Michael Edwards“Both development effectiveness and institutional survival demand that NGOs learn much more, and more effectively”
Philosophy behind Propel
Propel, our software tool for organisational learning, will transform the way international development organisations can approach learning and knowledge management. By integrating learning seamlessly into your programmes and projects and building organisational memory, Propel will redefine the way your organisation can capture, access and apply learnings.
By making “if only we knew what already we know” a thing of the past, Propel supports organisations tackle the dynamic and complex challenges they face in international development. To work effectively, organisations need to learn from their activities and build on their organisational knowledge. To do so, organisations have to systematically reflect on the assumptions that guide their projects. The complex and dynamic settings of international development work require organisations to be adaptive by testing their assumptions and building on learnings to achieve positive impact.
What is Propel
Propel is a software tool for organisational learning. It enables organisations to learn systematically from their activities and build organisational memory. As a result, valuable knowledge and learnings are captured and can be used to improve implementation work.
At Strhive, we know that your time is valuable. Therefore, Propel makes learning as an organisation easy. It is a web-based tool that enables development organisations to integrate continuous learning into their workflows and leverage their collective memory. This way, organisations can continuously reflect on their assumptions, learn what works and use these learnings for strategic decision making. The tool builds on existing models of international development work and enables organisations to learn systematically and collaboratively.
Key Features
Through a comprehensive and accessible three-step process, Propel guides your organisation’s learning journey and captures learnings in an interactive knowledge map.
Step 1: Visualise the Pathway to Change and Integrate Learning
The tool guides your learning journey throughout all implementation work and takes you step-by-step through your learning journey:
- You first visualise your project’s pathway to change.
- Then, you integrate your project’s learning agenda by adding learning stops.
- At each learning stop, Propel provides the space to reflect and learn together and guides you to systematically capture the answers to your learning questions.
Step 2: Capture Learnings and Create Learning Stories
The outcomes of each learning stop get summarised as learning stories:
- Each learning story will tell what you and your team experienced, what you found to work, the challenges you faced and the outcomes and decisions to move forward.
- The learning stories are collected in your organisation’s knowledge map through which you can explore and dive into your organisation’s memory.
Step 3: Build on Organisational Memory
Whether you are starting a new project and would like to know what was done before or are facing a challenge throughout project implementation, the knowledge map enables you to:
- Tap into the knowledge and learnings from all the different projects in your organisation.
- Learn together, and build on what you already know.
Propel turns tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that can be shared throughout the organisation while embedding learning in the implementation work of organisations. Through connecting existing models, processes, workflows, and tools of development practice, Propel adds the L(earning) to M&E. It provides experience-based learning to the data an organisation compiles.
Propelling forward
We are excited to announce that we secured our first pre-seed investment to take the next steps for the development of Propel! Currently, we are working on developing and fine-tuning the tool. For the further development of the tool, we are seeking interested organisations who would like to participate and/or partner with us.