Mission Accomplished: How Non-Profits Can Design for Planned Closure
In this episode, Sujatha and Deepak speak to Geoff Revell, who co-founded WaterSHED, a Cambodian non-profit organization working on water, sanitation and hygiene. WaterSHED was unique because it was designed to last only for 10 years. They speak on how WaterSHED’s planned exit influenced its goals, values, strategy, day-to-day operations. They also discuss the responses from the various stakeholders.
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About Geoff Revell
Pic: Geoff Revell
Geoff Revell is the founder of HappyTap, a leading social enterprise in the field of hand hygiene that operates across Asia and Africa. His background is in market-based approaches in international development, entrepreneurship, water resource management, and WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene).
He was the co-founder of WaterSHED, a Cambodian non-profit that was recognized globally for its pioneering systems approach to make water, sanitation, and hygiene markets work better for everyone. WaterSHED established the global benchmark for cost-effectiveness and sustainability in rural sanitation, before implementing a strategic exit in 2021.
Geoff previously worked at the World Bank on water sector projects in sub-Saharan Africa and India. Prior to that, Geoff was part of the start-up team at a software firm based in Canada, now a unit of CA, Inc. He has consulted for various international organizations and served on the investment committees of infrastructure investment funds.
Geoff holds a business degree from the University of Calgary and a master’s degree in International Economics from Johns Hopkins University – SAIS in Washington, DC.
Resources
Geoff’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-revell/
Exit Strategies, by Geoff Revell https://ssir.org/articles/entry/exit_strategies
HappyTap of which Geoff is the Founder and Managing Director https://www.happytap.net/
WaterSHED Asia website https://watershedasia.org/
Transcript
Sujatha
Geoff, we are going to get straight into it because we have so much to unpack today. So, let's start with an origin story. How did WaterSHED come about? What was the purpose of WaterSHED, when it started? And did you embark on the idea of planned exit, right from the beginning?
Geoff
Thanks, Sujatha. And thanks, Deepak. It's a real pleasure to be with you. To answer your question. Yeah, about WaterSHED. It was a project originally started meant to engage the private sector, the local private sector, in rural Southeast Asia, to deliver WASH products and services, mostly to households. It was a project funded by USAID. And what happened, we were - unexpectedly the funding was cut after a couple of years, mostly due to the US conflict at the time in Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with our project. But we were faced with the sudden realization that we would have to shut everything down. But at that time, I asked a couple of my colleagues, if they would like to keep working with me and carry on some of the more promising areas of our work. So, we created WaterSHED as a local Cambodian nonprofit organization. And you asked about, did we have the idea about an exit strategy from day one? I would say, yeah, we actually did. We didn't know the full extent, you know, all the ramifications of that. But our idea stemmed from two thoughts. Really, the first one was, we were engaging the private sector. And that was the concept underpinning our programs trying to engage them. And we thought, well, their business models inherently must be sustainable, they must be able to stand up on their own right. And so, we use this kind of internal key word called Hands Off. And it was our kind of litmus test internally that we would ask ourselves take a hands off approach, meaning we shouldn't support activities that need to be propped up artificially by a nonprofit in order to continue. The logical extension of that was our exit. That was the ultimate hands off, so to speak, then the second thought that led us to embrace or commit to an exit was more to do with power dynamics, actually. We didn't want to be a foreign funded foreign designed organization with a program thrust upon Cambodia, we thought that if the exit was embedded into our approach, it would limit the extent of that power imbalance that sometimes comes up and it would empower local actors.
Sujatha
So this was - What year was this? Geoff, when WaterSHED started?
Geoff
Officially, that was 2011
Sujatha
2011. And you exited? 2021, 22? Something like that?
Geoff
Yeah, we exited in June 2021. That's right. In the middle of COVID.
Sujatha
Right. And so what is WaterSHEDs fundamental focus.
Geoff
We started really with a wide look at like I said, engaging the private sector to make products and services. I said WASH what that means is water and sanitation and hygiene. And products and services, we were thinking you know about household water treat main products and services, hygiene products like hand washing, which is, as you mentioned, now what I'm working in; but our focus ended up mostly being in rural sanitation. And in Cambodia, even though we started in multiple countries, Laos and Vietnam as well, we focused much more on Cambodia where the rate of access to household toilets was very low in 2011.
But we thought, and then there were a lot of NGOs giving away toilets, but it was a perennial problem, they wouldn't get used, they wouldn't often be installed. And we thought, what if local producers, you know, who know best the consumers in the same communities - if they were producing and marketing and making products more attractive - so that ended up being a big area of our focus, and then working with government too, we found that we couldn't really achieve any meaningful progress with developing the private sector without working closely with the local government.
Sujatha
Right. So it was essentially, to improve the quality of wash or wash and associated products and services in Cambodia. And it turned out to be a more of a focus with rural Cambodia.
Geoff
Exactly, yeah. And that was where most of the sanitation was missing. If we looked at the stats, in 2011, there was a much greater rate of access to sanitation, ie, toilets in urban centers. And in rural, it was a huge divide, maybe down between 10 and 15%, of households having access to toilets, and yeah, I'm happy to say that the private sector has led a big change in Cambodia. And by the time we exited, this statistic across the country was closer to 80 or 85%, access in rural areas and continuing to grow till now,
Deepak
Geoff, I've worked similarly in international development, on water, sanitation, hygiene. And so, I know the context a little bit more. And I've been, I would say a fairly stringent critique of the international development aid sector, especially in what I have seen, right. So, you touched upon some of the topics, hands off approach, local actors, local governments, local private sector. But you know, what, a lot of organizations say this a lot of aid organizations, say and use this language. And you mentioned power dynamics, as well. I'm writing some notes here, and I'm struck, what does it take for an organization to talk this, and then say, you're going to use a hands off approach, and actually actualize it by saying in 10 years, they're off. Right? So what's the process of action of being authentic about it?
Geoff
Yeah, it's a good question. I certainly can confirm that, when we talked about it initially, with most stakeholders, I do think they interpreted like you're describing, you know, Deepak. Like that we are just sort of saying it rhetorically, you know, hypothetically, or something. And it's a nice idea. And certainly thinking about having an exit was, I think, a great starting point to really think carefully about our role as an organization, like you said, you know, a foreign or an internationally funded organization, even it was a local NGO, but it was mostly getting funding from abroad.
But about getting more into the day to day and like making it authentic, like you say, at all levels of our work and whatnot, we had to agree to the premise for sure, and really come to together around it. We called it - I don't know if they do this everywhere, but in Cambodia - Pinky swear. And so we would often refer to this pinky swear that we had as a group, okay, this is what we're doing, we're going to really do it, now we have to follow through. And the follow through naturally is the hard part, we had to kind of remind ourselves and hold each other accountable. While we asked two questions, we could just ask over and over again. And it was good to keep us on track, which was simply who's gonna do this, and by whom, when we're gone. And since we had kind of had the pinky swear about, well, we're going to be gone in this timeframe. It's for real, then those questions aren't just a hypothetical, like the same kind of rhetoric. It's real, and it's concrete, we have to plan for it. When the reason I say, by the way, that we have to hold each other accountable and stuff. It's because frankly, it's sometimes easy to kind of forget, there are a lot of forces that pull you into doing sort of direct service provision to make yourself integral, so to speak. And so we would be tempted by that, you know, and have to kind of ask ourselves that question again.
Sujatha
I guess the one of the operationalizing challenges is deciding what to say yes to and what to say no to, because as you engage with something as big as WASH, and although you say toilets and rural Cambodia, there is generally a tendency with those doing good to say, “Oh, can we do more good?”, right and so what starts off as we're going to do A ends up being A plus A.1 plus A.2 plus A.3, and then B comes in. So how do you, as an NGO, begin to think about this question, right? That is, how do we say no to things that somebody else may say yes to? And how do we move ourselves out of the job? Was that was that challenging? Was that part of the pinky swear process that let's go back to pinky swear and say, what did we say yes or no?
Geoff
Yeah, that's right, go back to the pinky swear, go back to our first principles, kind of and keep reminding ourselves of that, you know, and sometimes we had to kind of joke about it a little bit, like, one thing we often repeated, and to our partners was that, you know, we should exit and the idea we would say, quite simply is that if we've done a really good job, then after 10 years, if we've done a good job, then we should really be obsolete, and then we should shut down. But conversely, you know, if on the other hand, after 10 years, we have not really been successful, then we should also probably shut down and stop wasting resources. Everyone would kind of chuckle about that. So yeah, that's true, actually, I suppose you know. But yeah, indeed, it was talking about a while making it real keeping to it there. There's something that also was kind of a helpful motivator for I think, myself, my co founders and our team was that saying, yes, and yes, and yes, to more and more and more, like you said, Sujatha. To me, that's like, also a greater and greater and greater burden, right.
On a personal level, it was kind of like a little bit of a release valve in the sense that if we have this pinky swear, we had these principles, or whatever, this is what we're working on, we're focusing on that. And we're going to try to do a good job of it. And if your organization is growing and growing and growing, let's say, succeeding, you know, in the traditional sense, into perpetuity, then so does the burden to manage it. If you have more staff, more beneficiaries, more partners becoming dependent on you, then I think, for me, so would the worry, multiply.
So, if we take this, what we would normally think of as the failure of an organization, ie, its closure, if we kind of take that off the table, and say, ‘Okay, that's already baked in, we don't have to worry about it. That's what we're aiming for.’ Now, we can focus, you know, on our program, really what we want to do making it impactful in a way that will go beyond our direct engagement.
Deepak
I wanted to touch a little bit more on the program design part of it, Geoff. So, since the organization was designed to last 10 years, how did that change your program design? So what did you end up finally saying yes to?
Geoff
right, it did change. Something I looking back on, I think it's kind of in retrospect, I can say, was something I learned being valuable and approaching it this way that I wouldn't have kind of imagined going forward was that once we knew already, from the beginning, what the lifespan, roughly of our organization would be, we could kind of organize it into meaningful phases. And this, having a kind of an exit plan or lifecycle in mind, meant that, okay, when we're talking to our government partners, or other partners in Cambodia, or our funders, even our staff, we can say, well, the first couple of years, this is what we're going to be doing. This is sort of, in our in our cases, like R&D and learning and figuring things out and whatnot. And then it's like, institutionalizing it more scaling it up, homing in on key areas that we think really are impactful.
And then we can see ahead already that there's going to be a period in which we have to phase out. And in that phase, we focused a lot more on the systems for monitoring the work and making sure they're embedded and working within government. And yeah, it's a good question, Deepak because these phases, I think, looking back, we would have never, if we hadn't known what the trajectory of our organization was going to be, then I don't know what we would plan year to year, we would just be like, continuous operation, you know, and it would feel like that to me now.
Deepak
Sujatha, I wanted to dwell a little bit more when we look at other organizations in the sector, the like, get trapped in this service delivery mode, and especially if you're an Indian organization there is 80% or 1.5 billion people to service. So, the purpose of the organization is just endless. And our organizations tend to do more and most service delivery because it never ends, and it makes one feel very fulfilled while we are doing it. But Geoff is talking about is because of this approach, there is a freedom that he, and we'll talk more, and must be something felt by employees as well. versus thinking, from a programming point of view certain things that we will not do if you knew that you'd be there for 10 years, like, we would not do a lot of service delivery. And we'll try to focus on what systems strengthening work local actors, local governments, that's a natural outcome of that.
Sujatha
Yeah, thinking back to this idea of, you know, what Geoff was referring to as an understanding of demise, right from the beginning that as we get in, never thinking about death in that way. And I'm saying death as a natural process of coming to the end of something allowing for rebirth of other kind. And I think Geoff refers to that partly Geoff and us talk about the, you know, the exhalation, right, the release of the burden, and this and the stress, we’ll come back to that, because, you know, this is obviously a negotiated and communicated process with other stakeholders as well. Maybe just come back to the mindset and the belief systems maybe of founders to start with, because, you know, anybody who's entering this space enters with a great deal of desire to do good. And the doing good takes on a variety of forms. But, it's also, you are ambitious, to work in the sector, right? Like, it's not just optimism, that we can make a difference, but a certain belief system to say, you know, there's an ambition around it. So, and I know that, you know, many founders in India, as in other parts of the world, especially civil society organization, founders, I think there's an accelerating and growing ambition, both personal and professional, the ambition to be seen, as, you know, someone of stature, maybe in the sector or working to make a difference, and, and then the narrative shifts, right. It's not just that I've made a difference to a few 1000 people, and then it's a few 10s of 1000s, and then it's a few districts, and then it's a few states, and thereby building increasing dependencies on the NGO. I mean, you spoke about that briefly. So, I want to come back maybe to this question, and then we'll come back to how does it affect other stakeholders, right funders etc? But how does this mindset affect or influence leadership? Does it reign in ambitions of a particular kind? Does it enable leaders to build capacities of a particular type, how you and your co-founders, and others in WaterSHED navigate that?
Geoff
Really, it's an interesting point, Sujatha, trying to get into the heart of it, and I can't, I can't take credit myself, frankly, I mean, like, the co founders, even and the rest of our team taught me a lot about this too. And I would say that maybe one avenue for me, like if we have an ambition, and if I have an ambition and want to do something, you said, there's almost like a, almost an ego element in the ambition, right? And I can do something you have to believe, I guess, you can do something that's not already being done by someone else in a way or something to that effect. And that energy or that desire, maybe to, you know, on a career to have growth and to do more and to be seen and that kind of thing, maybe what we're talking about here offers an avenue to kind of channel it in a direction that's more productive, and gives you still the kind of the exhalation, the ability to say no, or something.
And what I'm describing this, and I'm thinking one of our programs was about really training and engaging local government leaders in Cambodia at the lowest level, what they call the commune level, elected leaders who were, could be very, very impactful and engaged in the Sanitation Program, getting communities to adopt safe toilets and managing the waste safely. So, you know, we realized that there could be some leadership development program and like many organizations, we could just deliver that to them, like train them. But we just checked back to our principles and said, well, how will this work when we we’re gone? It would have to be done - Oh, you know, we learned that there are departments in government meant to build capacity at the local level, and that those departments of government that are meant to actually invest in training and so forth, they could do this, and actually a lot more could be peer-driven, peer-led among the participants than anyone was really used to in the at least in the WASH sphere, and I think in the development sphere in Cambodia at the time.
So what I'm getting at is that we shifted what may be a normal approach to really engage and develop the leadership capabilities of officials who have a lot of potential and then to make tremendous contributions to this. I would say, by far the biggest contribution in the end, and we had an opportunity to shift it into a way that would be, could be and did end up continuing after WaterSHED left. And for the ‘channelling my ambition’ part of the equation, instead of saying more and more people, you know, were getting this training and so forth, I can still kind of say that, but I can say it even from a position that I'm more happy that it's being done in a more sustainable way. And if I can say, we can take some heart in that or feel like that's an achievement in itself, I think, if that would require, in the destigmatizing, some of the negatives about death and organizational - I use the term - failure. But I think that's kind of important, like it is taboo to talk about your organization, coming to an end in a way. And I had the experience, you can confirm it, if you go to a conference in development sector somewhere and wait for the Q&A session and asked to the president or the chairman or something of a major international NGO. Do you have an exit strategy? I've learned that almost sounds like an offensive question.
Deepak
Good question Sujatha. Actually when you asked Geoff the question, I was also thinking ‘what could be the mental makeup of someone who could do this? And what comes in our way?’ I think as social people working in the social sector, there is tremendous ambition, in fact, more ambition, that people who work in the private sector, commercial sector because they want to make a difference. But I think Geoff referred to a couple of times, in this conversation today, the real inquiry that we have to ask ourselves is, are we making sustainable impact? If you're holding that question, ‘are we making sustainable impact?’ Then a lot of answers tend to present itself to the question, to the inquiry itself. Because if we can be making short term impact by being purely in service delivery mode, but are we making sustainable impact – I think if that question is authentically answered, it leaves us actually no place but to go in that direction. Geoff may have chosen to close his organization, but then the inquiry ‘are we making sustainable impact’ leads us to a lot more bolder organization and program design work.
And also, the rest of the ways in which you were saying about Pinky promise -so keeping a certain way of holding that question throughout the organization, you know, a certain practice and hands off approach. So, there are certain things that as organizational practices, but also human and leadership practices that that we have to imbibe.
There are some questions already. Lakshman Srikanth asks, how did potential funders Look at this? And that's, that's a question that a lot of people tend to ask in the sector while we work with funders think about it. What did your funders think about it, Geoff?
Geoff
It’s a good question. It was a mixed response, frankly, and I hesitate to say, more negative than I would have liked, in the sense that many people, many potential funders that I approached to fund WaterSHED and fundraising was part of my remit. I think they often thought that it would kind of be a waste of money to fund an organization that wasn't even going to be around in a few years. You know, and maybe some others, I definitely know, some are interested in, like they saw the organization being sustainable as the sustainability thing. And I can't argue against every funding, because otherwise, there's a deeper inquiry, like you said, Deepak into what the sustainability ought to look like.
But the good news was that there were also quite a few funders, there were a couple that were intrigued by the concept. And there were several, and many great relationships we ended up having by organizations or foundations and funders that let us persuade them and came to agree that investing in something finite, was attractive. And maybe the most pragmatic way that a funder might interpret it was to say, ‘oh, it's nice to invest in something where I know that I'm not going to be endlessly asked for more money’. You know, we also kind of alluded to this before. It helped us talking to funders, when we could say, here's the whole span of what we want to achieve. And right now we're in this phase, and then we're gonna be in this phase and you're gonna be… Now you might fund us, you might be wanting to fund more this learning phase, you might want to be funding more this phase or this phase. That was helpful, too, but boy, it was an interesting discussion that many funders, like one in particular came and visited and joined our work and did some field visits at one point. And he saw that the training program we had been telling him and reporting about, the work that I mentioned earlier about training commune level elected officials. He went to one of those sessions. And he saw that, actually, they were leading the training, by themselves and things were going on and whatnot. And he had a moment where he thought, well, like, what am I paying WaterSHED to do that? And almost felt like, hang on a second, this isn't. And then he realized no wait. This is, this is good. And that's a funny, I didn't say anything, he sort of caught himself as soon as he said something.
Sujatha
Yeah, that's a really interesting distinction, Geoff, that you pointed out, which is mistaking the sustainability of an organization with the sustainability of impact. And I think you've written this, and you've said this, and from a very contrarian point of view, there is I guess, funders find a level of comfort in sort of funding predictable, sort of like, machine like outcomes, right. So, 6000 trainers today, and then 20,000. And whatever, right, there’s a predictability about it. A systems change is not as predictable in the first place, because you know, a system is far more complex. But also, if you flip it, there is greater predictability for funders, to be able to say, I'm going to keep asking the question, ‘when you leave, what is the impact that you're going to leave behind?’ Right, because - and I think the question that a lot of funders keep asking is - what is YOUR impact? Right? Like, what are YOU doing? I'm wondering what would happen to the ecosystem of funding? If funders just ask that question, which is not what is the impact that you are having, you know, using my money? What is the impact that you're doing? But when all of the money stops? What is the impact that you're going to leave behind? Then? Maybe Wouldn't that give them greater confidence in some way to, you know, answer that sustainability question,
Geoff
I would like to think so. It would be great if organizations were, I think challenged about this more, and especially from the ones that do have inherently a lot of power in the whole equation, which is the funder, or funders. It might not be more predictable, even if a little bit of contrarian too, in the sense that like it might inherently be more risky. You know, it might just be, especially if you have, something that's becoming more popular, I think is a results or payment for results type programs, and that kind of thing. That seems very low risk. And so I think on that basis it’d be very predictable, and appreciate it from lots of funders, buy outcomes. If you challenge organizations to take more of a systems approach, and really justify their role and know how it fits in, and when and how it would become obsolete due to the strengthening of other actors in the system. I'm really convinced that that would lead to better long-term outcomes. But I can't say for sure that that would be more predictable, though, you know, and it would be more risky than maybe riskier.
Deepak
Yeah. I still think it's low risk, but highly predictable, that things won't work. Okay. So that's my critique of the international aid system.
Geoff
What are we defining as a risk? If the risk is no sustainable impact, that's much lower risk than buying outcomes. But if so, maybe we that's how you define it. Yeah, yeah.
Sujatha
Yeah. But just before, I know, we want to talk about how other stakeholders looked at this, and I, you know, would like Geoff's thing on it. But just continuing just with this one question. I get sometimes NGOs also, the messaging can be contrarian, right. So for one hand, you might be extolling the services that you are providing by sort of having beautiful brochures and pictures about how many people you've served, and fundraising managers or, you know, talking up the impact that the organization is doing, on the one hand. Almost, there's a narrative that gets built, I think, maybe even subconsciously about dependency. It's also a very nice narrative, right, that you are serving more and more people. And so, when you are already following through with that narrative, I guess it's really difficult then for an NGO to step back and say, ‘Oh, we've done all this good work, but you know, what, in five years time we're going to shut down now’, right? Consciously we are going to exit and sort of we think it would be our mission is accomplished, systems is strengthened and we're going to leave it back to the communities to do it. I’m wondering whether your communication strategies right from the beginning Geoff, were aligned to this planned exit, you know, Pinky promise idea right from the beginning or did you struggle with contrarian messaging along the way?
Geoff
Well, I think we probably struggled with that. Yeah, to be honest. I mean, you're right. There are so many, let's call them pervasive factors that conspire against this kind of what we're wanting to do like sustainability systems strengthening. And as you rightly mentioned, you really think about it, the things that are pulling you into the direct service provision, and perpetual growth. It's everywhere, when we were asked to report or talk or in with lunch, or we did and many times talk about the number of people you know, who had purchased a toilet and you know, the number of people who are helping and many organizations will talk about the amount of funds that are being raised, the number of countries we're operating in, it's all about scale. It's all in one direction, that's positive. And that's what's, often you're right, that's what’s celebrated, that's what's incentivized, that's what we're rewarded, etc. So it is, it is hard, and I'm sure we didn't do that perfectly.
And we got more and more loud, externally about our plan to exit as the organization moved along, because at the very first moments of you know, a 10 year mission, it didn't seem always like the most pertinent, pertinent thing to do. We needed to make it fairly early on, you’re right, Sujatha. Otherwise, what we would be facing with would be reaction amongst a lot of people of you're abandoning this project, you're abandoning us that's very negative sounding.
Deepak
Uh, Geoff, you mentioned about in one of the trainings that one of your funders saw community level government officials actually doing the training. So that’s a broader question, How did local communities, local government actors respond to your way of organizational design and purpose?
Geoff
Good question. Reactions of people is probably the more for me like one of the more interesting aspects of trying to do this along the way, because there was a huge range, and sometimes surprising, but always interesting. But the first thing that was usually there was that people didn't think we were serious about it, you know, including government or, you know, even new staff or our partners, funders, when they heard us saying that we would be sunsetting. You know, we would try to use softer terminology, sometimes not say, the death of our organization, but the sunset or something nice like that. I think that a lot of people thought we meant it. Metaphorically.
Like the we're going to work ourselves out of a job, you know, ‘yeah, yeah’ like I heard a lot of and I wanted to kind of say, no, but really, though, and with government, to your question, Deepak, our staff, our team, as especially as you know, it was just a couple of foreigners like me in Cambodia, it was really a Cambodian led organization, that team had to make quite some effort over some time to persuade our counterparts in government, that this was being done and planned for good reason. It wasn't us being kind of irresponsible. It wasn't us like I said, abandoning them more generally, as having kind of a lack of commitment, or that kind of thing. Our team had to put in a lot of work to earn some kind of allies with this concept. And over time, I think many government counterparts started to see the advantages of a limited term engagement, you know, that allowed them to sort of look ahead too and say, Okay, well, I can focus on preparing to take over which, for us when that was the effort, that was fantastic. But we also tried to kind of talk about it within…many government officials also observed that this was kind of more of a reflection of our joint progress to build the system that we wanted than anything else, that WaterSHED would become obsolete was a good sign of the outcome. But it took a while to get there. Yeah.
Deepak
And you mentioned employees, what was the employee reactions to this meeting, they knew they're gonna be out of a job. And if I'm joining the third year, then I know I have only seven years, I'm not going to get a pension out of this place. So what was their reaction?
The reaction to this?
Geoff
Yeah, that well, maybe maybe that was a bit kind of dark humor too, or just humor anyways, to overcome something that kind of could be awkward, I guess, which is you're right. And we would sometimes joke about, well, we're not going to retire from this organization in our old age and have a pension.
But no, you know, it was troubling for some, I think, who maybe didn't think it was serious and joined the organization and see a vibrant set of activities and think that this could go on for a long time. But as we did, you know, as everyone sort of joined in the pinky swear and got to realize and jointly commit. You know, as our team grew, we, we already had kind of a core. Everyone could be kind of an ambassador of the concept to an extent, or probably help propagate the ideas. Over time, I think the best thing and this was really personally, a nice experience was that we kind of bonded over it. And as a team, we bonded over the concept of being different, doing something differently. And our team was mostly, I think, proud, I think I can objectively say, although I'm not totally objective here, but I think everyone was mostly proud that we were going to do this, we were going to try to achieve this. And it would be something kind of tangible, or at least concrete we could be happy about. And even we came with, we would always get criticism and like I said, some people would say, Oh you, you're not committed to the success or something, you're already committed to exit, we would wear it as a little bit of a badge of honor. One of the challenges I should mention, like our staff had to deal with was that, sometimes people in government and other organizations would say, your your exit plan is, essentially, what it means is, you're not going to keep working to channel resources into this sector anymore. So we don't need partners like you, you know, we need partners that are going to bring something and keep contributing. So that could be demotivating for our team, and we would have to come back together, you know, and kind of re-establishing our badge of honour that we're going to do this, it's a positive thing.
Deepak
And the employees, they all got jobs after that after WaterSHED was closed down, how did this pan out?
Geoff
I should mention that we made a deliberate effort. And that was, I think, helped due to the fact that we could plan for it in the sense that we didn't, it wasn't a sudden thing. We had an HR team who for the last, I don't know, a couple of years of our organization, was working with the team, one by one individuals, our max headcount, the high watermark, probably around the midpoint in the organization's lifespan was about 100 people, had gone down, phasing out towards the end over time, but they would work with everyone on an individual basis to review the CV, explore future career directions and see how - what channels for the next job and through a lot of partners. Some of our staff went to work with government. Some of them, many of them went into the private sector, kind of having learned and worked a lot with private sector actors. I think it was a good outcome across the board. Kind of that's also a, I'm really happy about and kind of relief that it didn't end up being more problematic for staff, I think, because the planning was possible.
Sujatha
And I think oftentimes that our projects often die suddenly in the sector, you run out of money for a particular program, you know, people can be out of a job fairly suddenly, without too much of...
Geoff
So that was what was going to be our case, with the USAID funding back in 2011. Was everyone was going to get their pink slip two weeks later and did. Well, and did and had to be rehired. You're right, Sujatha, I think that's not uncommon for project-based things.
Sujatha
I guess it also provided everyone an opportunity to keep looking at the skills and competencies that they are developing, I guess not just in WASH here, but also in systems strengthening, because you're constantly going back to that as a touchstone. So I guess, for WaterSHED staff, you know, when they had to go out and, you know, start exploring opportunities, I guess one of the strengths that they would probably be taking with them is this ability to do systems strengthening and be able to talk about other kinds of capabilities that they have built over the year. Because, you know, oftentimes, even that conversation can be challenging, right, like you're so tied up to a program.
Geoff
Well, it's also a very difficult, I think it's abstract, like, do you have skills in system strengthening? How would you talk about that? Or how would you even demonstrate that? I hope, and I think it's true that I think quite a few people could look at the track record and say, I was a part of this, and this is what we achieved. And it was more obviously, like a, hopefully a successful outcome through its closure. But one thing I should mention is that, you're right, when looking and thinking from what you just said, it reminded me that quite a few people would come into the organization, knowing that it was going to close. And that changes your perspective, also, in an organization. You focus a little bit more up on ‘what do you want to get out of being here?’ And I used to help people coming in, even in the interview, you know, look, you should use this organization, use it as a chance to, as a springboard, learn it, figure out what you want to really learn and then really pursue that because you also have a limited opportunity here, as we all do. And that's a nice way of honing your plan on a personal level.
Sujatha
Is that an optimum moment, Geoff, when, for example, an organization knows that it has to now leave, and with WaterSHED you said 10 years, but 10 years is ballpark number right? 10 could have been 10 years, six months or 9 years, eight months. So how do you disengage from a system, you know is there a readiness check that one does, you know does the system respond differently? How do you know when it’s time?
Geoff
I think that's such a great question Sujatha. I put forward kind of an idea to people who would ask us and even challenge us like, ‘Well, yeah, maybe yeah, sure you want to exit now we all do. But better to think more about when it's ready, you know when a system is ready that you can leave’. And what I would kind of respond to that is that I would worry, that if we're using what would be a very common yardstick, I think to determine whether or not things are ready is if I think most organizations, is the problem solved is like, poverty eliminated or something, you know, I don't mean to make light of it. But you know, any whatever your mission is, is it fully achieved. And I think that's why it sounds like rhetorical. That's why no one believed me when I said, you know that we were going to do this because well, then any organization can say, Yeah, we are going to definitely EXIT WHEN XYZ is done.
So, I kind of take that as a little bit implicitly disingenuous. So instead, I'm saying, look, there are also a lot of factors that can conspire against. We've talked about some of the vested interests that would like to see, especially WaterSHED was a relatively small organization, if a big organization with a lot more resources than WaterSHED, that means there are a lot of, just multiply the vested interests, perpetuity, going concern nature. So you know either, because of either of those factors, the readiness check may be pretty difficult. So, ours was arbitrary, quite frankly, it just seemed like 10 years ought to be long enough for us to kind of set out and achieve the things that we wanted to do, or determine that we weren't able to, and we should close either way. No one could really say, definitively 10 years was too short or too long. So, we kind of went with that. But I guess that someone more wiser or with a different experience than me might be able to say, if you really dig into it, and maybe there are some indicators about System Readiness, I would just be very wary about - we got a lot of value in just communicating, here's the timeframe, by not making it event driven, or some sort of other indicator thing driven. And that itself gave us a lot of the benefits, I think, of the whole approach. That wouldn't have been there if we had made it based on readiness.
Deepak
Also, the idea that once you decide that this is the time that I'm going to be there, means you will never become a big organization. Because you know, that when you have to close down, you'd have to close down with so many people already employed. So the way in which you're going to approach the problem is going to be different. Hence, the commitment for 10 years, designs the organization, designs the program, designs the interventions, designs the communication strategy, which is why it is remarkable what you set out to do.
Geoff
Yeah, I can't take too much credit Deepak because you know what, it's all in retrospect that we can sense so many of the kinds of advantages. We had a narrower view when we did this. I don't want to sound like we knew at all right? But looking back, you say well, okay, this, yeah, that did. And what you talk about, like not wanting to have a big organization, I didn't have an idea about what organization size would be optimal, either. But yeah, in looking back, I can say it would be much more compelling, and I think, more manageable from a leadership perspective. So, it really leaves it a purpose driven organization, rather than an organization driven organization. You know, what I mean? Where, like the organization is driving rather than the other way around?
Deepak
Yeah, but what I meant was, so once you design the organization for 10 years, that itself won't allow you to grow to more than a number. It's almost like the atomic size.
Geoff
Yeah, it's a limiting factor, you know.
Deepak
Yeah, it's a limiting factor. Why don't more organizations do this? Why this is not the norm?
Geoff
Well, we we've touched on a few things. But, you know, besides the things that I already mentioned, I think we have to look at funders too, you know. And you asked this question, if funders asked this, you know, Sujatha, you said, ‘If funders pushed the organization’, but I don't hear that push or that challenge too often.
Especially not, I mean, maybe about how is…show us how it's sustainable, not show us, what's your exit strategy. And that's, I don't think I've ever seen that. What I do see are things that are different things from donors, like value things, that all sound really good and responsible to, probably quite a few that contribute to a mindset that it would not be, it would not be good to target an exit like value for money, you know, is something that you hear a lot and it's been espoused by quite leading funding organizations in International Development, it sounds super reasonable. And the problem is, though, as I see it that it's much easier to calculate value for money, if you're counting direct outcomes, and the most efficient, best value for money vehicles are going to be the big, predictable organizations that can deliver the outputs. Right? Then there's the other thing that we kind of touched on about wanting to build an institution, it sounds really good to say I'm going to invest in the organization and strengthen the organization. But you do have to kind of ask - why, what's the purpose, and we kind of mentioned this the impact, like a limiting factor on the size. Well, if it's really a purpose driven organization, and if the purpose that we've set out to do is actually achievable, then it's implicit that once it's achieved, the organization isn't needed anymore. So, we don't want to feed the beast, if you know that expression, you hear that USA contractors or something. But even other things like the mentality, which is definitely laudable, to just get the job done, we see urgent needs to sometimes the fastest path is not through all kinds of middleman, publications, systems strengthening project, it's just straight to the issue. You know, child needs something or the person needs something, get it done, generate impact, I think those things are important reasons why we could completely understand why a lot of NGO leaders would hardly embrace the mindset to uh…
Sujatha
Yeah, I completely agree with what you were saying, Geoff, just wondering whether other cultural factors feed into this right, fear of failure, for instance. So you know, the sense that closing down something is sort of seen as failure in some sense, right, and fear of failure, and the opposite of that, seeing success as growth and perpetuity of, of work, and also scope creep. I think we start off, and then, you know, there's just a little bit more that we can do, and then a little bit more that we can do until suddenly realize that there are two new program verticals happening, and you know… So I think we can all understand the reasons why this is maybe difficult to do. But I think equally, it's very clear that, you know, we have to pay attention to this substantially, particularly, like you mentioned, you know, you don't want to endlessly Feed the Beast, right? If you want to ask, what's happening here.
The increased dependencies question that you answer, Geoff, with some of the stakeholders sort of asking you or referring to the lack of new resources that WaterSHED would bring in to the ecosystem? That's a challenging one to answer while simultaneously doing systems strengthening work, to be able to say, you know, but was there another way in which you could address that you're not bringing in these massive new resources, but what we are building for you is internal resources, right? You're building resilience into the system itself that can survive without this constant flow of new resources coming in. Did that help in any way that conversation about system strengthening?
Geoff
Yeah, definitely, there were different elements like communicating with partners who might have seen that as a negative where, like, for example, we had with a lot of the businesses that we have been working with, to kind of bring them into the existing businesses that weren't making toilet products. And we wanted to bring them into that market and sell toilet, it's, you know, in markets and, and so forth in rural areas. Once it was, you know, it's kind of funny, we did a lot of experiments where we would ask, you know, like, are you ready, just for no more support? And why would you say yes to that, and very few did or would, but what we shifted to call like, graduate, we shared, we developed with them, like, what would it look like, you know, and this was a little bit more like the readiness thing that you asked about Sujatha.
But on a more minute scale, as we looked at what would be the sort of a scorecard or kind of a readiness indicators for just individual companies, small mom and pop type operators. And when we would go back to them and say, look, you've already got this, this check, check, check, check, check. And that triggered a lot of pride. We'd say, look, you've, you're graduated from it. We don't have much, we don't have anything to offer you. You're already far ahead. We've learned that sort of changing it around. We've used a lot of ceremonies, like the graduation ceremony, with local authorities that participated in that training program that I mentioned, called it ‘civic champions’, the people who are most successful and recognized in that program were awarded in very extravagant ceremonies with confetti cannons and triumphant music, the National Anthem, medals placed not by us, but by other members of government. And I'm just giving this example because there was a sense of national pride and individual pride on the part of many of our counterparts, because we could kind of highlight their own achievements, they came to recognize their own achievement. And when you look at it that way, it's much more positive to say like, don't need any NGO support anymore.
Deepak
I wanted to also look at other organizational designs that are out there. And WaterSHED is an example of a purposeful organization, right. But if you are running community based organization, or if you are a community based organization, maybe gender based organization, gender based local organization that is based upon organizations, you do need to have an exit like this, or even a chapter based organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, and then it is not a silver bullet to every organization design out there. But the conversation with Geoff, Sujatha, is also about unravelling one of purposeful design, and then exploring a lot more. But of course, there are other examples of organizations that, that we don't have to go through this methodology because being there for a longer period of time outweighs the benefits of closing earlier.
Geoff
So we only closed because we could strengthen local actors in the system. And you know, those local actors, I expect many of them, I hope many of them will persist in doing what they're doing. You're absolutely right, Deepak, I think, the most important factor from my perspective, and why I wanted to be quite adamant that we should, and why my my co founders and our staff were also really on board with it was that the remit of our organization, especially the foreign funding is not at the behest of the local community. I think that a CSR with a mandate and operating, you know, at the behest of its members, it's the people they serve, you know, nothing to suggest that they ought to consider their closure. I think that maybe that litmus test is, ‘is it truly a locally driven agenda’? And then if it continues to serve a purpose, I think that's perfectly reasonable. But maybe you both have thoughts about that, too. I mean, Sujatha you specialize a lot in this thinking.
Sujatha
I'm naturally drawn to exits, Geoff, because I think you can outlive your purpose long after you finish serving. But I think that's because you've replaced essential system strengthening work, right? You are the plug that's now doing it. But I think for movements for you know, cooperatives, for people coming together to sort of innocence derive agency for themselves from their work and how they do it, I think there's no question of it. You want more of that, right? You want more cooperatives and the self-help, and so on and so forth?
Geoff
Right? And we didn't want we didn't want WaterSHED to be an agency of government with an open-ended commitment to deliver services to Cambodians forever. But yeah, you said that very well.
Deepak
One option is also to consider the founders to definitely exit after 10 years, even if the organization doesn't exit.
Geoff
Right. Good point.
Sujatha
Yeah. So fresh blood is really helpful. Geoff, this has been fascinating. We're sort of nearing the end of our conversation, is there something that you can wanted to talk about? Or say that we haven't addressed today, something that you'd like to keep alive in our thinking?
Geoff
No, I think because you both you, Deepak and Sujatha, have asked so many insightful questions. And you've thought about this a lot. And you have a lot of good inputs. But I mean, as I mentioned, we, we look back on it, I look back on it, and talk about it with my colleagues too. And we have a lot of interesting reflections that we hadn't seen in the future. And that's why I think it's nice to be able to share this with you and your audience. But one thing that I will remain fascinated by and I want to keep learning about among probably many of the things that we've talked about. But one thing is - this problem of kind of a cognitive dissonance that I can hold in my head, very clearly like, the reasons that it seems good and successful to grow an organization, expand, impact and everything like that. I can also, obviously, see why success could be looked at in a different light. All the factors that kind of are confounding the decisions that you make. We can say one thing we can say I want to achieve this, and then the next moment go and do something else. And I'm guilty of that. I mean, maybe we all are, but when it comes to systems strengthening. I think that one of the challenges is that there are so many great resources. I've found webinars and documents that help give examples of what it would be and how you can think of it but it's It's abstract enough. And I can be in a workshop and really feel like yes, okay, I'm getting this, see how it all fits together and whatnot. But then when you're with your team, and you've got your project and your reports due and your budgets to spend and everything like that, you, you lose sight of that. And that's probably the biggest benefit I found from, in retrospect, having an exit strategy in mind, it allowed us to make sure we were operationalizing that without falling victim to that cognitive dissonance of one moment to the next. So that’ll be something keeping me interested for years to come, I guess.
Sujatha
Yeah. That's a great point. Deepak, last thoughts from you?
Deepak
I think when we first read the essay that Geoff wrote, I thought it was such a possible beautifully written essay. And it kind of echoed some of the conversations Sujatha and I we were having, but to actually find an organization that actually done that was rare. And it was really lovely talking to you Geoff, and just uncovering the different aspects of plant exits, either through obsolescence or through inefficiency, the fact that you have an exit in mind, I think it's such a liberating thing, and that's what the word that you said which we probably didn't, didn't spend enough time talking about is, it just frees all of us up from pretending, into authentically doing what we think will work, and then showing up in that way. Also frees other people up.
Geoff
Yeah, like Sujatha said, new things will come.
Sujatha
And yeah, the article that Deepak is referring to is Geoff's wonderfully written piece called exit strategies. It's on the Stanford Social Innovation Review. And we'll put the link out, I think, along with the podcast as well.
Geoff, from Pinky promises to, to ensuring that you're transparent and open every step of the way to I think navigating the dissonances between growing the organization versus strengthening the system. And I think a lot of organizational resources go into sustaining itself. And I think that can be really tiring and burdensome for a lot of leaders and a lot of organizations, and instead turning that attention into that space of system strengthening on just reframing the idea of failure.
I think we attach too much to this notion of growth as success, whereas exit is, I think, maybe reframing it to a set of timed experiments. I think that liberates us, doesn't it? You know, we start off by saying, the 10 year experiment, and we're going to get out of it to 10 years, step back and see, what have we done? How is the system strengthened? How have we changed? So much more liberating than thinking about oh, my god, we're going to close in 10 years? Oh, my God, you know, what's gonna happen?
Yeah. And I think you're spot on, Geoff, I think that the life, when we take that particular life view of an organization, the aesthetics with which we operate change. We know we're leaving. So therefore, we're constantly asking that question.
I love the idea of celebrations and ceremonies, I think, we undervalue that in organizations. So, thank you for bringing attention to that. And just wonderful way of thinking about systems strengthening. So, I hope people go and read that article as well. And I hope we have more of these conversations in the funding landscape as
well. I think that would. Yeah, yeah.
Deepak
Thank you Geoff, for so wholeheartedly making time for this. You know, we've had conversation before, during to this podcast, and also it's in Canada. So it's, it's quite good. So thank you.
Geoff
Thank you both. Thanks a lot. It's a real pleasure to speak with you and I really appreciated the chance to meet you both. Thanks very much, Sujatha and Deepak.
