ISDM Knowledge and Research Centre
Our engagement with Development Leadership and Management has underlined the poignant need to empirically put together explicit and tacit knowledge existing with organisations and practitioners. The ISDM Knowledge and Research Centre seeks to enable a thriving Development Management praxis in SPOs through codification and co-creation of existing and new knowledge. Our engagement with some of the leading academic institutions and faculties from across the world, have led to a growing recognition of a very nuanced yet substantial difference between the usual practice of management as a discipline in the business domain and the paradigm of its application and learning in the social impact sector.
The inherent complexity of development work is what makes social impact leadership and management practice distinctive and critical. Social sector leaders increasingly need to develop their ability to understand and work within this evolving context of complexity and uncertainty, given that there could be multiple, equally intricate and complex pathways to finding appropriate solutions and scaling impact.
This calls to action an empirically driven and collaboratively created process of co-creation, collation and curation of the existing tacit and explicit knowledge on the subject into a coherent, grounded and robust evolutionary Body of Knowledge (BoK) on Development Management (DM). The context within which the BoK on DM is located demands an evolutionary approach to creation of the domain, wherein the humility and agility of the BoK to inquire, adapt and stay relevant to the fast-emerging and dynamic context becomes critical. The clarion call is to be able to build Development Management practice for the sector which is informed by this rich and agile Body of Knowledge andguided by the normative(s) principles and universal human values of social sector engagement.
All knowledge artefacts created by ISDM Knowledge and Research Centre shall be released under Creative Commons Licensing type Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) with due credit to and prior consent from authors and organisations.
