 So we want to look at power symmetries and we want to look at how we deal with conflicts, negotiations and trust. The first thing to say about the power relations is that they exist. And they can and often do play a role at every phase, every stage of the platform process. So it's very important to recognize these power dynamics and the effect that they have. System innovation often require a change in the power relations between stakeholders. And changing the power relation can often mean conflict. Because those who have more power will very much resist any configuration that will now have them having less power. Now, there are specific issues around gender relations within that. And power dynamics that ignore gender relations will likely run into all kinds of challenges in the innovation platform process. We see that research suggests that strong ties favor mutual learning and resource sharing. Remember how we said earlier that our natural disposition is not to share? Well, when we have feelings of trust and when we know the other parties, we do tend to share much more. So fostering that can help. In terms of centralized networks and decentralized networks, in terms of our relationships, the centralized networks work well in initial phases when we're trying to decide on collective action. So if we're a close-knit group, it's likely that we'll come up with similar ideas as to how we want to move forward or what we want to tackle. But on the contrary, if we want to have long-term planning and problem-solving capacity, we want to spread our network. And that's actually where weak relations, where new ideas can foster more easily, are better. So it's important to remember what phase we're in and then look at the, analyze the kind of relationships that we have among the members. We can also conduct a social network analysis, or SNA. And social network analysis uses numbers to represent two things. Whether there is a tie, so is there a tie or is there not a tie? It's very binary in that way. And the second thing is how strong of a tie it is. So we're not looking at what type of relationship, we're not looking at the depth, we're looking at whether there is a relationship and how strong it is. And the strong it is is, for instance, how many people are connected to that person and how critical that connection is. We can obtain this information by a structured interview questionnaire or we can even do that from observation. And we can generate a range of matrices to examine that. So for example, on the level of communication, on the level of friendship, of trust and so on. And there's a whole range of software tools that can help you generate sort of these type of looking graphs in terms of the mapping the relationship based on the questions that you've asked. The role of the facilitator is to empower weaker stakeholders to also participate in the process, to support the negotiation but also to support conflict resolution. Because if we let powerful members dominate completely the platform, we'll have an issue with group diversity. And remember we said that the whole point was to bring together actors from all the different levels together. Well, if you just bring them together to be dominated by the highest level, it's not very different than that highest level working separately. So it's not enough to have the people in the room, we need to make sure that we facilitate the power dynamics as well. And it's critical because the whole move to an agricultural innovation system approach was driven by the desire to have bottom up knowledge and valuing the local knowledge. So if we let powerful members dominate, we will lose that information and we won't have all the knowledge and all the resources available at our disposal. We have various ways of empowering IP members and I'll run through some of them quickly. So one way is to deal with participatory video. Participatory video has been used extensively throughout many parts of the world in my many organization. This is an example from Digital Green which is an organization initially based in India but working globally now which essentially lets farmers film other farmers, come up with solutions and then share that information making it widely available. Other forms of participatory video have dealt with empowerment by letting more marginalized members of the community feature in the video, also produce the video and take more control over what messages come out and have their voices heard in that way. In the interest of time I won't play you this video but I'll share the link with you so that you can watch it in your own time if interested. And also we have an entire online course on our learning management system which again like everything Hillary produces is entirely free for you to take yourself or use as part of the organization or do whatever you want with it which deals with how to set up participatory video, so how to run the courses for facilitators. Another way is to use role play. So we don't have a problem of power relations in this group, at least I don't think we do but if we had role play could be a nice way to address that because when you're assuming roles you're no longer your own identity you're assuming the identity that was taken and that allows you to engage in the kind of discussions that you might not have been able to otherwise. Now when doing that we want to give people written roles describing the characters, goals and intentions but we do not want to script the dialogue, we want people to engage. Normally players should only be aware of their own role they shouldn't know what the other roles objectives are as that can create gaming. We also want to have observers who report back on what was achieved and the goals and the process and we normally want to have more time to reflect so what the group as a whole achieved and what everyone learned from the process but this can be a very effective way people enjoy playing games and a role play comes into that quite nicely. Another one is participatory rural appraisal or PRA. How many here are familiar with PRA? Quite a few yes it's been around for many years and it's used quite extensively in the development sector so as you know it started in the 70s it uses group animation and exercises to basically facilitate how we share, analyze and take action among the stakeholders so we can do role reversal, we can do wealth ranking we can do focus group discussion, we can do all kinds of visualizations seasonal mapping, things of that nature and through that we get a sense of the community and what its priorities are and we can take more informed decisions. Again this is a way that deals with power dynamics because you can ask everyone what their opinion is and you map it out. Today when you heard between the first and second meeting in our role play that ICRAF issued a policy brief you took that very seriously. I was delighted for our ICRAF colleagues and indeed using research evidence is one way to deal with power dynamics so if you have a very strong member in the group saying you know well I think it's cold outside and the world is getting colder having a lot of documented research evidence that global warming is occurring might help diffuse that. So when you have research evidence which is valid then you can often overcome subjective opinions of powerful members but it requires everyone to believe that the study was actually valid and impartial so in group two they said today assuming that the study is valid we will accept the findings. So that's indeed a very strong perception. Conflict is not always bad. Conflict can be bad, it can be destructive but it can also be constructive or it can be instructive so it all depends how you deal with it. So it can help us understand the ways we define problems and the consequences of our proposed solutions. Constructive conflict means that stakeholders from diverse backgrounds can come together and be represented in part of the decision making process have a seat at the table which is a very good thing in the agricultural innovation systems approach. It can also help get new perspectives and confront narrow predefined points of use and of course it can also generate to discussion all kinds of new alternatives and more options that we might not have been aware of. So conflict is not in and of itself a bad thing. Of course if it's done in a negative way then it would not be very helpful. It's also important to recognize that we have different conflict management styles and we're all different. I won't go through a questionnaire here but I'll send you the link as well. There's a questionnaire you can go online and answer 25 questions and then it gives you which style you have and then you can take it or not and you can see if you agree with it or not. It's a fun exercise to do and if you don't like the results you don't have to tell anyone that you did it. One is competing. So competing is I'm assertive and I'm uncooperative and I'm going to focus on my gain and I don't care about anything else. This is the competing style. The opposite to that is the accommodative style. The accommodative is unassertive and even neglecting its own personal concern just to satisfy the other and not enter into a conflict. A third one is avoiding. It's when there was a difficult question and suddenly I only had 10 replies. I'm going to avoid this by not committing to take an answer. So when we take unassertive and uncooperative behavior but it's not really engaging in one way or the other. A fourth one is to compromise which is an intermediate position between assertiveness and cooperation. It's often meant splitting the difference, seeking a middle ground which may in some cases work quite well. In other cases we might find a middle ground that doesn't suit anyone and therefore is not a good solution for the group. Finally the one that is the most desired form of handling a conflict is a collaborative. It has elements from both the assertive and the cooperative behavior but it's emphasizing finding a solution that works for all parties as opposed to just settling on something that might not work for anyone. Trust is a vital part of all of this. It underpins really the whole approach. So when you establish trust and you maintain open communications you can get a lot of these conflict negotiations done. But to get open communication people need to feel that they're coming together and discussing as equals. People feel there's huge power disparities. They're not likely to be very open. We need to listen with empathy not listen in order to reply and show you that I was right. And we need to bring our assumptions and perceptions out into the open. We all have biases. Whether we are aware of it or not whether we acknowledge it publicly or not we all have biases. And when we bring the biases out into the open we can recognize them, do course correction get feedback and find ways to negotiate from a position of trust. We also need to recognize that there's a lot of resistance and resistance can be a barrier to open communication. So there are different masks that it's important that we have in the back of our minds that we can find and identify. So the angry mask. Using anger to prevent dialogue. I'm so upset at what your group did I can't even talk to you. And the problem is not me, it's you of course. The detail mask. Asking for so many details at every step of the way we need to sit together with a farmer representative yeah but we're from which village and then what are they growing and you know when will it happen? When you get bogged down in detail so much that you don't leave any space for the substance to be discussed. The time mask. We really need to discuss this. Yes, yes, yes we absolutely do you know this month is very busy for me at work. Can we do it after, after the holidays? We have the intellectual mask where we don't want to deal with the concrete problems because we always want to discuss the theories at a conceptual level and finally the mask that has no mouth when you're speaking and speaking but get no feedback back that is very passive and hides any reaction and makes it very difficult to have a meaningful dialogue. Conflict management is not a one-off thing. It's a never-ending cycle because different conflicts will arise at different stages about different points. So it's not about fixing a particular problem in a given point of time it's about having a system that allows us to deal with these things. Yes, like this workplace conflict that we have on the screen. So some of the things that we can do to address that is to have preliminary conversations to foster trust and understanding. We also want to deepen those conversations to identify and look at the real issues, the underlying issues. We also want to have mutual problem-solving. People are much more likely to accept a proposed solution if they were part in coming up with that solution rather than being told this is the solution and that's the way it needs to be. And finally, something as simple as following up once we've discussed and agreed something to see that it was actually done and that the results were as expected can go a long way into the next time there's a conflict. People will have much more trust in the process if that follow-through actually takes place. Okay. So let's have a few clickers to see how we are doing. So which of the following is not a good reason for ensuring that all stakeholder groups are represented in an innovation platform? A, to avoid bias decisions and action? B, to avoid pushback from marginalized groups? C, to avoid elite capture? Or D, to avoid conflict between platform members? Only 13. Only 13 so far. Maybe I didn't phrase the question well. There are three things that we want to avoid and one thing that we don't want to avoid. What is the thing we don't want to avoid? That's essentially perhaps a better way of asking the question. So we want to avoid elite capture. We don't want elite capture. Yes, it's a deal. We also don't want bias decisions and we also don't want to have pushback by groups who feel they were marginalized and we don't want elite capture. But conflict we don't have a problem with because we said conflict can be constructive, can be good. True or false? Social network analysis or SNA categorizes the type of relationship between members of a platform. True or false? The answer is false. It does not capture the type of relationship. Remember it captures two other things. One, whether there is a relationship, so a binary yes-no, relationship no, and the strength. But not the type of relationship. Yes. In network analysis there is this... when you connect the two nodes, for example, the direction of the arrow, you see, because, for example, the two nodes will be joined by a line, right? But sometimes there is an arrow indicating that probably the relationship is one way. So it could be a type of relationship. It could be, but often it is not. So for example, I don't know if the type of relationship is a seller-buyer relationship or if it's a colleague relationship or if it's a political or if it's a friendship. I'm not asking the type. I'm just asking whether there is a connection and how strong in terms of, you know, how frequently you meet if I'm asking about frequency or how important is it to you and so on. Yeah, I just recall. I just remembered the software, the UCI-Net. It's being used in SNA analysis. It can analyze many different kinds of relationship among the different nodes in the network. If we take it to that level of complexity, yes, absolutely. But I was more checking if you're paying attention rather than if you understand how SNA software works. Okay, so for a role-play to be effective, the actors should be provided with a script through a false. That is correct. They should not be provided with a script. And which of these is an appropriate role for the observers of a role-play? Is it to provide feedback on the quality of the play? To reflect and suggest how the situation could have been addressed more effectively? To help refine the script so it can be used more effectively in the future? Or observers are in audience only and should not speak? That is the correct answer. So we basically want to reflect together on how the situation can be addressed. It's basically a mechanism to get the issue to the table. Any questions on power and conflict dynamics? If not, I'll move on to module nine. A question only. If you are an IP broker and you are facilitating a multi-stakeholder process and two or three of the stakeholders probably don't want to compromise as an IP broker, what should be the proper way to do it? So it's quite possible that we get to situations where there is conflicts and people won't budge. So that's when you can use some of the techniques that we identified to try and get them to engage. If at the end of the day an actor absolutely doesn't want to negotiate, doesn't want to engage, then that person will not remain part of the platform. Because if they completely disagree with the platform objectives for how to get there, they will not want to be part of that. So you can try and engage with them so that they at least don't become an opponent of the process. But at the end of the day, to go back to the example of the forest in the morning, if I am a housing constructor and my only objective is for houses to be built where the forest was, I don't care about the analysis of ICRAF on the rubber and I don't care about eco-tourism and I don't care about agriculture for better food. All I want is houses and I don't want to hear anything else. If that's my attitude and you've tried all of these things then at the end of the day the members will say thank you very much Mr. Contractor, we have heard your opinions repetitively and now we respect them, but we don't find that there is room for that because the platform wants to move in a different direction. Sorry? It's a powerful person who is... you're dealing with a powerful person. At the end of the day, this is not magic. So I mean, if you are dealing with a very powerful person who only cares about his or her personal gain and he or she has the means to rig the system to get those gains and doesn't care about anything at all, then just bringing them to a participatory process will not change much. In fact, usually if that's really how they feel you would not get them in the platform to begin with. They'll say, I'm not interested, you can meet without me, it's not important and so on. But usually these things are very difficult to sustain over time. So if the source of the power is political, then at the end refusing to engage with what the rest of the community wants might translate into loss of political power. If the source of power is through business with the community and the community feels alienated, then eventually they will find ways to take their business elsewhere. So it's also in their interest to see that it's better to engage and to find a collaborative solution than to really go it alone. And that's the kind of roles that a skilled facilitator can find ways to do. Now it may be done in a group setting or it may be best done through networks. So finding someone who is close to that person and can approach them in a way that they don't lose face publicly but explain to them why it's important to be a bit more accommodating and where people are coming from and that it's not a direct threat to them or targeted at them. So there are many ways to do it. We discussed more public ways to deal with a group but in the case that you are trying, sometimes it's better to do it not in a group session but one-on-one with someone that person trusts and respects and try and see if we can nudge them to a more collaborative solution.