The New Year and Progress on the Strategy

We are already in February of the new year, and activities have been back to normal for about a month since the Christmas break. Regrettably, the activities on this blog have not been brought back to normal (but this posting marks a ‘from-first-of-February-resolution!). Not an excuse, but yours truly has already spent some time in Paris and Turkey, and is just back from an unusually thrilling week in Kabul.


I spent parts of the week in Kabul with Kai, the two of us having differing networks in the Afghan capital. I did not stay at the usual guest house, but at Hotel Serena (where Journalist Carsten Thomassen was killed in an attack in 2008, with FM Støre present). We were informed of a concrete threat against the hotel one night, leaving us with not much sleep, and we chose to shift to the Norwegian Embassy for the remainder of our stay. On the good side, I got to follow up on two ongoing projects (religious institutions; towards durable peace), and to meet with a number of interesting people, from ministers to uninfluential observers. Unfortunately, the main impressions give little basis for optimism.

Some of you may have heard of the recent initiative proposed by the board - and followed up on by the management - to create a system for measuring progress on the strategic goals. This will be the strategic issue for the four first PLG meetings this year (meetings 31 January, 14 February, 28 February and 14 March), under the heading Key Performance Indicators (KPI). A summary of the first meeting is posted as a PLG News item on Intranet, but I will mention the most important aspects here as well.

The starting point for the work, to be executed by a group comprised of Lars Even, Peter and Damian, is Lene and Lars Even’s MBA paper ‘Implementing PRIO Strategy 2010-2013’. The group’s mandate is to work out a set of KPIs for PRIO to use, and they will do so by revising the KPIs spelled out in the paper, and if necessary removing and/or creating new indicators. This is not necessarily an easy task, as the goals are of various natures and not all are directly quantifiable. Some element of qualitative assessment will likely have to be employed, and the measurements will vary from achieved/not and achieved/not from year to year, to progress towards goal. Fulfillment of actions intended to realize the goal may be fourth way of measuring.

The group will present their drafts to the PLG bi-weekly and programme leaders will inform their programmes about the progress. In addition, the drafts will be made public within the organization. In this process, we will depend on feedback from anyone (you will certainly be reminded of this). The initial list of indicators from Lene and Lars Even’s paper is located here (PRIO Intranet). Challenging as indicators always are (we know this far too well from the RCN’s result-based core grant system), I am looking forward to our discussion on indicators, which I expect will make use even more aware of PRIO’s outstanding qualities!