Systematization

Isn’t it frustrating to have to reinvent the wheel? You are facing programming or organisational challenges – and you just know that other people have managed to solve these problems - but you don’t have access to these experiences.

Or, you’ve been through a complex and interesting experience, which you’d like to share with others, but you are not sure how to organise and share your ideas.

Or perhaps you’ve had a major success (for example, a community mobilises, or a government changes a policy) – and you are not quite sure what the success factors were, and you’d like to understand better.

Or maybe you are facing a big challenge in a change process, and you’d like to build better understanding of the problem and find a different way of working.

Systematization is a methodology that offers a way to do all of the above. It allows us to:

Organise and document what we have learnt through our work
Better understand the impact of our work and the ways in which change happens
Develop deeper understanding about our work and the challenges we face to inform new ways of working
Capture and communicate the complexity and richness of our work

Systematization “helps people involved in different kinds of practice to organize and communicate what they have learned. We are talking about …so called …. lessons learned, about which everybody talks nowadays, but are not so easy to produce.” (AAI systematization resource pack, pg. 1, 2009)

A definition: Systematization is the reconstruction of and analytical reflection about an experience. Through systematization, events are interpreted in order to understand them… The systematization allows for the experience to be discussed and compared with other similar experiences, and with existing theories and, thus, contributes to an accumulation of knowledge produced from and for practice (Systematization Permanent Workshop in AAI systematization resource pack, pg 10, 2009).

In 2009, IASL has produced two excellent resources on systematization. The first is a resource pack, (smaller file download option here) which is one of the few English language resources on this exciting methodology. The pack will inform you about the methodology, and give you a detailed orientation to how to systematize experiences. You will also find links to other systematization resources and examples, and an existing bibliography of systematization materials.

The second resource is Advocacy for Change, a systematization of advocacy experiences related to the status of youth (in Guatemala), the right to education (in Brazil) and farming (in the United States). The systematizations allowed the actors involved to consider the evolution of the experiences and to identify lessons and insights for future interventions. The Guatemala systematization product was documented in writing and film, the US experience in writing, and the Brazil experience in film (see below.)