In search of champions of learning from self-evaluations

Forty-five years ago, World Bank President, Robert McNamara mandated self-evaluation for Bank projects. And we have been going at it ever since.

Self-evaluations are now undertaken by all of the Bank Group institutions - World Bank, IFC, and MIGA-and are targeted at project, program, and country levels. The stated purpose of the self-evaluation regime is to foster organizational learning, inform management action, and ensure accountability for results and performance. In turn, IEG's validations (or desk reviews) of certain outputs from the self-evaluation system feed into corporate "scorecards", "dashboards", and other systems. They also provide foundation-level material for our larger scale evaluations.

That, broadly, is how things are set up to work - at least on paper. But we're interested in finding out more about how well the theory is reflected in reality. So we've decided, now that spring is in the air, it's time to check out the ROSES (Report on Self-Evaluation Systems)! And we're looking for your help as we attempt to dig out good practice and lessons on how self-evaluation might best support learning and effectiveness.

The ROSES will cover most WBG self-evaluation systems, looking at:

• the integrity of the self-evaluation architecture, and whether accountability, performance management, and learning objectives are being achieved; and, at
   
• behaviors, incentives, and organizational norms and practices that shape how self-evaluation information is produced and used.

One of the questions we plan to address is "how well these systems serve their learning purposes?" Over the years the Bank Group has seen a number of initiatives-"learning from failure", the "Solutions Bank", "Knowledge Talks", and "Knowledge Silo Breakers" - designed to encourage and maximize learning; however, relatively little attention has been paid to the use we make of project level evaluations, of which there are hundreds every year. Staff surveyed for our evaluation on How the Bank Learns reported that they only infrequently consulted project completion reports. And while all self-evaluation templates have mandatory sections for teams to record "lessons learned", our reviews of these reports see near-identical lessons recorded year after year. Arguably, if lessons were being learnt, we would be bending the downward trend in overall portfolio performance documented in IEG's Results and Performance 2013.

Achieving better results through self-evaluation

So the question we're asking you to help us with is how might the Bank Group best tap into the learning value of self-evaluations? Specifically, we're looking for instances and examples of how and where self-evaluation has been systematically used for learning purposes.

There is no restriction on the type of learning we would like to hear about, but we're particularly interested in hearing from colleagues about any type of Bank, IFC, or MIGA self-evaluation. Perhaps your team launched a study of completion or supervision reports to inform design of future projects. Or you started a seminar series to disseminate self-evaluations. Or a trust fund partner or client country worked with the Bank Group to promote operational learning in the context of self-evaluation of a project or program. Or maybe you have experience of some other self-evaluation system that worked for learning.

There must be good news stories out there, so please respond and share your experience. For our part, we plan to study and follow up on examples of good practice to help fertilize the ROSES!

You can respond below and share your experience with the whole community, or you can email us at ieg@worldbank.org. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!