Adding in some 'personal transformation' to my previous post

Building on some recent reflections of my co-researcher Juan Carlos Giles, which include a challenge to analyze the extent to which we take personal transformation and identity into account when we think about developing the capacities of ‘others’, I offer the following modification to the question at the bottom of my previous post:

To what extent do the management practices and systems of social change organizations take into account the complexity (external and internal) of the social change they aim to support, and the identities and personal transformation of the people who put these systems and practices to use?

I think this is important because of some reflections I've been having on my own motivations for supporting social change, as well as the multiple motivations that different people have for desiring, or not, social change prescriptions from outside. The more I reflect on this the more I feel I need to rethink the way I approach capacity development work in general. Also—in addition to human motivations for change—the implications of the broader situational complexity behind any significant change (i.e. multiple hidden and visible factors, relationships, conditions, etc.), make me really question the logic and philosophy behind some traditional capacity development thinking and methods.

One of the exciting things for me is the potential I see in learning based methods for capacity development. An example could be participatory action research not ‘into’ capacity development, but as capacity development. With these methods it’s OK to ask questions and assume that we don’t know the answers going in (i.e., we can assume that there is not already an existing best practice—waiting to be discovered—that can be applied in each case). This kind of approach can support more emergent CD processes that take into account where the individuals that call themselves ‘organization’ have come from and how that affects where they see themselves going, both individually and collectively (as well as what key stakeholders outside the organization have to say about that). It can also take into account local realities, which are situational, emergent, and potentially ill-suited to homogenizing best practice management models.