30 OCTOBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL collection all the way to formulating courses of action—or more thoughtfully leveraging research already completed or underway. Second, agencies should take the time to craft and tell compelling stories. This is not a call for anecdotes about beneficiaries but rather stories about positive and negative trends, related both to the substance of what agencies are learning and the challenges of the learning process itself. For example, Congress and oversight offices need to understand how difficult it is to define and measure “success” in foreign assistance. This knowledge is not intuitive for the uninitiated. The agencies tend to think that sharing how hard a task is opens them up to criticism for being bad at that task, but doing so is likely to change the nature of oversight over time, as long as the bad news is followed by “and here’s what we’re doing differently as a result.” Only the agencies can describe the challenges and importance of their work, but that story will not tell itself. And third, agency leadership—certainly including all political appointees and their senior staff—should move away from the traditional oversight mindset in their own management practices. This mentality is not simply inherited from Congress and oversight organizations. The traditional oversight mindset is traditional for a reason—it’s widespread across most thinking about motivation and achievement from a workforce. Instead, at every meeting, supervisors at agencies involved in foreign assistance should be asking their staff, “What are we learning?” and then deploying the staff and resources necessary to get better at learning, which will in turn improve their performance. Initially, the incentive to distort will still seep into discussions about evidence as this shift takes root, but over time officials conceiving and implementing foreign assistance will see that building a culture of evidence will actually help them succeed, get promoted, and build credibility with Congress and the American people. In Congress, oversight organizations, and in the agencies themselves, our notion of accountability in foreign assistance needs a reset, where mistakes are no longer prohibited but repeating them is. n
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