Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It's a great honour for me to be here today.
What we want to do is take a few moments to tell you a little bit about who we are, what we have done in Afghanistan, why management training is critical to building self-sufficiency in Afghanistan, and a bit about our approach to building administrative capacity, and also to offer a word or two about costs.
My name is John Inns. I am a principal of IPA Group. I'm a former government employee and have been an independent management consultant for 20 years. I specialize in organization development, performance management, and training.
I am anglophone. I was born in Montreal but I only learned a few words in French when playing hockey in the streets. Therefore, my knowledge of French is not sufficient, and I will speak English only.
My colleague Geoff Poapst has a similar pedigree to mine, and in addition is what I would call a renowned video producer.
We brought all these skills together in 2007 when we were approached by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to design and deliver a western-style management training program for the Afghan National Directorate of Security. That request for western-style training came from the NDS director general Amrullah Saleh, who was the director at the time. He realized that you can teach intelligence officers to investigate crimes and pursue terrorists, but it was still an uphill battle if that manager lacked a fundamental grasp of management concepts like strategic planning, setting goals, and holding people accountable for results.
NDS wanted a more effective organization, with a more open, collegial, and less autocratic management culture. So those were our marching orders. In 2007 and 2008 we put 400 NDS personnel through our program, a mid-management-level training program, and a further 100 senior officials through an executive leadership training program. In our view, all indicators showed that this work was a success.
Several months after the course had been delivered, we evaluated the ability of NDS to implement the training materials we had given them. We toured nine NDS offices, including regional offices in Panjshir, Nangarhar, and Parwan. The graduates from the middle management training program told us that they were working smarter, significantly more effectively. We measured the output of productivity improvements they acquired by using the training instruments and had productivity improvements in excess of 50%. This was gratifying news, which confirmed what we had seen in the classroom—that most senior leaders and middle managers at NDS were open to new ideas and had a real thirst for knowledge. As I said, I'm a professional trainer. I've trained thousands of people in North America. I would say that these were some of the best students I have ever been exposed to in my training career.
Based on those results, NDS saw that we needed to train perhaps 3,000 managers and 500 executives. They saw that a critical mass needed to be trained in western management tools in order to develop an organization that was more effective, accountable, and results-producing. We got the same sort of endorsement from the CSIS director, Jim Judd, and Ambassador Ron Hoffmann. At the time, they wanted us to finish the work required to produce that trained critical mass in NDS, and then to move on to do ANP. At that time we were expected to go back, but the work was suspended because NDS was unable to free up resources, because the writ had been dropped for the Afghan election in 2009. There was no one available to be trained at that point, and we have been on hold ever since, as the Canadian government rethought its strategy on Afghanistan.
With the commitment to move Afghanistan towards self-sufficiency by 2014, we wanted to get back in the game using a program that we think has already proven to be effective. Management training is not as sexy or interesting as building schools or dams, and not as tangible as teaching police how to shoot, do riot control, or conduct investigations. But in our view, technical training will not move Afghanistan towards self-sufficiency. Indeed, the Canadian-proposed efforts to build technical capacity will go for naught if the organizations lack the administrative capacity to put technical skills to work effectively.
I have to tell you that we have been talking to your confreres in the States. We were in Washington in June, and at that time a report was issued by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. The report assessed an ANP unit that had been successfully trained and had a vehicle and equipment evaluation that was at the top level. The vehicles were ready to go, but no one was in a position to drive the vehicles. As we said to our American hosts, fixing cars and trucks is a technical challenge, and there's no question that there's merit in technical skills. But making sure you have people who can fix and drive the vehicles is a management challenge. And it's just as important if you're actually going to be effective in catching crooks.
That one case in point sure helped to make the penny drop, as we are now part of a consortium bidding on the U.S. government's $3-billion piece of work to restructure and retrain all of the Afghan National Police, 142,000 people. We also teamed up with Deloitte Consulting to explore opportunities for police-sector capacity-building in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia.
Our experience in Washington was also gratifying, in that we came to appreciate that our training was unique, and also very Canadian. Unlike our American friends, the Brits, or the Russians, we don't tend to go around the world telling people what they ought to be doing, and that shows up in our methodology. Let me give you some of the details of our methodology. We can show you some examples at the end of the presentation if you wish.
First, we are significantly less prescriptive than typical American or European trainers. We don't impose western ideas. We don't lecture participants. Instead we show participants how westerners would handle a typical management challenge that Afghans would have been confronted with perhaps even on a daily basis. We work with them to come up with an Afghan approach and an Afghan management tool best suited to their work environment. In the end, it's no longer a western idea; it's their idea and they own it. With their owning that solution, they are predisposed to using that as a solution to the problem they see.
Secondly, we rely very heavily on custom-made, native video training aids. They tell the participants we've done something special for them, we've made a particular effort. When I turn on the projector, they know they're in for something completely different, but there's also more to it than that. In Afghanistan, as I'm sure most of you are aware, translation is an absolute nightmare. It's very difficult to get your point across. We found we were inventing Dari lexicon because the words did not exist in Dari.
We produced 140 minutes of Dari and Pashto video to illustrate key lessons in management situations and we summarized daily learning for the participants. We also gave them homework assignments to use the management tools that were part of the training program. We shot all this in Toronto, using Afghan Canadian actors.
We also used the video to bring the voice of the boss into the classroom, and this was absolutely critical. As you know, Afghanistan has a very autocratically based public sector. When their minister or their deputy minister comes into the room and explains to the participants that this program is absolutely critical for their career and this organization, and if they don't use these tools they will have no career in the organization, you start to have a fairly motivated batch of participants. We captured that in video and we showed that to every classroom we had access to.
Finally, and this is crucial, we gear our training programs to an overall organization development strategy. We work with the top leaders to find their vision, what their vision is, where they want to go, important policy issues: human rights, corruption fighting, etc. We tailored the program to specifically address those policy issues because we have already identified, with the deputy minister or with the minister, that these are key policy issues he wants to change. That works to address these policy issues through the training program.
It also shows the participants where the organization is headed, and in so doing it makes them accountable to produce a set of results that will make a contribution to that corporate vision. It makes them personally accountable and it gets everyone pulling the organization in the same direction.
That's how we delivered the management program in Afghanistan.
Let me say a couple of words about cost. If you were to take this management course or had some of your staff take this course--I'm an instructor at the Canadian Management Centre--you would take the same course, obviously in English or French, at a cost of $2,500 per participant. We ended up delivering that program to 500 people in Afghanistan at the same cost per participant as we delivered it in Toronto. I think that's very significant. That doesn't include some of the travel costs and that sort of thing, but we're in the same ballpark.
Of course that number would fall if the fixed costs were amortized over a larger participant population, especially if we equipped a contingent of our military trainers to deliver the program. The real cost leverage would come from training Afghans to train themselves. We don't believe that has been properly addressed in Afghanistan to date. We believe if that were significantly dealt with, that would make a significant Canadian legacy.
Let me wrap up by saying that there is more to building the security sector in Afghanistan than simply providing technical training. We must also help them build an effective organization, to develop that organization. From my 1,600 hours of classroom time in Afghanistan, we have a significant amount of ground to cover in the future.
Finally, let me say that administrative capacity-building takes time, and you can't do it in half measures. Critical mass needs to be produced across all levels of the organization, from the technical person up to the management and leadership levels. If you want an organization to change and to be more effective, to be more respective of human rights, to be more vigilant in fighting corruption, you have to train that critical mass. At NDS that number was touted as 3,000. At ANP we believe it to be in the order of magnitude of 30,000 people, and therefore it demands proper, custom-tailored, train-the-trainer programs.
We have a proven approach to administrative capacity-building. We need to tweak it, in view of what we have learned at NDS, but we are essentially ready to go, and the Afghans have asked for this specific assistance.
Omar Samad, the previous Afghan ambassador, said he saw a need for this to be delivered over a thousand times in Afghanistan. The existing Afghan ambassador has urged--and you listened to him a few weeks ago--that the work at NDS continue with the training and development of that organization, because it is the lead entity in the Afghan law enforcement sector.
We're keen to work with the military and the RCMP to make all of this work, put the capacity in place, develop the organizations, and move Afghanistan toward self-sufficiency.
Thank you for your time. I'll be pleased to answer your questions or show you any of the video methodology.
