If you are professionally involved in promoting good governance and fighting corruption and organised crime, the following five problems may sound familar:
1. Most of the smart people work for someone else. Conventional organisations need to hire people who have good ideas day after day. Unfortunately, most humans are not so prolific. Most people have just a few good ideas, while their employment comes with high cost. It is not that conventional organisations wouldn’t want to use the occasional brilliant idea. The way they are set-up just makes that too expensive. Because NACS works with expanding networks of consultants, its clients literally get access to hundreds of interconnected and collaborating brains around the world, all focusing on the issue of corruption and good governance – at no extra cost.
2. Most activities address symptoms, not problems. Corruption is a symptom that can have many causes. Unfortunately problems and symptoms usually look alike, so that it is easy to confound one with the other. Because of the complex relationships between cause and effect, individuals or homogenous groups trying to define the real problems causing corruption in a certain organisation, system or country, will almost always go wrong. Designing a solution around the wrong problem again will waste time and money. The longer clients work on the wrong issue, the higher the cost of changing course and checking original assumptions. NACS is set up to avoid this typical flaw by networking diversity. NACS specialists not only come to the issues of corruption from diverse backgrounds, they are also free to discuss and present their ideas. Having a diversity of viewpoints available, clients are more likely to unveil the “big picture”. NACS assists them in reviewing their corruption issues from more than one angle. This approach greatly increases their chances for finding out where the problem really is.
3. Most initiatives end up reinventing the wheel. “Not Invented Here” is a typical attitude in the corporate world. NACS works differently. If the problem has been defined, chances are that the solution already exists within the network. This saves time, money, and nerves. Since many people will review the problem, clients will likely get many different solutions, and can then choose the one they like most. Alternatively, clients can ask NACS to recommend a solution. Unlike other “networks”, which tap only the brains of individual members, NACS specialists constantly interact and have routine procedures for developing common standpoints. Where NACS does not have the solution ready, the network will work it out with the client, while keeping an eye on the big picture.
4. Getting good players is easy. Getting them to play together is the hard part. The main outputs of regular projects are reports filled with well-intentioned recommendations. These recommendations often do not correspond to the clients’ implementation capacity. NACS identifies solutions which clients can implement without buying further external assistance. For this purpose, NACS constantly invests in the creation of new knowledge products that are ready to use. Still, the client may wish to leave all or part of the implementation to NACS, because of a lack of time, or a shortage of transformational capacity. In those cases, NACS will complement existing client resources with the best fitting consulting team. NACS specialists are not only hand-picked by the network using strict criteria and peer relationships, but also know how to work with each other in a team. While teamwork may not be the best approach when brainstorming innovative ideas, it is necessary when implementing a specific solution and getting the job done. This is the beauty of NACS: it can transform itself from a lose network of independent minds into coherent teams - depending on what the the situation requires.
5. Multi-disciplinarity often remains an empty word. Corruption borders many other issues, such as drug-trafficking, terrorism, migration, poverty, etc. If the solution is outside the area of expertise of NACS, or if additional expertise is required, NACS will find the right partner(s) through its links to other networks. NACS currently draws in members from three continents. It is quite likely that the partner(s) we find is/are located in the client’s neighbourhood.
NACS serves as the key global platform for facilitating information sharing, co-operation and collective action among anti-corruption practititioners in order to maximise the effectiveness of anti-corruption initiatives.
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