In capacity building, much energy is often devoted to finding the one "best" solution, the "best practice", or the best strategy, policy or procedure. A great deal of managerial time and effort is devoted to identifying the one right answer, while all other solutions are considered wrong. The enormous time end effort invested explain the intense feelings that go along with the need to be right. The expression of these feelings often go beyond rightness to righteousness.
Having decided on how to deal with a problem, managers act as if all other solutions were wrong - including those believing in them. The opportunities in the rejected choices are thus denied, as are the negative aspects of the action preferred. Where the experience of regret is denied, managers can only resort to projecting the negative aspects of the chosen course of action outside their own area of responsibility. This denial becomes one of the major issues in facilitating learning and capacity building.
Action taken from the position or righteousness are usually strong, forceful and provocative in nature. They are "big acts". Examples for such acts are large scale restructuring, mergers, substantial reductions of staff numbers ("downsizing"), cultural change and other action targeting a system's recurrent processes. From the perspective of capacity building, the question is whether such acts will lead to more awareness of organisational choices, or in other words, build long-term capacity.
Usually, such acts involve the prior investment of so much energy that it must be released in action. The awareness of the perpetrators becomes "supercharged". The supercharged energy builds up over a period of time in which it could be released in smaller actions from which wider awareness could arise. The problem with intensely focused awareness is that alternatives are shut out as energy builds up and it becomes more difficult to take responsibility for both the good and the bad emerging from action.
By contrast smaller action steps make it harder for people to stay fixed in bipolar thinking. High capacity systems will track their problems and address them with smaller actions as they go along in order to avoid crisis. In doing so they make the best choice they can and experience regret while doing it. This approach is difficult to pursue when an impending crisis calls for the "big act". Therefore, the more complex the problem the more important is it not to get stuck in finding the grand solution.
For effective capacity building this means that the main role of consultants should be to help clients use the energy that derives from awareness in a process of incremental change.