How the development process got stuck in simple models and how to get it unstuck. The key is understanding culture.
It is not really possible for a person to understand what shapes another's culture unless he or she spends years in an active dialogue with that other culture. If this statement is true, then one would expect development projects -which by definition aim to change the environment or the behaviour of people — to be based on a deep understanding not only of obvious cultural differences, but of the underlying values and perceptions which shape a culture.
Unfortunately, this seems to be less and less the case. More and more development projects are conceived, planned, and even executed, by people whose schedule is so tight that they have to rely on a technique which allows them to turn out projects at a rapid rate: the bottleneck approach.
THE BOTTLENECK