I Went to Pali as a Team Member. I'm Returning as a Systems Thinker.

When You Enter a Field Together, You Return Changed

Two weeks ago, I boarded a train to Pali with six people I barely knew. Today, I'm writing this reflection knowing that those 12 days fundamentally shifted how I understand development work, collaboration, and what it means to learn as a team.

This isn't a report. It's a reflection on what happens when seven emerging development professionals spend nearly two weeks listening to the same communities, asking different questions, and slowly realizing they're seeing parts of the same system.

Part 1: The First Day Disorientation

Arriving in Pali as a PLC 4 Member

On Day 1, we met in a small room in Bali. Seven of us. Different backgrounds. Different disciplines. Different ways of thinking about development.

• One colleague was trained in education systems

• Another in health and nutrition

• A third in livelihood and agri development

• Another focused on gender and social dynamics

• One brought public policy expertise

• Another was grounded in participatory research

• I came with my development management lens

Our brief: Spend 12 days understanding how development actually works in one district.

The disorientation was real. We didn't have a unified research question. We didn't have a shared methodology. We had only:

• A commitment to listen deeply

• Curiosity about how systems actually function

• The humility to admit we didn't know what we'd find

What I Learned: Diversity in a Team Isn't a Problem, It's the Whole Point

By Day 3, something shifted. We stopped trying to agree on what we were looking for. Instead, we started genuinely curious about what each person was noticing that the others weren't.

The education colleague saw the gap between enrollment and learning. The health colleague saw anemia rates stubbornly persistent despite improved clinic access. The livelihood colleague saw young men making migration decisions not out of desperation but out of calculated choice. The gender colleague saw how early marriage interrupted all other trajectories.

These weren't competing observations. They were different angles on the same system.

Part 2: The Stories We Collected

Beyond Data Points. The Girl, The Worker, The Mother

One of the most powerful aspects of being in PLC 4 was that we didn't just gather statistics. We sat with people. We listened.

We met:

The Girl in Sakda – A student whose brother was in school, but she wasn't. When we asked why, her father explained: "What will she do with education? She'll marry anyway." Not cruelty. Just a calculation based on what he'd seen work (or not work) in his community.

The Worker in Kakradi – A young man who'd decided to migrate for MGNREGA work rather than pursue local livelihood options. When we asked why, he said: "There's no shame in it. It's what men do. My father did it. His father did it." Migration had become normalized not as failure, but as the adult path for men.

The Anganwadi Worker – A woman running a nutrition program with inadequate resources, but doing it anyway. When we asked what would change things, she said: "If mothers understood that feeding children well in the first 1000 days changes everything. But they don't know. And I don't have time to teach them."

These weren't interview subjects. They became touchstones for our collective learning. Every time we debated what Pali's core challenge was, we came back to these stories to ground our thinking.

What I Realized: Numbers Without Names Aren't Learning

ISDM teaches you to look at data: literacy rates, health metrics, economic participation. All necessary. But here's what I discovered: Until you've sat with the person behind the statistic, you haven't actually understood why the statistic exists.

A 31.9 percentage point gender literacy gap isn't just a number. It's the girl in Sakda not being sent to school. It's the mother who never learned to read wondering how to check medicine instructions. It's the young woman navigating a world where literacy was optional for her but mandatory for her brother.

Data tells you what's happening. Stories tell you why it's happening. Development work requires both.

Part 3: What Happened When We Disagreed

The Productive Tension of Multiple Perspectives

By Day 6, we were in real disagreement.

One colleague was convinced the core issue was education quality, if we strengthened foundational learning, everything else would follow.

Another was equally convinced it was gender norms, until we addressed why girls were married early and boys were expected to migrate, education interventions would be absorbed by the system.

A third saw livelihood constraints as foundational, without realistic local options, education and gender norms couldn't shift.

In traditional research settings, this becomes a problem. Someone "wins" the argument. You publish separate chapters. You move on.

But in PLC 4, something different happened. Instead of debating who was right, we asked: What if they're all right? What if they're seeing different parts of the same system?

The Reinforcing Loop Emerges

As a team, we started mapping how these observations connected:

• Limited quality education → Children leave school

• Children leave school → Limited aspiration for further education

• Limited aspiration → Gender norms prevail (why educate a girl who'll marry?)

• Gender norms prevail → Limited female participation in economic opportunities

• Limited local economic opportunities → Male migration becomes normal

• Male migration becomes normal → Girls left at home → Early marriage

• Early marriage → Interrupted education and health → Repeat

None of our individual observations was wrong. But only by bringing them together could we see the loop.

This is what collaborative learning actually is: Not agreeing on answers, but creating space where different perspectives illuminate different parts of the same system.

Part 4: The Uncomfortable Parts (That Nobody Talks About)

What It's Like to Do Deep Fieldwork as an Emerging Professional

Here's what development textbooks don't prepare you for:

1. The Emotional Weight

By Day 8, I was exhausted. Not physically tired, though that too, but emotionally heavy. We'd listened to stories of constraint, impossible choices, resilience under pressure. A mother deciding which child to send to school because she can only afford one. A young man choosing migration as the most honorable path available. A teacher doing her best with broken infrastructure.

There's a tendency in development to approach communities as "problems to be solved." But when you sit with the people, you realize they're not problems. They're people making the best choices available to them within the constraints of their systems.

This is harder to sit with than it sounds.

2. The Guilt of Outsider Status

We were there for 12 days. We'd leave. They would stay. By Day 5, this reality weighed on me.

We asked deep questions about their lives. We took notes. We'd synthesize their insights into a report. Then what? How were we different from the dozens of researchers who'd come before us?

One team member named this directly in a reflection: "I feel like we're extracting their stories for our learning. How does this actually serve them?"

We didn't have a perfect answer. But we named it. And that naming mattered.

3. The Data Collection Overwhelm

We gathered 150+ conversations across 8 villages in 12 days. That's a lot of data. By Day 9, I was struggling with the question: How do we honor all these conversations without flattening them into categories?

I realized that fieldwork isn't just about collecting information. It's about how you hold what you collect. Do you reduce it to neat data points? Or do you preserve the texture of the conversations the hesitations, the contradictions, the things people said that didn't fit your framework?

Part 5: The Bricoleur Situation (And Why It Matters That Someone Else Holds It)

What I Noticed About Our Team's Structure

Our team had a Bricoleur, one colleague tasked with synthesizing all our observations into a coherent narrative.

Watching this role unfold, I realized something: This person had to hold everyone else's expertise while also creating coherence.

It was harder than it looked. Because synthesizing 7 different disciplinary perspectives while honoring each one's validity isn't just intellectual work. It's emotional work. It's holding contradictions. It's saying "all of this is true" while creating a single narrative.

And here's what struck me: I'm grateful I'm not the one doing it.

Not because I couldn't. But because watching someone else carry that role helped me see what I'm actually good at in collaborative spaces.

I'm good at:

• Asking connecting questions

• Holding multiple perspectives without needing to resolve them prematurely

• Sitting comfortably in ambiguity

• Seeing patterns across observations

• Translating between different people's frameworks

But I'm not the Bricoleur. I'm a member of the team who asks "what do we see together?"

That's a different and equally valuable role.

Part 6: What "Collaborative Learning" Actually Means

It's Not Agreement, It's Choreography

Before Pali, I thought collaborative learning meant "we all agree on what we've learned."

Now I think it's something more interesting: We come with different lenses. We see different things. But we create enough coherence that each person's observation makes the others' observations more meaningful.

Think of it like an orchestra. Each instrument plays a different part. The violin part wouldn't make sense as a standalone piece. Neither would the cello part. But together, they create something coherent that none of them could create alone.

That's what happened with PLC 4.

We each brought our disciplinary lens. We each saw different parts of the system. And by holding all these perspectives in relationship, we saw the system itself, not as a collection of separate problems, but as an integrated whole.

What This Requires

Working this way requires:

• Intellectual humility – Being willing to let someone else's observation reshape how you see the data

• Curiosity over certainty – Asking "what are you seeing that I'm missing?" instead of "here's what I think"

• Patience with ambiguity – Tolerating the discomfort of "we don't all agree" for long enough to see what that disagreement reveals

• Genuine respect – Treating other people's expertise as expertise, not as something to be subordinated to your framework

These aren't usually tested in professional settings. But they're essential for anyone doing complex collaborative work.

Part 7: What I'm Taking Forward

The Shift in How I Understand My Role

Before PLC 4, I saw development work as: "I have expertise in X. I apply it to problem Y."

Now I see it differently: "I bring a particular lens. In collaboration, that lens helps illuminate parts of the system that other lenses might miss. And other lenses illuminate parts I couldn't see alone."

This is a smaller, more humble role than I might have imagined. But it's also more grounded in reality. Most development problems are too complex for any single lens to solve.

The work is learning to work in teams where:

• Different expertise is genuinely valued (not just tolerated)

• Disagreement is seen as information, not failure

• Coherence emerges from respectful engagement across difference

• The goal isn't agreement but systemic understanding

What I'm Curious About Now

After 12 days in Pali, I'm asking different questions:

For myself: How do I continue developing my own expertise while also becoming better at cross-disciplinary collaboration? How do I know when to go deep in my field vs. when to step into collaborative spaces?

For the development sector: Why do we structure organizations to reward individual expertise but not collaborative intelligence? How could funding and evaluation frameworks change to reward the synthesis work?

For my peers: Are any of you grappling with this tension between disciplinary depth and systemic breadth? How are you navigating it?

Part 8: The Question Lingering After We Left Pali

What Happens Now?

We have a report. We have insights. We have stories and data and systems maps and recommendations.

But here's the honest question that keeps me up: So what?

How do these insights actually translate into change in Pali? How do the stories we collected become action? How do the reinforcing loops we mapped get interrupted?

I don't have answers yet. But I know this: The 12 days weren't just about learning about Pali. They were about learning how to learn in the presence of complexity, with people who see differently than I do, while maintaining enough humility to let that difference reshape my thinking.

That's a skill I'll be using long after the Pali report is published.

Conclusion: What Collaborative Learning Looks Like from the Inside

PLC 4 was messy. It was emotionally demanding. It was intellectually challenging. It was also one of the most powerful learning experiences of my professional journey so far.

Not because I "got" all the answers about Pali. But because I learned what it feels like to think rigorously in the presence of different rigor. To hold data while honoring stories. To see systems while respecting disciplines. To work toward coherence without erasing complexity.

If you're an emerging professional in development, I'd encourage you to seek out these experiences: Spend 12 days with a diverse team, asking hard questions about a complex system.

You won't solve the system. But you'll learn something more valuable: how to think about systems with people who think differently than you do.

That's the work. And it's increasingly what the development sector needs.

Keywords for This Edition

Collaborative learning, team-based fieldwork, systems thinking, development research, interdisciplinary teams, emerging professionals, complex problem-solving, community engagement, development management, qualitative research, Pali fieldwork, ISDM learning, collective intelligence, systems mapping, professional development

Connect & Engage

Share Your Experience: Have you done collaborative fieldwork? What surprised you about working in a diverse team?

Read the Full RI Report: Understanding Development in Pali District (by PLC 4 Team)

Curious About Systems Thinking: What questions do you have about how different disciplines see the same problem?

Meenakshi Sundareswaran Ravichandran (Nami)
Development Management | Building Global South NGO Networks | EdTech + AI for Social Impact | ISDM Cohort 9
India

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