Reflections on applying CHÔRA’s Portfolio Design Process
Learnings and effects — 1 year after the design of a city transformation portfolio for the city of Stepanavan, Armenia
In 2021, CHÔRA collaborated with the UNDP in Armenia, the UNDP Regional Bureau for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Agirre Lehendakaria Center to support the design of a Portfolio of Urban Transformation Options in the Armenian city of Stepanavan.
The Portfolio Design effort was carried out as part of the UNDP’s City Experiment Fund (CEF) initiative, which is a multi-year structure set up to respond to the need for innovative approaches to urban policy-making that take into account the multi-dimensionality of development programs and, therefore, the growing complexity of social, economic, and environmental issues that cities face when planning for future pathways. The second cohort of CEF aimed to serve as a learning and experimentation vehicle to test the application of Portfolios of Options as a new policy and program design approach in four cities, of which Stepanavan was one.
The project deployed the Agorà City Portfolio Stencil framework, a portfolio design tool developed for city systems by CHÔRA Foundation and the UNDP Regional Bureau for Eastern Europe and Central Asia predicated on the Portfolio approach articulated in our Green Paper on the Future of Development. The intent of the project was to design and leverage a Portfolio of Urban Transformation Options that multiplied possibilities for the city to develop its well-being by increasing its urban vibrancy.
It has been almost a year since the project ended, and we were keen to learn about the effects of Stepanavan’s new Portfolio and reflect on the overall process of Portfolio Design. We interviewed our counterpart, Nelli Minasyan, the Project Manager of CEF Stepanavan from UNDP in Armenia, and asked her about her reflections and key take-aways from this process. Her key insights are captured below.
Reflections on the process
For the UNDP in Armenia team working on Stepanavan’s urban transformation Portfolio, there were three aspects of the design process in particular that stood out:
Community Listening — The Community Listening process driven by our colleagues in the Agirre Center helped the UNDP team gain a richer understanding of the city’s context. Through iterative rounds of interviews, the team could access information about the various issues and dynamics in the city and understand better the existing state of the urban system as is. Another highly valued aspect of the community listening process was the engagement with stakeholders: through this process, the UNDP team connected with local stakeholders that they would later work with for the city’s development in subsequent stages of the project. This type of qualitative research through informal interviews and open-end questions encouraged stakeholders from public, private and civil sectors to share their hopes, dreams, and personal histories connected to Stepanavan. For example, while the team knew about the absence of work opportunities, through this phase, they came to understand that lack of personal development opportunities as well as lack of entertainment and leisure time opportunities were crucial factors resulting in the young people leaving the city.
Portfolio Intent — A pivotal moment in the project was the Portfolio Object and Intent articulation phase that CHÔRA led. After the Community Listening process, the team did have a lot of information at hand about issues, needs, and desires of stakeholders in Stepanavan; however, they still needed a way to use this information as a means of focusing their energy and harnessing opportunities through their Portfolio of Options.
Intent articulation, the first step in CHÔRA’s System Transformation Framework, helped the team identify what system effects they would like to contribute through their Portfolio. Through a series of facilitated workshops, the team weaved threads between the bulk of information collected from the listening process, synthesised connections and insights, and articulated the direction of their future Portfolio. This process helped create a shared understanding of where the team would focus their energy, and how each of the elements are interconnected under a new strategic focus and narrative. This intent-setting phase is similar to the “reframing approach” mentioned in other blog posts by our colleagues at the UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit.
Before the Intent-setting step in the Portfolio design process, the previous focus of the new Portfolio was the establishment of a “digital talent nest”, whereby a potential solution to bolster the city’s economic development amidst the COVID-19 pandemic would be to attract digital nomads to the city. Through a series of interactive workshops, CHÔRA helped the UNDP team explore the dynamics of the Problem Space that they intended to address. For Nelli, the exploratory questions that drove this phase of the Portfolio Design process were key to both understanding local sociocultural dynamics and perspectives as well as testing underlying assumptions. By making sense of existing information, asking explorative questions and trying to understand the issues at hand in a relational and systemic manner, the team came to understand that problems such as lack of entertainment for young people, lack of job opportunities, and depopulation in Stepanavan were interconnected and needed to be solved relationally for the city to revitalise itself.
This led to the reimagining of the Portfolio’s focus towards urban vibrancy, instead of just attracting digital talent. For Stepanavan, urban vibrancy is about the richness, diversity and density of relationships and exchanges within the city, as well as of the city with the outside world. A vibrant Stepanavan is an active, energetic and efficient urban space where human interactions occur in various and compact forms with an embracing mindset. A city’s vibrancy in turn attracts people, resources, and opportunities and enables the wellbeing of the city. One of the Options activated for this Portfolio captures Stepanavan’s vision for vibrancy here.
Portfolio Positions — Another pivotal moment in the portfolio design process was the development of Portfolio Positions, which helped the team articulate where and why, given the Intent of the Portfolio, they sought to engage with the system. Facilitated by CHÔRA, the team used the Agorà City Canvas as a visual mapping tool to help the team anchor and visualise information on the key needs, experiences and resources of transformation in Stepanavan. This process helped to mentally anchor key elements of information and in turn assisted the team in visualising and ideating potential solutions.
As part of developing the Portfolio Positions, the team also identified key presences in the city and distilled these into archetypes — symbolic representation of a presence in a system that leverages available information to “play out” need, resources, behaviours and interactions. For Nelli and her colleagues, these archetypes provided a creative way to better understand how different presences interact in and with the city. This in turn helped the team identify strategic intervention points that would provide the team with both learnings and systemic change opportunities by leveraging existing stakeholders, resources and capabilities in the city.
Emerging Effects
As a result of the designed Seed Portfolio, five Options were designed and activated. Seed Options help test assumptions about a given dynamic of transformation in the city and they are a means of quickly providing learnings. You can find more information on the Portfolio Options in a previously published blog post by our UNDP in Armenia colleagues here.
Some of the Options activated by the team in Stepanavan have attracted further attention and funding by stakeholders, developing trajectories of their own and engendering other projects in this space. Innovation community members Ruben and Arevik, for example, started by implementing a Seed Option with a small budget focused on raising awareness and providing informal education to develop future-proof skills across the city’s young members. Building on this Seed Option, Ruben and Arevik are now continuing multiple projects related to youth education. This includes a digital animation skills course, a new library in construction that serves as a learning hub with dedicated workshops and speakers, and a social media network for expats who want to live and work from Stepanavan.
Another significant outcome of this Portfolio Design process is that the Portfolio Intent and Positions are now being used by the Municipality of Stepanavan as key directionalities informing their new 5-year Strategic Plan. Every Position has become a strategic area of work, which helps the municipality and stakeholders manage their work as well as attract funding and attention.
The process has also contributed to the development of Portfolio Dynamic Management and design capabilities of the UNDP in Armenia participants themselves. According to Nelli, the Portfolio approach pushed her as a Project Manager to think differently about what projects are and how they can be managed. It encouraged her and the team to be more curious about the problems they are trying to help address and to learn more about flexible, agile, dynamic ways of doing research, engaging stakeholders, creating strategic arguments and managing them.
Portfolio Design as a practice
The journey of our UNDP colleagues in Stepanavan shows that the application of the Portfolio Design approach enables teams to holistically address the challenges in urban transformation. It has also enabled the team to attract collaborators and resources, as well as to direct these resources strategically in efforts to increase the vibrancy of the city. Moreover, the process of articulating Positions has been adapted by the municipality as a way of providing strategic directionality to their city development plan.
Moving forward, CHÔRA is keen to apply Portfolio Design as a practice to help organisations use their resources strategically in addressing other systemic challenges. As outlined in our Green Paper, we believe that the thoughtful design of a coherent and cohesive Portfolio of Options that serve as learning, sensemaking and problem-solving mechanisms will provide organisations with ample possibilities to effect positive systemic change. We are excited to explore new areas of interest as we expand our practice, and we welcome new ideas for collaboration.
