3 things that are enabling the UNDP’s shift to portfolios
By Millie Begovic, Head of the UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit
We seem to be in the middle of a phase shift with our innovation work. This was well summarized in a recent statement by a colleague from the Danish permanent mission to the UN speaking at the UNDP Executive Board in August:
“It’s important to move beyond the individual project approach, see and support the bigger picture as development is inherently complex and intermingled. Denmark will continue to support UNDP’s [and wider UN system’s] effort to make portfolio the default approach.’
Statement by Denmark at the UNDP Executive Board, Aug.2023
This blog post is a reflection on where we’ve come from and what got us here. The next post will feature a bit of a shameless announcement that has been several years in the making (stay tuned) and explore what might be coming next for us on the portfolio journey.
From a challenger to an incumbent — it takes 3 to tango
Three years ago, UNDP set up a Strategic Innovation Unit (SIU) supporting the Strategic Plan’s objective of moving beyond single point solutions toward creating the conditions for system transformation. It was clear that at least some of our partners wanted to engage with us on a longer term, systemic level for which the projectized logic represents a straitjacket.
Relative to the early stages of our innovation journey that focused on bringing the outside-in perspectives to challenge established norms, connecting to and working with ‘development mutants’ & fast prototyping to establish legitimacy, this new intent called for a different approach and, eventually, mandate. It was time to respond to our partners’ appetite for a new standard. We were no longer the challenger, but the incumbent.
This “inside-the-mothership” track recognized the degree to which fragmented, short-term projectized logic continues to inform much of the development sector. As an incumbent aiming to shift to a portfolio approach, we needed to generate political will inside the organization for change. But this was not enough.
We know that internal transformation was ultimately a journey that we would need to go through hand in hand with our government partners and donors. The answer to why the development sector is stuck in a linear world lies in an entangled web of multiple factors and a recognition that UNDP is but one player enmeshed in multiple institutional dynamics. Initially some of the pushback against this work came in the form of ‘donors would never fund this,’ or ‘our partners won’t be interested in this type of work, they want quick solutions.’ At other times, some partners would say that ‘development sector is simply not set up to do this type of work.’ In both contexts, the self reinforcing loops, be they truth or perceptions, are a small taste of the dynamics that hamper the broader, sector based change.
As ‘incumbents,’ our intent was to explore what a world not based on power imbalances and infrequent reports (with a strong bias toward success) but instead a shared accountability grounded more in reality and joint sensemaking of what is happening might look like. A world where partners might be willing to forgo a (false) sense of security built on ‘certainty’ artifacts such as log frames and theories of change and instead embrace the uncomfortable messiness of development work and a different type of accountability that emerges as a result of that messiness.
This pointed us to spaces that previously, as challengers, we hadn’t worked in & where different units took on the leadership role in instigating change- from legal & HR to evaluation and other. more horizontal teams. It signaled the need to attend not only to the ‘what’ of development (policy responses to development issues) but also to the nuts and bolts of the ‘how’ we do development. This meant working to rethink M&E frameworks that allow for collective accountability, adaptation & risk sharing (M&E Sandbox,) and developing finance instruments that trigger transformation (System finance facility) to building capabilities for understanding systems and working with emergence (portfolio competency framework) and rethinking structures and ways of working (what does an office composition look like in the field that is fit for more horizontal, adaptive ways of working).
So what follows is a reflection on the journey we’ve been on & a few key insights that help structure our thinking about where we need to go next.
But first, why we decided to pivot
Few people nowadays will dispute the uncertainty complex — we live in a world of ‘not knowing’ where the past doesn’t provide a good map for what we need to do today. Nine out of 10 countries globally backtracked on the human development gains over the last decade, while in half the world’s countries economic growth increases poverty and carbon emissions. As Vaughn Tan reminds us that when we break down the concept of uncertainty, we find that we can’t say with any degree of certainty:
- What action we can take that might lead to a particular outcome (think about what exactly might lead to a decoupling of economic growth and emissions in one country?)
- What concrete outcomes are possible (think about how shutting economy down to prevent spread of diseases had inadvertently triggered mental health epidemic)
- How likely is an outcome given a particular set of actions (think about what might build trust in one over another country)
- How much value to place on one over another outcome (think about the tension in favoring policy choices that favor investments in physical infrastructure vs. social services to stimulate the economy).
A projectized understanding of how change happens — predictable, stable, linear- is at odds with each of these. So our assumption was that investing in system & portfolio approaches might offer some value in helping understand better and tackle complex policy issues whose dynamics ultimately are constantly shape shifting. But it also validated the focus on rewiring the ‘how’ of development and creating the space for experimentation in areas that are traditionally difficult to tackle (M&E, legal instruments) but where the legacies of fragmented ways of development are most stubbornly entrenched. In a sector where a professional identity is linked up to a single project ultimately this means evolving a culture that elevates this identity to a transformative mission — moving from a mouthset (adopting a language of change) to a mindset shift (where the language is embedded in new ways of working).
3 building blocks to transition to portfolios
To explore the new standard, we seeded a series of country based ‘Deep Demonstrations’ — where UNDP teams and their partners reoriented small scale experiments and quick fixes toward ambitions like circular transition & trust in post conflict places. As the initial set of demonstrators grew into a movement (with over 50 countries & 400 partners), and started to create ‘pockets of coherence,’ we used their insights to build the case that the new path that some of our partners wanted us to embark on was indeed feasible. While at many points it felt that we were crossing the river by feeling the stones, with hindsight, we can point to 3 building blocks that were instrumental to ensure we transitioned to the incumbent space:
- Building up and nurturing a network of practitioners — to trigger movement around the change, speed up learning, to provide the space for collective venting & to engineer serendipity. This worked both internally (spotlighting the first movers, comparing notes, translating the field movement into structural change) and externally (bringing in fresh perspectives & expertise, leveraging external politics for internal movement).
- Productizing not for the sake of products but for reducing barriers to entry — translating experience from the field into a set of ‘how to guides’ isn’t a shortcut to change or a substitute for a long-term effort that the transition requires, but it helped provide a bit more of a digestible google map for the general direction we want to move into and ways of getting there. From UNDP’s first Portfolio Primer and an online teaser about systems & portfolios to a 2.5 day corporate face to face engagement (Transforma — collaboration with the Talent Development Unit, Accelerator Labs & our team), products helped build shared understanding about the intent, decentralized uptake & appropriation from the field teams and partners. These get updated at the speed of learning that surfaces from the field — at least monthly incremental adaptations and biannual reviews.
- Institutional sandbox — a mandate to start evolving institutional architecture that accelerates new ways of working, from different ways of understanding change (M&E) and investing in development (systemic finance) to building a new suite of legal instruments that encodes system & portfolio ways of working within the organizational DNA.
Acting on the 3 building blocks simultaneously began generating shared understanding of the ultimate intent (bringing systems and portfolios to development and public sector) and surfacing the kind of fundamentals that need to be in place for this to happen (from new capabilities and ways of understanding impact and financing to different relationships with partners).
This in turn helped reinforce the momentum, grow political capital and distribute agency and confidence across the organization & increasingly with our partners about a new way of working. As a result we’re seeing more decentralized action in the field where team are instituting entirely new ways of doing R&D and growing alliances of diverse partners around strategic priorities — in Bosnia & Hercegovina and the Philippines around circular transitions, in Iraq around social contract, and Angola and Uzbekistan around work to name a few.
Our partners in the cities — from Montevideo and La Paz to Mykolaiv and Pasig — are instituting more dynamic and decentralized ways of building development strategies, investing in insights from different constituents in communities. And there is emergence of new institutional forms in the field that may be a better fit for working with complexity — where more traditional, waterfall-like organigrams are tweaked to allow for more horizontal ways of working.
What next?
In many respects, we’ve pivoted from having to create legitimacy for a particular form of innovation (a guerilla approach) to working on redefining new standards of work (our current incumbent position). Being in a whole new space, we’re learning what it means to be a more ambidextrous of an organization — balancing rapid live testing and experimentation with deep rewiring on entrenched power relationships and structures that hold existing systems stuck. At the same time, we’re cognizant that being a part of the problem ourselves there is a long road ahead. Hard wiring more systemic & adaptive ways of working both institutionally but also across the sector is a long term proposition that faces strong headwinds in many different shapes. This is what we’ll be digging into in our next post.
*Government of Denmark invests in UNDP’s Innovation Facility that through Deep Demonstrations on a country level supports various actors in the (eco) system to move beyond acting on single-issue projects to explore complex development challenges
