Making the pursuit of system transformation tangible
A joint reflection between Simone Uriartt and Milica Begovic from the Strategic Innovation Unit; Daniela Lima from Angola CO; Alik Mikaelian from Egypt CO; Nadia Ben Ammar from Tunisia CO; and Alvaro Pena, Paula Mosera, and Francisco Pons from Uruguay CO.
UNDP Offices like Angola, Egypt, Tunisia and Uruguay are part of a more significant cohort of more than +40 offices that are taking a system approach to tackle pressing societal issues in their contexts. In these offices, we are testing a hunch that is turning portfolios into physical installations. More tangible, experiential manifestations of complex issues might trigger different types of conversations and engagement of partners. For example, we observed in the work of four country teams that making portfolios into interactive artefacts holds the promise of triggering a different organisational culture (where the professional identity links up to a higher-level outcome as opposed to a siloed project), generating new options to tackle complex challenges and support system-based reflection about the underlying dynamics that help the team target drivers as opposed to the symptoms of difficult policy issues.
A bit of context: the decision to embed a system way of working in the organisation is grounded on the fact that traditional approaches for development are not suitable to take on the complexity of today’s challenges and neither to deal with multiple crises and uncertainty that all nations face across the globe. In the same vein, taking a system perspective to address the world of work in Angola, sustainable tourism in Egypt or city based circular transition in Montevideo poses several challenges in contexts where fragmented projects and siloed interventions are ‘the way we do things around here.’ For instance, we need to dig deep to discover the dynamics taking place among the actors and make decisions on where in the system we want to go learn about these dynamics. In short, there are three questions to answer before designing interventions (the action itself).
- How do we understand ‘what is going on here’?
- How do we know where to position ourselves to learn about ongoing dynamics?
- How do we make decisions about our role in this space and actions we ought to take?
We turned to portfolios as things one can feel and touch inspired by generative toolkits¹, and concepts like mixing a system map with a physical landscape (h/t Sam Rye) and were keen to find different ways of facilitating conversations that would answer the above questions and consequently make a tiny, but nonetheless less important, contribution to embedding the portfolio approach in the organisational culture. We structure this piece in two parts. First, we outline some key learnings that emerged from this work, and then we describe each experiment in detail in case it sparks ideas and interest to connect.
Key Learnings
What promises do physical installations of portfolio tools and results hold?
1. Trigger a different organisational culture
Physical installations help build a shared understanding among people from different areas. For instance, in Uruguay it led to a conversation on how a project about gender relationships in the city unlocks learning that can help create a better working environment for mothers in the informal economy. In this way, colleagues’ professional identities linked up to the bigger question of generating new economic opportunities (as opposed to the objective of a single project).
2. ‘See’ under the hood unlocks creativity and new opportunities
Physical tools tend to create a different type of engagement with the problem if for no other reason than it allows participants to ‘step’ into a space that defines critical structural elements of the issue, they are working on. This tends to expose entry points and insights that might otherwise get buried in the pages of word documents. For example, in Angola we saw a need emerge around having a country-wide Future of Work observatory that would continually feed learnings to different constituents about how the world of work is changing.
3. Strengthen relationships with stakeholders
Having physical elements facilitate having multiple stakeholders express and visualise their role in a particular system and helps them better connect to others who work in the same space and see opportunities to join efforts in R&D. This shifts ‘convening’ from organising workshops and conferences (which of course is helpful in its own right) to generating a shared understanding of synergies and assets that a collective can more intentionally leverage toward a bigger goal. For instance, in Tunisia CO, the interactive session involving national actors from various sectors that support women enabled them to visualise the entire journey of women and children victims of gender-based violence, as opposed to only seeing the challenges limited by their organisation scope. The question for local health providers was no longer “how efficient is our internal structure in supporting victims of GBV?” but rather “How might we improve the user experience of women and facilitate their entire user journey, which may or may not start with our institution?”. This perspective shift has effectively put the problem in the centre and emphasised its systemic nature.
4. Spark curiosity internally and externally
Let’s face it — turning a portfolio into a series of physical artefacts is not something that is (still) mainstream. For this reason, we find that it tends to generate interest and curiosity, grabbing attention in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be possible (think of the last power point presentation you attended!). For instance, in Egypt CO, we observed the visitors were excited to contribute their ideas and thoughts to the mural. It also caught the attention of government counterparts, who later requested to work together to visualise and develop mechanisms to socialise their strategies and goals at their physical offices.
5. Take a different vantage point on complex issues
The experiments help people see things and ask questions that can quickly go (synergies, patterns, non-obvious insights). In Angola, it helped drive the conversations about what is in and out of the future of the work system. The crucial conversation that emerged is, for instance, “health” is not literally mentioned within the FoW portfolio. But then, to what extent can health-related initiatives also produce learnings about future work? In Uruguay, we used physical experiments to trigger the debate about the complexity of urban waste issues not only in the office but also with civil society, government, academia, the private sector, and community representatives.
Physical experiments in detail
What are some alternatives to represent portfolio tools and results?
The first experiment comes from Angola, where we focused on bringing to life the problem space tool — an effort to build a 3D version of a system that drives dynamics in the world of work, from resources and actors to the way they make decisions. For instance, in your household, having a meal involves the actors (children, parents, grandparents, guests,…), and mobilizing resources (kitchen utensils, ingredients, knowledge to prepare the meal and a decision about who will prepare and serve it and when. Manifested this way, the problem space allows us to identify dynamics that arise from an interaction.
Likewise, the team mapped the critical elements in the work system in Angola; for instance, there are natural, financial and knowledge resources and actors such as the private sector, education centers and networks & cooperatives. A position comes from the intersection of a marker from the actors axis and a marker from the resources axis. Defining a position is all about getting curious to learn about the dynamics of those two markers; to illustrate, one of their six portfolio positions is “agricultural value chains” in the intersection of natural (resources axis) and networks and cooperatives (actors). Therefore, the intention is to go where cooperatives adopt new agricultural value chain practices to enter into renewable energy production opportunities. Taking action in this position can teach what employment looks like, meaning it brings to people and uncovers local innovations.
Therefore, portfolios are made of multiple positions, and they are not always completely new to the Country Office’s current work. For this reason, the first physical experiment captures how current projects can feed learnings in the portfolio positions. Basically, we drew the axis on the floor identifying the positions in colorful cards (abstract the visual noise from the carpet); and then we asked colleagues that belong to different programmatic areas to place the current projects near the positions.
In Egypt CO we focused on showcasing the portfolio of interventions to the broader CO team.
As people enter the office, they are greeted by a mural that tells the story of the Egypt CO portfolio: how we are rethinking the tourism model. There is space and sticky notes inviting people to contribute their thoughts on the proposed interventions.
Portfolio interventions are a set of actions designed to respond to the problem positions (where we want to go to learn more about the dynamics of the tourism system). A set of interventions support the team in testing, learning, and generating policy recommendations on different levels of the system, going beyond known solutions. The way these interventions are tested and activated can vary. They can be starting points for new projects, they can be small iterations within existing projects, or they might be something an existing project is already doing. By making them visual and accessible to the CO team and other partners, we have the goal to start discussions and raise awareness/concerns on how the interventions can be implemented.
The third experiment comes from Tunisia CO. We focused on using the problem space tool to facilitate discussions with partners.
Using the Lego Serious Play facilitation method, we ran two workshops, the first involving UN agencies and the second inviting national partners, both around the issue of Gender-based Violence.
For the workshop with UN agencies and similar to the team in Angola, we used the problem space tool where the axis reflects the elements in the GBV system, prompting participants to map their initiatives onto the building elements of the system. Our goal was to understand how the UN agencies are collectively positioned to tackle GBV as a system and as a wicked problem. This exercise, also referred to as landscaping in the lego serious play method, enabled the group to understand where we are not present and the programmatic gaps in our collective actions to tackle gender-based violence.
Similarly, the other workshop involved national GBV actors from various sectors (security, health, justice, social affairs…), and was set for participants to build a representation of their role. The goal was to contribute to widening their viewpoints, seeing the multiple touch points with women and children beyond their organizational scope.
The last experiment comes from Uruguay CO. We aimed to physically represent the portfolio in an interactive way to share the interconnectedness of the system elements.
Here we are motivated to show the socio-environmental tensions to achieve Uruguay’s capital city transformation into a greener city. With the frame in mind from seeing waste as a problem to waste as a resource.
To represent the complexity of a system and the need for a portfolio approach, we built a wooden board to help with visual representation and people’s engagement. The wooden board allows you to play, explore, have fun, and visualise complex systems. The coloured pieces on the wooden board symbolise the different actors, entities, and elements of the Montevideo waste system (differentiated by colours depending on their type). Each piece is interconnected by a thread (representing the complex skein of the system) according to the flow of relationships. For example, 1) informal trucks are related to 2) shops & stores where they collect their waste, some of them are dumped in 3) illegal trash sites that affect the 4) bodies of water, and others end up in the 5) municipal’s final disposal site, 6) recycling plants, or 7) deposits where in this case 8) intermediaries access to sell it in 9) local and foreign markets.
The board was created to be easily understood by a global audience that does not have a lived experience of the city context. Moreover, under each piece, a QR code was placed, giving more information about the intervention developed in the portfolio of interconnected actions that involves or affects each point of the system. Alternatively, people could interact with digital visualisation to discover the details of each intervention and the narrative from each they emerged.
What’s next?
All experiments at different levels were enablers or igniters for new crucial conversations, unlocking new opportunities or addressing tensions that persist due to the different views of people on what should be done to achieve a transformation.
We already have ideas for a second iteration; for instance, we use them in weekly meetings. If you have experimented as well or if you are working with system-infused methods and approaches. Let’s connect!
¹Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders & Pieter Jan Stappers (2014) Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning, CoDesign, 10:1, 5–14, DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2014.888183
