Mustering organizational will to transform: How a portfolio approach leads to changes in internal structures and culture & relationships with partners
by UNDP Ghana CO Future of Work Portfolio team with the leadership of Sukhrob Khoshmukhamedov, Jennifer Asuako & Huzaif Musah
Ghana is dealing with a crisis of unemployment and underemployment notwithstanding recent significant economic progress. As a result, since 2018 the Government of Ghana has prioritized an “Agenda for Jobs” in order to find a long-term solution to this issue. In 2020, we embarked on a Deep Demonstration to develop a new value proposition for the Government and partners around the future of work to contribute to this agenda. The Deep Demonstrations seeks to show an alternative approach to shaping development interventions by rejecting the temptation to look for quick fixes and being able to maintain the political space necessary to investigate and address the root causes of complex development challenges.
As part of the process, we designed a portfolio of multiple options as vessels that accommodate ambiguity and uncertainty and generate learning around 4 key areas: value of work, empowering local economies, inclusive workspaces, and in/formal flipside. Through this work we realized that the value of work is at the heart of everything. The purpose of this area is to convey that work is about more than just compensation, but also has a role in ensuring social cohesion, a sense of dignity and security. We therefore need to start new debates that widen the current notions of value. It entails incorporating the traditional African viewpoints that regarded labor as having intrinsic value and human dignity. See here our previous blog post on how it all started.
Beyond influencing our understanding of the dynamics around work in Ghana, this process resulted in a series of ripple effects in the country office manifesting in changing structures within the office (setting up a portfolio team), evolving culture (where professional identities of colleagues connects to the bigger picture of the Future of Work (FoW) as opposed to their individual project) and shaping demand, where the CO leveraged new investment for the FoW intent.
Here are the three key lessons learned from the process to date:
1. Tackling incoherence with the portfolio view
The Deep Demonstration process of building capabilities for systems & portfolios allowed us to bring coherence to a number of projects that sit across our internal teams but individually contribute in one way or another to creating work opportunities & building conditions for more inclusive employment in Ghana. This fragmentation had made it difficult for us to extrapolate what is the value that the country office brings to partners on work and aggregate results across all the projects relating to work. The portfolio process and more specifically the Sensemaking protocol allowed us to establish interlinkages between our projects in pursuit of stronger coherence and impact and leverage a new strategic intent to not just bring meaning to the existing set of projects that we have but also to shape the future work more intentionally in line with that bigger picture.
2. Shifting culture and structures for portfolios
After re-thinking the future of work and seeking coherence in our existing set of assets, a new set of inquiries on the implications for our organizational structure and underlying business model emerged. Structured as we are, in a set of siloed program teams (which is a similar situation that public sector faces as well), it was difficult to ‘land’ a portfolio without defaulting to a projectized logic of work.
To address this, we set up a team, composed of colleagues across the formal office units that are best fit to contribute to the strategic intent on work but that for the purposes of our corporate systems was invisible (as the back end systems are built for individual projects not for portfolios).
In addition to be able to take a balcony view across the portfolio, we introduced a role of a portfolio curator that maintains the integrity of the portfolio intent for FoW and ensures that we keep an eye on it as a priority (as opposed to connecting professional identity of our staff to individual projects who tackle only a slice of an issue).
This enabled us to start the program coherently in alignment with our intent. But what we discovered was that our staff must be prepared to link their professional identities to something broader than a particular project. This has particular implications for the following insights about leadership.
3. Role of leadership in shaping demand
We discovered that underpinning the whole transition from projects to portfolios lies strong leadership. Apart from motivating and incentivizing staff to be part of the process, it is critical for nurturing a different relationship with donors & government (who are used to working in projects). Utilizing the portfolio task force and leadership support, we started to shape our new pipelines in alignment with the intent we had created on FoW.
So, in practice, the entire FoW team examines the pipelines and incoming requests in order to generate a comprehensive and cohesive offer that molds the request based on the portfolio approach. The strategy is to integrate the portfolio options into current and upcoming projects and activities rather than maintaining it as a separate portfolio.
One example of beginning to nurture a different type of a relationship was when a donor approached us with an ask to develop a project to improve human security in Ghana. The portfolio proposition allowed us to articulate a systemic understanding of the challenge as a function of high informality, discrimination in the workspace and reducing fiscal space of local authorities (the portfolio areas). So instead of giving a single project for the donor we invited them to invest in a portfolio whereby leveraging their investment with others we are better able to address a mix of underlying drivers of human insecurity.
We are only in the beginning of our journey to move from projects to portfolios but would like to continue the conversations with others on figuring out how to make this a sustainable practice.
