Pivoting to strategic innovation: 3 things we learned along the way
By Milica Begovic & Giulio Quaggiotto
A couple of years ago, we embarked on a shift in our innovation approach, driven by a number of considerations (and a blessing from the Danish Government who has invested in this journey from its beginning):
We were still pursuing largely incremental innovations, working within existing paradigms, rather than trying to work with our partners to challenge and transform the logic that got us in the current situation of compounded crises in the first place.
We felt we were losing relevance due to the projectised logic of our work, with its focus on linear, compartmentalised solutions and delivery: a poor fit with the complex, systemic nature of the challenges we are facing that call for constant adaptation and accelerated learning.
We were uncomfortable with a dominant paradigm of innovation that looks for unicorns, single point solutions and industrial “scale” — a model that, in our experience, is an ill fit with social challenges and tends to avoid questions of directionality (innovation for whom?) and unintended consequences.
We felt increasingly uncomfortable with these limitations and decided, not without trepidation, to try to pursue an approach that would help us see the bigger picture, work with potential leverage points across existing silos, and orchestrate connections between interventions that would reinforce each other over time and across geographies.. An approach that would prioritise social/collective learning instead of reporting for the sake of accountability. An approach that would aim not only to work within existing systems, but explore their evolutionary potential to collectively reimagine and seek alternative options for development. Inspired by Climate-KIC, we designed a vehicle, the Deep Demonstrations, to test this approach on the ground with around 20 country offices to date.
UNDP’s new Strategic Plan also embraced this direction of travel, with its call to raise our ambition to tackle structural transformations, being “hyperlocal and global” and shift from projects to portfolio. There is a credibility question at stake here too: how can we ask government counterparts to “go beyond silos” and single point solutions, without having done so ourselves?
We were comforted by the fact that many other organisations are on a similar journey, frustrated by the speed of progress in tackling what is an increasingly planetary crisis and willing to “call the bluff” on the absurdity of reducing, e.g. the fight against climate change to a logframe or a race to pick the winning technology that would scale as if by my magic.
Transformation is a long term game (a message, we appreciate, that is not very popular). In many ways, we just started. Below are 3 key takeaways from our journey so far. If your organisation is asking itself similar questions, we would be keen to compare notes.
1. Where to start? Building islands of coherence
Initially, we made the mistake of projecting the shift “from projects to portfolio” as a matter of adopting new tools and/or procedures. What we learned is that ultimately this is a question of organisational change and mindset shift. More specifically: how can we build the organisational will and capacity to question the coherence of our interventions, elevate our ambition and signal the intent to seek new paradigms (rather than aiming for incremental change in the existing ones) and bring our partners along on the journey?
“We can make more short-term decisions and take limited stands by funding single-issue projects. Or we can invest together in shifting the systems that underpin development”
UNDP Administrator, UNDP Executive Board, June 2022
Once framed as a question of organisational renewal capability, the focus shifted from tools to creating the conditions for the will to change to emerge. We worked with Chora Foundation to develop a structured journey that helps our country offices collectively craft a “north star” that is transformative (rather than incremental), surfacing questions around our identity and role as a development player in a broader ecosystem of partners. The process induces collective reflection on our current portfolio of activities/projects at a country office: identify patterns and opportunities to connect them, so that they become more coherent (with our intent) and can accelerate the maximisation of assets across the portfolio. The joint reflection encourages a team to move from “the dance floor” of project implementation to “the balcony” where they can reflect on the shape, coherence and orientation of the overall portfolio. This is essentially a collective meaning making process, and for that reason this approach is referred to as “portfolio sensemaking”. Sensemaking is not a one-off, but an iterative, continuous processthat can be applied at different scales (country, region, global) to collectively build alignment to a transformative intent. At the latest count, we estimate that we ran around 100 instances of the protocol in the last couple of years.
Sensemaking takes project fragmentation and silos as the starting point, because this is what we have to work with in the present (as opposed to defining an ideal future state and working backwards from that). After all, this is the same starting point many of our government partners have to contend with.
Even if we did not fully realise it when we embarked on our journey, sensemaking journey allowed our senior management champions to generate “small islands of coherence” in their country offices (where the projectised logic started to be questioned and alternative ways of operating prototyped together with partners). They then harnessed their experiences to advocate for broader systemic changes within the organisation and build the case to develop a new business model for UNDP.
The difficulty of opening up such a conversation in the context of an organisation where professional identity is often associated with individual projects, where partners often share and reinforce the same siloed structure, and where many donors still adhere to logrames and linear planning cannot be underestimated. As this article persuasively argues, projects are a “genre” that progressively narrowed development organisations scope and ability to imagine solutions that are commensurate to the nature of the challenges faced by the planet. Opening up the pandora box of “going beyond projects” can be both frightening and liberating (like “stepping into the washing machine in the middle of a spin cycle”, an image colleagues often returned to in our journey).
2. Deep rewiring — operating on the “horizontals” as well as the “verticals”
“This may sound simple, but transformational change requires true transformational intent. Real, hold on to your hats, reconfigurations of service offerings and entire business models, leaning into stranded assets and departments, holding difficult conversations with shareholders and losing some along the way..”
Kate Wolfenden
When we started, our entry point for the Deep Demonstrations work was on the programmatic side (our “verticals”, e.g. future of work, border communities, urban transformation, etc.).
However, the feedback we got from country offices as well as governments and partners very quickly pointed us to a different (and complementary) direction of travel. The message emanating from our “islands of coherence” was clear: there’s no shift to portfolio without turning our attention to the “horizontals”: areas such as M&E, finance, auditing, human resources, etc. It is here that the legacy of a paradigm based on linear planning and predictability are often to be found, and we need to tend to the inconsistency between the ambition to engage with partners on transformations and the constraints of an outdated business model, a compliance culture that is ill suited for a word of uncertainty, a transactional view of partnerships, and so forth.
Ultimately, our original focus evolved from rethinking how we design programs to triggering questions around broader organizational renewal. What does the ‘back office’ systems & structures look like that enable tackling planetary scale problems at the local level, continually sensing emerging risks & opportunities, and dynamically evolving our collective understanding of, say, climate change or inequality dynamics by harnessing hyperlocal insights and expertise. As Sascha Haselmayer argued persuasively, “back office” functions like procurement can become a source of transformative public value, but this requires infusing them with a new logic.
When we started the process of rethinking areas such as monitoring and evaluation (through the M&E sandbox), financing (for the design of financial instruments that can support systemic investing), intellectual property (led by the Accelerator Labs) or auditing in times of complexity we found immediate resonance with a number of organisations that are keen to see the development sector embrace the challenge of deep recoding. This gives a different, broader frame to what some might consider our own internal ‘kitchen sink’. The next stage for us will be a structured journey to identify other areas where our “horizontals” can be reimagined to enable portfolio approaches and eventually draw the contour of a new business model, working closely with colleagues from human resources, auditors, IT, etc. This will be where we expect that the transformational intent will hit the hard reality of legacy and institutional constraints.
Luckily, a number of corporate investments are moving in the same direction: as part of our new Strategic Plan, UNDP is investing in exploring new financing models, accelerating organisational learning, building leadership capabilities, strengthening our digital capabilities, among others. Ultimately, we won’t be able to live our ambition to trigger transformative effects it we cannot leverage a horizontal infrastructure that allows us to continuously seek for connections across programmatic areas, generate actionable intelligence from globally distributed interventions, harness the power of digital and build the adaptive, agile muscle that is necessary to operate in complex, fast changing environment.
3. We are not stuck in traffic. We are traffic.
“If not every action or every vision for the future amounts to a project, then what else is there?… Why don’t we choose to de-projectify some social environments, for example, to ask what work or development might look like without perpetual projects?”
A. Graan
One thing we learned very quickly is that the answer to “why are we stuck in a projectised world” involves an entangled web of multiple factors. It required us to take a step back and embrace a systemic view of UNDP as a player enmeshed in multiple institutional dynamics. Focusing on a country program in isolation would be missing the point (as in the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant).
“Donors will never fund this”, or “our partners aren’t ready for this” is the pushback we often got internally. And, on the other hand, in some places donors and governments were telling us “UNDP is not set up to do this” or, “this is not what we typically expect from you”. This self-reinforcing feedback loop, whether grounded in truth or perception, is just a microcosm of the dynamics that hamper broader systemic change in the sector (including philanthropy), as in the famous cartoon that Echo Collins-Egan at Re!Institute recently reminded us of.
Imagine instead a world where rather than a relationship based on power imbalances, producing infrequent reports on discrete projects (with a strong bias towards success) and a single-minded focus on number crunching, donors and recipients commit to jointly learning and adapting as on ongoing process, and collectively managing the uncertainty arising from a portfolio of interventions designed for long-term transformation together with people with lived experience. In some respects, designed this way the process might evolve a different type of accountability that is grounded more in reality and joint sensemaking of what is happening versus what is projected in reports designed for compliance. This is ultimately a matter of trust and being willing to let go of power and the false sense of security provided by certainty artifacts such as logframes, theories of change and scoring cards to embrace the complexity and uncomfortable messiness of development work.
How can we work with our partners to move in this direction? To explore this, we partnered with the Center for Public Impact to run a number of experiments jointly with donors and governments and “bring the system in the room”, as it were. We will test whether it’s possible to collectively generate new dynamics that allow us to move beyond the negative feedback loop that diminishes our collective ambitions and keep us stuck in linear view of change. The ambition is to prototype a positive feedback loop that fosters collective learning and sets the basis for a different business model.
A question of identity
The journey towards strategic innovation has taken in an unexpected direction, and challenged us to question our identity as an innovation unit. We gradually transitioned from being “the rebels” working at the fringes to taking Pia Andrew’s challenge of being “the most helpful person in the room” (whether we succeeded with that is not for us to say!) and engaging with different core functions across the organisation (as well as external partners). This also holds fundamental implications for the role and capabilities that we as a team have and need to play, and a question of whether what has gotten us here is in fact sufficient to support others in the recoding of the organizational dark matter and imagining new business models..
Ultimately, of course the proof will be in the pudding: will our journey lead to better results on the ground? Will we be able to work with local ecosystems to harness dynamics that can trigger transformation effects, and yield insights into how better tackle planetary scale challenges? Will we be able to embrace the humility necessary to work with systems and drop the allure of quick fixes and single point solutions?
If your organisation is asking itself similar questions, we’d love to connect.
