Programming in highly volatile environments — the challenge of continuous sensemaking
By Elias Mouawad, Lilian Abou Zeki, Vrouyr Joubanian, Joanna Nassar, Marina LoGiudice, Lea Kai (UNDP Lebanon) and Søren Vester Haldrup (UNDP Innovation)
The UNDP has been working in Lebanon since 1960. We work alongside the government and the Lebanese people, supporting their efforts to achieve sustainable and equitable development.
However, the October 2019 protests in Lebanon and subsequent crises have prompted us to reflect critically on whether we are sufficiently equipped to understand and navigate the fast-changing fragile context that we operate in and are part of and to tackle the systemic challenges that Lebanon faces. As protests were spreading across the country and among different population groups, it became clear to us that we needed to better understand and address the needs and aspirations of people and that our business-as-usual way of operating was insufficient for doing this.
Join the Conversation — making sense of our context
The crisis made us realize that we need to rethink how we learn about and make sense of the complex context that we are part of, and to find new ways of understanding the lived experiences of the Lebanese people. This presented an opportunity for the Accelerator Lab in Lebanon, launched mid-2019.
The AccLab, together with a core team began to design and roll out a new way for UNDP as an office to collectively understand the complex world around us. We named this “Join the Conversation”.
The “Join the Conversation” approach taps into our collective intelligence and sensemaking and acknowledges the lived experiences of a broad range of UNDP Lebanon staff (we are also part of “the system”). This approach — which demands more of our time for continuous dialogue and reflection — stands in stark contrast with how we often default to learn about the outside world — by hiring consultants to engage, analyze and learn for us. Join the conversation then is best thought of as an organizational platform for ongoing sensemaking, carving out a dedicated space for staff to reflect on what is happening in the world outside and building a joint understanding of what this might mean for our work.
We rolled out the first “Join the Conversation” series among UNDP staff in the wake of the October protests (December — January 2019). The series had three parts. The first session (“sensing where we are”) was aimed at gathering insights (data) and having a collective conversation and reflection in order to identify gaps and surface non-obvious patterns and new narratives in the Lebanese context. The second session (“sensing what this means for UNDP”) sought to deliver a consolidated analysis of the context (from session 1) and UNDP’s relational position to key issues. The third session (“align and diverge: identify new avenues”) was forward looking and focused on identifying the role that UNDP could play in the changing Lebanese context. As the process developed, we engaged external expertise on fragility to tap into global lessons learnt and to identify highlights from the sensemaking process to inform next steps.
The series was presented as a dedicated safe space for colleagues to reflect and converse on the circumstances that we suddenly faced. The approach was designed to break down the thematic, professional and geographical silos that we usually work in and to enable free flows of information and experiences. It did this by providing a platform for bringing people together as well as a structured approach for facilitating a dialogue. In the first iteration of “Join the Conversation” we brought together a diverse group of 40 colleagues. Our hope was that this group of participants would champion the conversation within their specific organizational corners and help us extend the platform to partners and others on the ground.
Dialogues balanced diversity and homogeneity. Knowing that organizational hierarchies and questions of “seniority” can sometimes hamper free dialogue, we structured engagement within groups that were professionally heterogeneous (different areas of expertise, projects, or locations), but homogeneous in terms of seniority (horizontally aligned groups, for instance with senior-managers in one group).
The “Join the Conversation” series was intentionally designed to promote alternative and diverging perspectives and to avoid groupthink and confirmation bias. We did this by drawing in a variety of data (beyond quantitative indicators) allowing for lived experiences and other qualitative insights about the context. For example, we sourced qualitative data from emerging manifestos, crowdsourced perceptions data (e.g., people’s priority issues and concerns), and undertook social media analysis. We also invested heavily in preparing and closely facilitating dialogues to ensure they produced useful and actionable insights but doing so without pre-defining the content of these insights. Similarly, we used tools for “persona development”, which allowed us to take off our UNDP lens and look at the context through the eyes of impacted citizens and residents.
Iterating our approach: enter COVID 19 and the August 4th Beirut explosion
The catastrophic August 4th blast at the Port of Beirut was a severe shock to all UNDP staff in Lebanon. Following the explosion, colleagues were aghast and, again, questioned how we can better engage and collaborate with government, civil society and private sector to create positive transformational change. In the days after the blast, some colleagues exclaimed that “we don’t feel okay by continuing to do business as usual”.
It was clear that the blast reflected underlying systemic challenges. In this context, we turned to “Join the Conversation”.
On a practical level, we moved the dialogue onto Zoom, given the COVID19 situation in the country. However, we quickly realized (as many of you have) that Zoom fatigue is a real thing. Having people participate in a virtual sensemaking space for long period at a time is often not useful. We therefore planned for shorter sessions, but supplemented these with other online tools such as WhatsApp to continue sensemaking journeys. We sought to integrate the “Join the Conversation” series as smoothly as possible with colleagues’ daily tasks, for instance, by sending out prompts to participants at a particular time each day while allowing flexibility in response times.
Moving to a virtual sensemaking platform also required us to develop new technical capacities among staff. At times, we had to “digitize” people, funneling them into a brave new world of WhatsApp and Zoom, and designing clear and concise online prompts and share these at the right time a day to ensure continued engagement. We were cautious of not going overboard on the virtual platforms so we intentionally stuck with what people already knew and avoided new collaboration tools such as Slack, Mural or Miro (although we and other UNDP colleagues have found these very useful in other initiatives).
Moving forward — Join the Conversation as a way of working in a fragile context
“Join the Conversation” has evolved from a one-off experiment into a process and platform rather than a product. We use it as a way of continual learning about the context and complex systems we operate in and to generate ideas for how to effect positive change.
This is not the end of the road. “Join the Conversation” is an ongoing process that is owned and led by UNDP’s Lebanon country office, and we look forward to continuing to leverage this platform to jointly experiment and engage on new issues. We also work to support different teams to gradually integrate these ways of working into their practices when designing and implementing projects. We believe that by doing so we will trigger a change in individuals, teams, and organizations. A change that will enable a larger and deeper impact on the people and communities we serve.
