The journey from “yes, but…” towards “yes, and…” Insights from the 2 year- old innovation and integration cell in UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina

Marina Dimova, Integration and Innovation Cell Leader, UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Why did we embark on “hacking” ourselves

UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina helps the country address complex development challenges — such as climate change, inequalities, deepening social divides and insecurities — in a complex administrative and political setting. A team of some 200 development professionals, managing annually on average US$ 45 million of development financing entrusted to us by development partners, supports governments and socio-economic stakeholders to strengthen governance systems and public services, recover from disaster shocks, combat climate change, stimulate sustainable economic growth, sustain peace, and enhance social cohesion.

In that setting, the Integration and Innovation Cell was born in 2021 as an organizational response to the call of the UNDP Strategic Plan to develop integrated solutions, to the challenge of a growing portfolio under the new country programme 2021–2025 and the imperative of embedding innovation and acceleration into all streams of work in our programme. When we are working on projects as opposed to issues, it is difficult to join up learning, insights, and resources across different interventions into a more coherent story of how change can happen, or be able to adapt or reframe our approach in step with the constantly changing reality.

Who are we, what is our mission and main work streams?

The Integration and Innovation Cell is a team of 5 enthusiastic development professionals, which was created through an internal management decision, by bringing together the existing functions of innovation (the Accelerator Lab), programme strategy and monitoring and evaluation. The Cell’s intent is:

· Coherence: Build programmatic coherence within UNDP by continually extracting insights from across different thematic areas, cultivating development blueprints for change at scale and applying “big picture” thinking into the implementation of on-going, or the design of new interventions, to maximise development results. This is one of the most significant results of this unit — its ability to continually synthesize emerging patterns & drive decision making at a faster clock speed in line with the speed with which changes are happening in our context.

· Different way of working: Nurture space and facilitate cross-thematic collaboration to overcome project or programmatic boundaries, unlock siloed knowledge and turn it into a rapid intelligence generation capability, enaction synergies that help accelerate results on the ground.

· Renewing our development approach: Enhance UNDP team’s capability to anticipate and adapt to new or emerging trends, embrace experimental ways of working, connect to partners who embrace systemic approaches and aim for transformative vs. incremental change and shift from a “project delivery” mindset to a culture where dynamically learning is the main “development currency” for a renewed UNDP strategic offer capable of instigating systems transformation.

The Cell team embarked on this journey with the destination in mind, yet — a winding road ahead without the travel itinerary and guide. The main type of workstreams dynamically evolved into a home-grown innovation and integration service offering:

The emerging changes we start to notice (which would have otherwise not happened without the cell team)

Reflecting on the experiences, lessons and achievements generated during our work in the past months, the Cell team has captured several emerging changes within UNDP team in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These are the 3 main shifts we started to observe; not yet “business unusual” across the board, but strong signals of positive change.

shift 1: from a siloed doing-business (“1+1=1”), to a more collaborative, horizontal and issue-based interaction that started to create new added value (“1+1≥3”)

Here are some of the main results and realisations that speak to this change:

Connect programme dots and maximise existing resources: at present, UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina implements approximately 40 projects spread across 4 programmatic pillars. While the UNDP team started to test a more strategic and portfolio-level approach to the design of new interventions, the Cell team identified many untapped opportunities to combine efforts, resources, and networks among on-going UNDP interventions for maximised results, without additional financing needed. In late 2022, the Cell team created a simple digital tool (the Programme Coherence Map) that helped identify internal cross-project linkages and gradually turned them into concrete actions. For example, the TvojCO2 digital carbon offsetting marketplace developed by the innovation team was embraced by all projects that organise national forums as a standard event offsetting tool, thus contributing to country-wise awareness raising on sustainable lifestyles and reducing the carbon footprint of UNDP work. The existing monthly programme and project leadership group conversations started to change from “reporting” on project activities and delivery figures, towards whole-of-programme conversations and synergies, ideas flow, and discussions on common challenges, opportunities and partnerships beyond project “boxes”. Gradually, the Cell team, empowered by the UNDP Resident Representative, started to “horizontalize” UNDP team by catalysing issue-based groupings of colleagues and coalescing the rich in-house expertise around a common challenge — such as digital services, solid waste management, circular economy, localising the SDGs. Such process started to gradually blur the thematic and project borders within the team, turning knowledge and ideas into a more significant whole.

Consolidate UNDP knowledge and data resources: in May 2022, the Cell team started to consolidate existing UNDP knowledge and data assets in a shared online single repository — the Knowledge and Data Hub, meant to compile assessments, research, datasets, concepts, etc. generated by UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina under “one roof” and make them easily accessible by the entire team, thus enabling their further use for analytical, policy, programme delivery or new programming efforts and making sure that valuable knowledge assets we generate are not “locked in project drawers”.

Dynamic portfolio management & shaping demand: Turn intelligence and research into a powerful tool for new types of development conversations with partners — tapping into existing data resources and supporting strategic policy research, the Cell team started to play a more pro-active role in facilitating collaborative efforts in preparing the analytical ground for new programming, increasingly seeding the perspective and toolkit of system-level development thinking among stakeholders and UNDP team. The Cell supported a new generation of development dialogues with donors in Bosnia and Herzegovina — e.g., in the areas of local governance, circular economy, etc., entirely grounded on the need to understand and intervene in the policy area in question from a systemic perspective, testing a new analytical toolkit and engaging in discussion with donors which is focused on the impact and not simply on the “next project phase”.

shift two: tilting from “yes, but…” towards “yes, and…” attitude

Soon after our team started to make deliberate efforts to nudge new ways of doing things, inspire new learning and ideas, the Cell team felt the “Yes, but” wall. Often the attitude among colleagues was as if the Cell work is just another “buzz” intent, aiming to sprinkle innovative ideas here and there. There were several critical ingredients that helped the Cell become a pivot point where old approaches convert into new thinking and capabilities:

· Trust: gaining colleagues’ trust and keeping a positive mindset despite severe development challenges was very important and helped us build, at first, a small group of like-minded colleagues who are curious to test new ways of working and thinking, which then started to grow into a wider network of UNDP teams.

· Unlearning: however central learning was for this journey, the Cell team realised that unlearning is equally important. By unlearning some of the unhealthy habits — such as the siloed way of work, thinking in logframes as the only development approach, or the notion that repeating more of what we do is equal to scaling, etc. — the team gained new perspectives and knowledge that started to enrich our development thinking as a team.

· Safe haven: the Cell team enabled a safe space for development work where colleagues could engage in a more creative, re-imagining, even moonshot-like testing of new ideas and development approaches. For the first time, the team had a safe haven where UNDP team had the permission to fail, while making sure to “fail forward” and extract valuable lessons, admit that we do not know all the answers and feel comfortable with it.

shift three: from “innovation as a perk” to organic organisational infrastructure to support the transition from projects to portfolios

Enhanced development offer and pipeline aiming at change at scale: the Cell team started to nurture the habit of collaborative design of new interventions and cross-sectoral thinking. As a rule, no new project or concept is shared with development partners and donors without at least first being consulted with all programme leaders and the Cell team, to ensure strategic alignment of ad-hoc opportunities into a more meaningful development offer. For example, connecting inter-sectoral knowledge in-house, the Cell team facilitated the design of high-quality thematic programmatic frameworks (e.g. — in the area of cybersecurity, sustainable tourism) that not only helped position UNDP as a thought leader in these areas, but also mobilised engagement and investments from stakeholders towards a high-level common agenda.

Portfolio stewardship: sitting at the heart of multiple interactions within the UNDP Country Office, the Cell team was well-positioned and empowered to steward the development of the new circular economy portfolio as a renewed development offer that seeks to re-orient the country’s economy and behaviours of citizens towards circularity. The Cell team emerged as vital organisational infrastructure with nested capability that can curate and support the transition from projects to portfolios in UNDP, while testing new models and solutions to improve the corporate enabling environment for such transition. All these helped improve the quality, relevance and coherence of UNDP development offer, while nurturing a healthy pipeline to catalyse financing for its implementation.

WHAT IS NEXT?

Change is a long-term journey. The efforts of the Cell team will continue and seek to expand capabilities and new development thinking within the UNDP team in Bosnia and Herzegovina, towards what we believe “NextGenUNDP” implies.