Learning, Adapting and Lean Impact — 3 reflections, 18 months in
Development, like every other sector on the planet is grappling with the pace of change and increasingly volatile and uncertain operating contexts. As the kinds of questions we’re asking become increasingly complex, with uncertain answers, our need to learn and adapt becomes crucial.
As part of LearnAdapt we’re exploring ways to work adaptively, working with and learning from DFID colleagues to overcome barriers and enhance a growing toolkit of methods — including some from private sector innovation. Lean Startup is one of the methods we’ve been working with and sharing in collaboration with Ann Mei Chang, whose book, Lean Impact is out now.
Borrowing from private sector practises results in a mixed bag of responses, from colleagues in DFID. We’ve heard things like…
- Yes, but Silicon Valley is so much faster than government.
- What would Jeff Bezos do if he was CEO of DFID?
- Yes, but the work we’re doing is far more complex
- Why is this work so full of annoying buzzwords?
Despite this range of responses — or perhaps because of them — the LearnAdapt team has spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the pitfalls, hype and potential merit of how methods from Silicon Valley might work in development.
To us the opportunity is as clear as it is inspiring: Imagine ideas to overcome barriers between us and the SDGs could achieve the same scale and velocity of scale as, say, mobile phones?
Far from advocating a wholesale appropriation, work like Ann Mei Chang’s Lean Impact adds to the classic Lean Startup method and adapts them for development by, for instance, adding key measures for impact along the way.
After 18 months of delivering Lean Impact training and coaching to DFID staff and implementing teams around the world, we have three major reflections:
1. Risk needs an urgent reframe
Our natural defaults and biases around risk are wonky — it’s just part and parcel of being irrational humans. Behavioural science has taught us we typically shy away from the new, fall madly in love with our own ideas and feel overly, inaccurately optimistic about how things are going to play out.
Against that heady backdrop and in the context of programming for development, where wicked problems are being tackled, new ways of working are often perceived as way too risky and admitting uncertainty feels like losing the ground underfoot. The result? Something similar to Einstein’s definition of lunacy: rolling out the same programme designs that assume predictability to tackle intractable issues.
In truth, pretending that a programme of work is predictable when it isn’t, is far riskier than adopting a methodology and process to account for those unpredictable outcomes.
TRY: an innovation carve-out. Set aside a proportion of your budget and time to experiment with new ways of tackling challenges. This carve-out can try new things and only weave them into the bigger programme once they’ve proven themselves to be strategically worthwhile.
2. The soft stuff is the hard stuff
Talk of ‘failing fast’, course correcting, improvising and flexibility may be lenient in tone, but these practises demand a culture of real accountability and rigour. A learning culture requires psychological safety, so the team isn’t just comfortable to share bad news and invalidated assumptions, but delights in uncovering this new wisdom. Cultivating this team culture takes time and mindful effort.
It takes more time, more decision making and a closer-knit team — across the donor and implementing team.
TRY: a long inception period (of around 6 months) works well to get teams thinking about goals, speaking the same language, testing early strategies or developing minimum viable products
TRY: a donor secondee into the programme builds empathy for one another’s needs and allows quick decisions to be made in the moment
And while it might sound totally obvious, coherence across programme, process and contract is a must. Make sure, for instance, that the progressive methodology you’re striving towards is mirrored in the incentives structure you’ve created. Demanding flexibility and adaptivity in the programme, but with a contract that has payment milestones set to immovable results not only won’t work in practise, it erodes trust and relationships.
TRY: payment by learning. On Frontier Technology Livestreaming payment is disbursed iteratively, in line with the validation or invalidation of critical assumptions.
3. Measure proxies and use them to inform, not just evaluate
Quick course corrections that help to adapt programmes are imperative for innovation, so make measuring what matters imperative. When it comes to measuring progress, be sure to measure what really matters: it’s easy to opt for big, impressive-sounding numbers that don’t give any indication of whether they’re a 10% or 10x improvement. Measuring adoption rates, increases in efficiency and user demand will do a much better job of telling us if our work is working.
Proxies, proxies, proxies: often impact measures are really long-term, leaving teams feeling like they have to wait until they’ve hit the five year mark to determine whether or not they’re on track. While it’s true that really long term measures can only be measured in, well, the longer term, we can and must measure proxy signals along the way to test our thinking.
You know that moment on a programme where you realise that something you’d imagined at the outset isn’t quite what you’d imagined? That’s the proxy measure. The indicators and signals that can be assessed from day one.
TRY: test your thinking with minimum viable products. Ask yourself: what can we do tomorrow (literally) that will help us learn as much as possible about our most critical assumptions?
Use this data to inform: beyond just evaluating what has come before, this data is used to inform what comes next
TRY: Sprint reports like the example below were designed for pilots on Frontier Technology Livestreaming. They ask four simple questions of implementing teams: what was supposed to happen? What did happen? Why was there a difference? How will that inform what you do next?
We’ll be sharing more reflections on Lean Impact, agility, adaptivity, learning and adapting in coming weeks. We’d love to hear from you on what you’d like us to cover and whether you agree with our reflections.
Have you been using Lean Impact or other methods in your work? What are your reflections? We’d love to hear from you.
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LearnAdapt is a collaboration between DFID, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Brink, to explore how to manage adaptive development programmes better. It draws on approaches from the development and tech sector including adaptive management, agile ways of working and lean startup. This is a sister project to Global Learning for Adaptive Management (GLAM).
Lea Simpson is co-founder of Brink, an innovation practise that blends method, enabling environments and mindset for enduring impact. The team uses LearnAdapt ideas and Lean Impact methods across two DFID programmes.
Brink also works on Frontier Technology Livestreaming, an action research and innovation programme exploring the application of frontier technologies like drones, Internet of Things, Blockchain and more to big challenges in development.
