Embedding Systems Thinking in the UNDP: Takeaways from a Sensemaking Meetup
Written by Arnaldo Pellini and Mikael Seppälä
The Sensemaking meetup is Systems Change Finland’s monthly meetup where we explore topics related to applied Systems Thinking and Complexity with interesting speakers. Instead of being one-sided lectures, our meetups are spaces where participants can also make sense about the topics with each other. January’s meetup took place on Monday 11th January and has been organized in association with our global friends in the Systems Innovation community. The discussion was ignited by Ida Uusikylä who works as an Innovation officer at UNDP Viet Nam.
Ida (Twitter, LinkedIn) is a cross-unit innovator at UNDP Viet Nam focusing on strategic innovation. Ida has experience in e-governance, emerging technologies, institutional reforms, complexity science and innovation policy. She has worked with the Government of Finland on foreign affairs and science, the European Commission in Finland on political affairs and as an independent consultant for ministries and international organizations focusing on evaluation, governance and development policy. She holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Development Management and Bachelor’s degree from University of Helsinki in Political Science.
The host of the event from Systems Change Finland was Arnaldo Pellini who is a member of Systems Change Finland and who had a conversation with Ida Uusikylä earlier last year about experimenting with innovation and accelerating development in Vietnam.
Ida spoke about the work the UNDP in Viet Nam is doing in establishing practices related to sensemaking and (innovation) portfolios of experiments to build the organization’s capabilities to apply Systems Thinking in practice. Ida touched upon questions of building learning organizations and the role of experimentation can take in enabling them.
The UNDP in Viet Nam in one of the 92 Accelerator Labs set up by UNDP across the world. The Labs offer a range of services to support UNDP’s country teams and their country partners to better understand the systems and the nature of the problems they address. The Labs also provide support to country teams with the mapping of possible solutions and the design of portfolios of experiments to test and learn from addressing those problems. Ultimately, Ida explained, the aim is to support the UNDP country team and their partners to strengthen the coherence of the country portfolio of projects and programmes to better address complex social, economic, and environmental problems.
Ida ended her presentation with a synthesis of the insights from her experience of working with the UNDP Lab in Hanoi and with embedding more systems thinking in the work of the country office. As with any change process, there have been challenges, successes, and, importantly, a lot of learning which is informing adaptations and iterations as the process of change continues to evolve.
A very interesting presentation, grounded on a concrete experience of trying to bring more systems thinking into international development and the work of UNDP, and which attracted the interest from about 80 live participants from Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, Guatemala, United States, and other countries.
Ida’s slides:
The video recording of the meetup:
Interested to learn more about Systems Change Finland and about how to join our community?
Systems Change Finland seeks to cultivate a society that can deal with systemic and complex challenges. The purpose of Systems Change Finland is to promote the application of approaches that help people, organizations and society understand and work with systems and complexity.
- Join the Systems Change Finland group on Facebook
- Follow @systemschangefi on Twitter
- Check our WWW-page at systemschange.fi
- Come work with us in our slack community
