Innovation Works for Everyone

Although every area of UNHCR has rules to follow, the Legal Affairs Service is using innovation to work within the rules more effectively.

By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist

As the old saying goes, you have to know the rules before you can break them. It’s not that the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Legal Affairs Service (LAS) is arbitrarily breaking rules, but the saying does help demonstrate how they’re adopting innovation: adhering to the rules that are imperative to their work while looking for ways to innovate within their boundaries.

“Innovation and rules are like oil and water,” says Lance Bartholomeusz, Principal Legal Advisor and Head of LAS. “Or perhaps you might say it’s a little bit like the rules being the white powder that’s placed around the perimeter of a football field: There are certain rules that govern it, but it doesn’t mean that every football match is the same. You can still have some brilliance within the four corners of the field.”

LAS is developing strategies to encourage their team of about 20 people to use innovation to “show some brilliance,” he says.

“You don’t always have to break rules or be disruptive to innovate,” explains Dina Zyadeh, Associate Innovation Officer (Operations) for UNHCR’s Innovation Service. “A willingness to start small and make sustained, incremental changes that result in significant improvement over time is a common form of innovation. For a lot of us, this starts by mastering existing rules, because it gives you an insight into what works and what doesn’t, so that you can identify areas for improvement.”

As she explains, tearing down everything and replacing the old with the new isn’t always possible, or even desirable. The small improvements that people can make by drawing on innovation tools and methodologies — which the Innovation Service helps teams implement through workshops, the Innovation Fellowship and other means — can make a significant difference in day-to-day work. This applies not only to LAS, but to any unit or team across UNHCR.

“People are sometimes surprised that successful innovation begins with adhering to and mastering the rules — both the written and unwritten ones,” Zyadeh says. “Virtuosos of the rules are in a good position to innovate, especially when they combine their knowledge of the rules with a focus on the user and an ability to incorporate diverse views and methods in their solution.” That’s because obtaining support for novel improvements from both users and gate-keepers is contingent on securing their trust, which often requires a mastery of the rules before proposing new alternatives. In addition to this practical consideration, structure and rules support the translation of creative ideas into incremental innovations that can be implemented and sustained.

Looking at rules through a new lens

For LAS, their renewed commitment to innovation began in earnest with a small workshop led by Zyadeh in the fall of 2019. Recognizing that UNHCR has embraced innovation at the highest levels of the organization, LAS wanted to find ways to bring new approaches and thinking to their own work. So they learned about strategies they could apply, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which can automate tasks that really don’t need human intervention, such as processing certain kinds of paperwork. This frees up the team to use their expertise on more meaningful work.

For example, UNHCR must be extremely careful about the people they recruit. Applicants must undergo rigorous background checks to uncover anything that might exclude them from consideration, such as a history of disciplinary measures or criminal activity. This requires scouring key UNHCR and UN databases, a task LAS is currently working to automate. LAS is looking to similarly transform the way LAS and field colleagues handle the processes related to contracts for the hundreds of premises UNHCR leases around the world.

But as anyone who is familiar with UNHCR’s stance on innovation knows, it goes far beyond technology. That’s where re-thinking what following the rules might mean comes in.

“Rather than being risk-averse — which is a traditional sort of lawyer’s approach that emphasizes strict adherence to the rules and doesn’t encourage innovation — we’re taking a risk-conscious approach,” Bartholomeusz says. “Looking at risk is part of our daily routine, but how do we work through that so rules and innovation can work together?”

For example, much of LAS’ work involves dispute resolution. There are rules in place that require UNHCR to offer an effective method of resolving disputes raised by personnel. But there are many opportunities to innovate while working within the confines of the rules.

For personnel other than staff, the standard UN approach is to offer international arbitration. But the rules would allow alternative expedited dispute resolution such as mediation. And it could be more accessible if we could use technology to interact with those involved wherever they are in the field, and in whatever language they speak, Bartholomeusz explains. “The rules are also fairly open in terms of languages,” he says. “English and French are the working languages, but that doesn’t mean we’re forbidden from working in Arabic.”

LAS is also supporting new procedures to simplify many of their daily processes, such as the agreements between UNHCR and the organization’s partners around the world. More flexible templates for agreements with large NGOs that UNHCR regularly partners with all over the world is one solution. Plus, this is an example of a process where rules actually can be changed. For instance, there’s no reason the parties involved should have to sign every single page of a 100-page document, which can sometimes be the case.

“We can simply change that rule — it’s just silly and it’s not a high-level rule cast in stone,” Bartholomeusz says. “It’s not necessarily anything all that spectacular, but small changes can make a big difference for our colleagues in the field. Especially with lawyers working in various parts of the world, it creates more consistency and brings us all together.”

Innovation doesn’t require large-scale overhauls. In fact, it’s much more likely to be made up of incremental steps — and especially in large organizations with complex systems, even small improvements should be celebrated. That’s because small improvements add up over time, empowering people to continue adapting the rules they master to find increasingly better ways of getting the job done.

In part two of this series, we’ll explore how LAS is using collaboration — another cornerstone of innovation — to adapt the rules for the good of their operation.