Steeple Chase and Open Fields: Finding an Innovation Mindset
The highly structured world of schools and universities meets the needs of innovation-thinking in the humanitarian sector.
By Eva Hangartner, UNHCR Innovation Service Intern
Running the steeple chase
Until the summer of 2020, my academic journey was a steeple chase race. I competed in this 2000-meter track and field event for my high school: like my peers, I jostled to get into the fastest lane and overcame a standard 23 hurdles every race in my attempt to cross the finish line first. With the same focus and determination, I pursued coveted spots on honors tracks in high school, strived for perfect scores on standardized tests, and mastered the steps — including participation in sports — needed to attend a top university. Of course, this journey required hard work and sacrifice, but the targets were sequenced, defined, and logical, and consistently hitting them was predictable and programmatic. Both in school and on the track, there were guard rails on either side of the “winning” lane. It would have taken immense courage, self-awareness, and confidence to deviate from the protective certainty of this well-worn and proven path.
I thus learned to be literal, to search for the right answer, and to stay on the narrow path that others defined as success. I wasn’t even able to see past the guard rails — especially because I did not have to worry about my safety or my next meal. I became adept at checking the academic, athletic, leadership, and passion boxes needed to craft a good narrative for university admissions. Choices of how to spend my time felt obvious and binary. Like many other high schoolers, I learned what was expected of me and delivered that to a tee.
Since then, these skills have served me exceedingly well, even if the boxes to check have multiplied and become more complicated. Before joining UNHCR, I worked at an immigration clinic for refugees and asylum seekers, in which each story was unique. But the very nature of the immigration system necessitated fitting these differences into government-defined boxes — there was a decidedly correct course of action, and I had to find it. I would ask a string of questions, walking the asylum seeker along a winding decision tree to arrive at the appropriate immigration application which they could file. Because the impact of these decisions affected someone’s ability to remain in the host country, the guard rails felt even higher and the lane even narrower.
Importance of critical thinking
Many universities aim to instill in their students critical thinking skills. In an academic context, this can be defined as “careful thinking directed to a goal” and can be achieved by constructing your own beliefs or appraising those of others. If high school gives students facts about the world, university supposedly teaches how to analyze those facts. This, I feel, was taught well: through debates, problem sets, and essays. Course syllabi provide low guard rails to guide students along a path, while allowing us to see the wider field of possibilities beyond. Thus, the philosophy of goal-oriented critical thinking is successful: so successful, in fact, that critiquing has become a default mode of discourse.
Yet still, there is a pervading and unquestioned narrative of success in university: take hard classes, do research, get an internship. Grades themselves imply a spectrum of correct answers and processes, whether that be the solution to a math problem or the process for writing an essay. There are rankings of schools and internships, and the better the ranking, the better the perceived chances of success. These norms reinforced my instinctive search for the one correct answer or path.
Courage to deviate
For someone who is accustomed to delivering specific and well-defined projects — to staying in their lane, if you will — innovation can be a challenging space to enter, and certainly was for me. The parameters of humanitarian innovation are not always clearly delineated; projects can be labeled exploratory, experimental, and probing. The very nature of innovation is to identify challenges, evaluate ideas, and find new solutions, in ways that are iterative and self-testing. This felt like asking my well-trained muscles to run the steeple chase diagonally: when starting a new job, one supposedly has strong muscles and skills, but needs to learn to use and apply those in a new environment.
The freedom to decide a direction for a project was, at first, disorienting. Without fully comprehending their meaning, common innovation phrases like “being comfortable with the uncomfortable” and “holding space for innovation” were initially hard to enact. Of course, colleagues helped with guidelines and questions: hearing what piqued their interest helped to situate my work in that of the team and to understand the broader ecosystem of ideas. But they also did not want to box my thinking in by giving me too clear of a goal or directive. The iterative process meant that the goal was (and is) constantly and collaboratively being defined. The job for any one new to innovation is to recognize this new way of thinking, and to step off the familiar and well-worn path.
Learning to question
At first, what I perceived to be a lack of direction made me question myself at every turn. My mind instinctively searched for the comfortable space of perfecting a race that had already been run. I settled into a line of questioning that was comforting, known, and graspable. Was I running fast enough? Was I achieving the pre-set goal? Was I doing what I was supposed to be doing, and thus meeting expectations?
As the weeks passed, I began to realize that different questions would lead to the answers I was seeking. Innovation does not provide a step-by-step action plan to complete. Rather, the goal is to constantly probe what is the goal of this project and in how many ways can we achieve that. When the goal is yet unknown, the questions turn to how many potential goals are there, what are the guiding principles of the stakeholders, and how can I use the latter to inform and prioritize the former? Moreover, I am no longer pursuing success for my own sake, but rather seeing where my contributions fit into the success of a team. It may even be that such lines of questioning lead to a break with an entrenched work habit. This mindset shift can help build just enough of a path to feel comfortable exploring the field, especially for someone new to the innovation space.
Navigating these spaces has given me an appreciation for the elusive “soft skills” about which I often hear, as well as for the active integration of values into work streams. New questions were a communication revelation: in order to communicate effectively with my colleagues and navigate the complex and ambiguous spaces of innovation, I had to change the way I approached projects. Seeing theoretical research translated into guiding principles and frameworks is a concrete example of academia in action. The team emphasizes the process and iterations just as much as — if not more than — the end result. I learned (and to some extent practiced) these skills in the more protected context of university; however, I am now learning to fully enact good communication, research, and collaboration skills.
The biggest takeaway from working at the Innovation Service has been learning to be OK walking through an open field with unseen and unexpected hurdles. This field perfectly represents the complex domain of the Cynefin framework, in which one has to probe and sense before responding. As opposed to the complicated spaces of college admissions and immigration, or the simple space of the steeple chase, I am learning to approach complexity with skills beyond knowledge, expertise, and the pursuit of a right answer. After all, there are many viable paths that can take you in many viable directions.
As I have worked in the Innovation Service, I have left the structure of a steeple chase completely. The decision trees have multiplied, the paths have widened, and I am more comfortable in the open field. I am no longer running in circles around the same track, striving only for speed. As its name would suggest, there are no boxes to tick when it comes to innovation.
