What are we learning from (trying to) tackle systems transformation?
At UNDP Innovation we have made a bold shift in our strategic approach to tackle the world’s most difficult development challenges. In short, we are moving away from “single point solutions”, and instead trying to figure out how to best tackle really complex systemic challenges. On this blog, I’m sharing (in “real time”) my reflections, insights and ramblings emerging from this exciting and immensely difficult journey. My colleague Millie is doing the same thing here.
19–23 October: Toggling between detail and abstraction to understand the system
Over the past 3 months we have worked hard to get a series of “systems transformation” focused pilots underway. We call these pilots “deep demonstrations” and you can read about them here. Unsurprisingly, we have had to sort out a wide range of administrative and operational tasks at this early stage of our journey. However, we have also been faced with a number of bigger and much more intriguing challenges. In this first post, I’ll briefly discuss one of them.
The real world has an infinite level of detail. Complex systemic challenges are no exception, whether it’s a country’s food system or the complex web of interactions through which citizens, elites and bureaucrats (and a plethora of other actors) influence each other and allocate a country’s resources (aka “governance”).
If we are to have any hopes of understanding such complex systems, then we need to be able to simultaneously dive into details and zoom out to the “abstract”. The objective here is to understand rather than trying to predict the system (for more on understanding vs prediction, see this piece on complexity science and traffice jams in Mexico City). Going deep: my colleagues in UNDP Tunisia are trying to improve relations of trust between citizens and public institutions. To start out, they went deep into the issue, but they did so by casting their nets wide. They read up on trust and state legitimacy, and interviewed a wide variety of people, including a sociologist, a social activist, a football club supporter, a movie director, and public officials. Zooming out: in Angola my colleagues are working on transforming informal markets. In order to do this, they first went deep into the context, and then progressively shaved off details to get at a more abstract representation of the informal market system as a relationship between dynamics of value creation, social capital and (informal and formal institutions of) governance. This method is akin to what you may do on google maps as you move from “street view” to “satellite view” to (the grey coloured) “map view”. As we zoom out, we lose detail, but it also becomes much easier to navigate the world and to find out how to best get from A to B.
Toggling between deep dives and abstraction is a difficult thing to do and it is a skill we need to continue to develop in UNDP as we seek to understand, navigate and transform complex systems.
