Our road towards experiments — and other interesting lessons we are learning on our journey to tackle youth unemployment in Asia Pacific

By Courtney Savie Lawrence

Just this week, Azusa Kubota, UNDP Resident Representative to the Kingdom of Bhutan, shared how her country office is driving an action oriented ecosystem approach to surfacing solutions towards complex issues. It’s not with logic frames, linear thinking, nor a closed door centralized process, but with embracing a new way of doing things:

“We, therefore, have decided to take a step back and support a comprehensive system mapping to get a more in-depth understanding of the employment issue as a whole. This is not an issue that can be solved with “silver bullets”. Therefore, we will invest in a portfolio of experiments that touch upon varies facets of the employment question in the hope to make a change in the eco-system.”

Bhutan represents the first country ‘pilot’ (of a pipeline) using a systems approach to address youth unemployment — in collaboration with the UNDP Youth Co:Lab and Regional Innovation Centre. Below I’ll share the origin story, where we have been on this quest, and insights gathered from our most recent collective reflection that may be helpful for other teams on similar journeys.

Things move fast and evolve rapidly. If I were to write this post only a month ago, the title and content would be different. It would certainly include ‘government’, ‘innovation’ and ‘lab’ in it. That’s what we’ve been working on- and it would be the most concise way (to ourselves at least) to continue sharing updates on what originally kicked off in April this year. In fact, we’ve been working out loud iteratively — starting with Why Labs Matter — a reflection from Hanoi to When Government + Innovation become a #futureofwork Lab- insights from Singapore 2.0. Although the penchant for lengthy titles still exists, a few critical shifts have surfaced as a result of pausing to reflect and facilitate generative, collective conversations about what we have been learning as we move the vision forward.

Where we have been, where we are going (Big Picture)

As UNDP, a team of teams, or network of networks, embarks on a transformation journey to develop interventions that meet the evermore transnational and complex demands characterizing today’s exponential times, we have to confront the possibility that the UNDP will need to consistently update our ‘operating systems’ — including culture, mindset and practice. With this imperative in mind, we must strive to accelerate what works, craft what bridges gaps, let go of what no longer works, and experiment our way forward on purpose — by design. This space of organizational evolution is catalyzed evermore with critical self reflection that allows for a rich field of questions to emerge (i.e. are we capable of constantly adjusting and renegotiating[our] intent as circumstances around [us] change often in unpredictable ways?) It is with this backdrop that the Youth Co:Lab and Regional Innovation Centre collaborated to develop a ‘Gov Lab’- as one possibility for accelerating impact.

Youth Co:Lab and ‘Upstream’ Collaboration (One Frame)

In 2017 UNDP and the Citi Foundation established a platform for Asia-Pacific countries to empower and invest in youth through social entrepreneurship. Now scaled to 25 countries, Youth Co:Lab has catalyzed and scaled over 500 youth-led social enterprises and has worked with stakeholders to strengthen the ecosystem for social entrepreneurship. This is commendable work given that, based on recently released data coming from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, 97% of all jobs are created by small and medium-sized enterprises and that ‘Southeast Asia is the region with the fewest social entrepreneurs at just 3.8% of the working-age population’. There is no argument that the work being done is adding value. That being said, with 700 million young people aged 15 to 24, or 60% of the world’s youth, living in the Asia Pacific region, what about those not destined for the entrepreneurial pathway, and sitting among the 300 million living in economic uncertainty? Compounding this discussion is the eminent and adjacent ‘future of work’ factor. This is a hot topic and quite a conundrum for those working to leave no one behind or rewire policy to foster inclusive innovation. Truly, how might we serve and build enabling environments for the millions of youth that are also not accessing digital ecosystems, being ‘reskilled’ or are not connected to sustainable education to decent work pipelines? From an intervention standpoint, this is precisely the ‘false ascent’ in which we may be finding ourselves as we work towards chipping away at the problem of youth unemployment, yet without really making a dent as the speed of change required. Downstream programs alone, on their own, will not be sufficient.

Enter the ‘Government Innovation Lab’

By now you may have a sense of where this could be going. As mentioned earlier, we kicked off a prototype ‘Gov Lab’ to work our way through a set of initial questions: what does government need and want to be able to anticipate, catalyze and accelerate the policy and infrastructure change, at the right ‘acupuncture points’ of a system, in order to effect targeted systems change? What is UNDP’s unique role and opportunity to support demand in this space? In fact, these questions emerged from country office asking how might we examine the systemic youth unemployment issues. After 3 regional gatherings (most recently from November 4–7 in Guangzhou), and the launching of ‘systemic change’ pilots to tackle this on the national level (Bhutan and Cambodia as of today, with Nepal and others in the pipeline) we have some insights that have been gleaned through the trial and error of the past 8 months. The synthesis captured below is a result of how we have been shifting.

The Guangzhou Set Up: Why We Stopped Capacity Building Regional Workshops and Designed for ‘Sensemaking’

In this third regional convening of the GovLab, a track running in parallel at the Asia-Pacific Forum on Youth Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China, the intention was to facilitate experiential conversations that focused on taking stock of what has emerged to-date and offer space to calibrate the roadmap forward with multiple perspectives. We took a page from our UNDP teams who usually run longer processes of ‘sensemaking’. Our intent included:

• Re-visiting the youth employment ‘challenge’ and ‘response’ space: to step back and hold generative reflection on the systems in which we are engaging, while testing and validating assumptions.
• Sharing the ‘opportunity trajectory’ of ‘Gov Lab’ interventions in terms of country pilots: We heard from the work that has been kicked off in Bhutan, and pipeline discussions underway with Nepal and Cambodia; the purpose was not to not sell, yet set the stage for a critical learning dynamic to emerge.
• Further develop the ‘Minimum Specs’ for two key elements:
  (A) Country Pilots (i.e. the essential ingredients or critical preconditions necessary to be established before running a country pilot); and (B) The Learning Dynamic (i.e. our Collective Intelligence Mechanism)

Building on the UNDP Acceleration Protocol (Beta), we sought to utilize the gathering to generate space that would further build on a staged learning dynamic: from zooming out (revisiting the wicked question and complexity in relationship to ‘youth employment’) and zooming in (exploring the pre-conditions and nuance in relationship to a systems approach grounded in the country context). Process credit: Axilo.

At the same time- we anchored our conversation space with these starting questions for the small ‘focus’ group of about 15 participants, working among government, the private sector, academia and the UNDP.

• How do we use the expertise in the room to best set up the country pilots on youth employment for success, using a systemic design approach?
• Can we surface the preconditions that need to be in place, or be built? (reflecting back to CoLab’s characteristics of successful systemic design projects and mindsets.)
• Which tactics and strategies can we use to check for these conditions at the outset and to build these conditions throughout?
• At the outset: how do we check for demand and fit, sensitize, align expectations, build a team, build buy-in, identify the actors, design the process, gather existing evidence?

We spent day one, of three, zooming out, noticing each individual’s unique perspective and contribution to the way in which we are approaching the youth (un)employment space. We used time to deeply listen to participants individual motivations, passions and frustrations- acknowledging that systems are comprised of humans, and that often invisible mental models drive actions.

So what did we learn?

There was high level consensus that the semantics around “Government Innovation Lab” are problematic for UNDP teams at the Country Office Level (especially with the 60 Accelerator Labs rising globally), and additionally for government partners. There is confusion around ‘labs’ in the sense that there are many associations of pre-existing labs and it is not clear where this ‘Gov Lab’ is owned or located- especially in geographies where a Gov Lab may already exist.

There was also alignment in regards to using a ‘Systemic Approach’ to building a country pilot and agreement that in regards to concretely describing ‘what’ this is, the following descriptions suffice as working definitions for the moment: ‘initiative’ and ‘pilot’. This is a collaborative systems change ‘experiment’ among the Youth Co:Lab, Regional Innovation Centre, the UNDP Country Offices and associated government partners.

Outcomes of a crowdsourcing session around what factors should be considered and an assessment of what helps or can get in the way of implementation.

What’s next? Stay tuned with what emerges in Bhutan, Cambodia and others- we will be working outloud to share what we are learning as we go, and plan to showcase at the April 2020 YCL Summit in Malaysia. How might you engage or contribute? We would love to hear from you- message us @ricap_undp and @YouthCoLab.

Courtney Savie Lawrence is Head of Exploration with the UNDP Asia Pacific Regional Innovation Team. You can connect @cocosavie or on LinkedIn. This post is written with gratitude and thanks to Beniam Gebrezghi, Eleanor Horrocks, and Giulio Quaggiotto for their inputs and perspective.