The road to renewing our institutions: three takeaways
by Kal Joffres
We will need more than innovative products, services, or programmes provided by deeply traditional institutions to tackle 21st-century challenges. We need to renew our institutions — from development agencies to governments and civil society — so that the way they work is better adapted to a world where the problems we face are quickly shifting, where the solutions have many moving parts and uncertain spillovers, and where no organisation on its own can solve today’s tough, social and environmental challenges.
UNDP is renewing itself. We’re doing this to accelerate the impact we’re having on 21st century challenges. The UNDP Accelerator Labs are one of the most visible ways in which UNDP is changing the way we do development work, though far from the only renewal initiative. As we embark on this road to renewal, we are exploring a number of hunches about what it takes to renew an organisation.
As part of a commitment to learn as a network, we are exploring these hunches not just at UNDP but with other organisations interested in exploring the same questions. When the Zero Extreme Poverty 2030 (ZEP2030) initiative approached our Philippines Accelerator Lab with an interest to explore what renewal might look like, we thought it would be great to explore that question together.
In August we hosted a retreat about organizational renewal with ZEP2030. We don’t know what renewal will ultimately look like for ZEP2030, but here we summarize three takeaways from starting the renewal process.
1. Collective realizations that enable renewal come from asking “deep why” questions.
ZEP2030 is a coalition of social impact organisations collaborating around the ambitious goal of bringing 1 million families out of poverty by 2030. Two years into its work, the coalition had made valuable progress, but it wanted to take stock and understand how to dramatically accelerate progress towards the 1 million families goal.
A core idea behind our approach to renewal is creating a social process to understand these challenges. Our approach brought together a cross-section of people in the organization to develop a collective set of realizations — and a collective will — about the need for change.
Change initiatives are more successful when they rely on building a movement for change within the organisation rather than mandating change. Building a movement is often the only option for change in public institutions, social sector organisations, and coalitions like ZEP2030 where power and influence are dispersed across the organisation.
Together with ZEP2030 coalition members, we looked at how the work of the coalition stacked up against the challenge of addressing extreme poverty at scale. We surfaced patterns in the coalition’s way of doing and thinking that accelerated or slowed down the rate at which they were raising their 1 million families out of poverty.
We then asked “deep why” questions to probe the reasons behind those tendencies and patterns that were slowing the coalition’s impact. “Deep why” questions go beyond the organisation’s projects, decisions, or leadership to surface beliefs, values, and mindsets that drive the organisation’s current ways of working and making decisions.
For example, the ZEP2030 coalition operates using a centralized “hub and spoke” model of coordinating members. The secretariat and key members define a framework for cooperation and coordination and members come to meetings that bring everyone together to coordinate. This model is replicated in different parts of the country with local conveners. The mindset underlying this way of working that, as a coalition of social impact organisations, ZEP2030 provides value to members by coordinating them.
All of this made sense at one point when the organisation was much smaller. However, as the organisation grew, this approach started to stand in the way of accelerated impact. One member talked about the hours he spent sitting in traffic to attend coalition meetings. Another spoke about how she had joined because she was hoping to learn from the content expertise of other organisations but hadn’t had the opportunity to do so. Attempting to coordinate partners with very diverse needs led to a system that was burdensome and didn’t necessarily satisfy everyone’s needs — it was also slowing their growth to 1 million families.
Making this a collective process is all the more important because insights about what is slowing down impact can often defy conventional wisdom in the organisation. ZEP2030 had made a significant investment in building a standardized approach for measuring coalition members’ impact on poverty. However, as one participant said, “I see now that standards and frameworks can be inhibiting. What I thought united us has actually been holding us back.” As an insight developed by people inside the organisation, this is the kindling for change.
2. Replacing old mindsets requires new, believable visions.
Through this sensemaking process, we surfaced four key mindsets and sets of practices that were holding the organisation back from accelerating its impact. Each mindset was useful at some point in time — but it persisted beyond its usefulness in the absence of a regular process of organisational renewal.
Collectively realising that these mindsets slow down impact is only half of the journey. We framed four different opportunities that involved re-imagining what the coalition would look like without those mindsets. For example: what would ZEP2030 look like if, instead of convening, it added value by acting as a platform for self-organized collaboration?
As part of the retreat, we shared inspirations about how other people or organizations solved for similar opportunities. These inspirations ranged from how Grab provides a platform that enables drivers and riders to self-organize, to how Poverty Stoplight turned household surveys inside out, to how Adobe decentralized innovation through Kickbox.
For each opportunity, teams developed ideas about what the new ZEP2030 coalition might look like. They shared scenarios of what life would look like in the new coalition by roleplaying or acting them out with props. The solutions ranged from a new way of conducting a meeting to a new way of talking about impact measurement. Roleplaying can sometimes be dismissed as a cute design thinking gimmick but, when done effectively, it provides a far more precise and powerful way of conveying what a renewed organisation might look like than any text in a concept note. Can we imagine ourselves being part of this scenario? How might different stakeholders act and react with the new organisation?
3. Scaling renewal means anchoring on opportunities, not solutions.
Many organisations are too large to fit into a single retreat or workshop, which makes scaling renewal a challenge. Building a movement to scale renewal means engaging the broader organisation in thinking about each opportunity. In this case, an opportunity is a question like “how might we act as a platform that enables collaborators to find the best partners and self-organize?” Engaging the broader organisation around the opportunity includes the story of where the opportunity came from, the impact of not doing anything, and how people can get involved in addressing the opportunity.
The specific ideas or new ways of working that were developed during the retreat in response to each opportunity are just a starting point; they are believable hypotheses about how a new ZEP2030 might work. As different stakeholders are engaged, we expect new ideas to come up and the current ideas to be challenged, reshaped, and improved — with each opportunity remaining a north star that focuses those conversations on their renewal purpose.
ZEP2030 capitalized on the momentum of the retreat by sharing the opportunities and initial ideas with a broader group in the coalition at their Lead Convenors Meeting the same week. In the coming months, ZEP2030 coalition members will have the opportunity to prototype how the new ZEP2030 works with support from the coalition secretariat and the Philippines Accelerator Lab. This provides a supported process for quickly and collectively learning about what works in terms of new ways of working for ZEP2030, demonstrate results, and build the collective ambition for change.
As different elements of ZEP’s new way of working are tested, some things that seemed surefire will end up not working and some things that didn’t seem like they would fly unexpectedly take off. When teams are focused on the opportunity rather than a specific way of solving for it, they always have a base to come back to when some concepts inevitably don’t work and it’s time to come up with something new.
Renewal is more necessary than ever
History is littered with organisations that have become irrelevant. It can happen to anyone — from the world’s best photography or mobile phone brands, to governments, and yes, UN agencies! As the world changes, so does our relevance.
Staying relevant in the face of 21st century challenges will take more than innovative new programmes or services. Our institutions need to master the ability to continuously renew themselves — updating the patterns in the way we work and think — to deal with challenges that are radically more intermingled, complex, and fast-moving.
Through a process of renewal that is collective, that asks deeper questions about why certain patterns of work exist, that tests options for a new future, and that scales change by movement rather than mandate, organizations can build the muscle to continuously renew themselves to stay relevant.
UNDP is renewing itself. We don’t have all the answers about how institutional renewal works in the public and development sector, but we are exploring this question with others interested pursuing bold challenges, like ZEP2030 in the Philippines.
If you have been exploring renewal or if you’re interested in exploring renewal in your organisation to accelerate social or environmental impact, we would love to hear from you.
Special thanks to Giulio Quaggiotto and Andrew Parker for their inputs as well as to Br. Armin Luistro, Oman Jiao, and the ZEP2030 team for joining us on this adventure.
