Why Labs Matter-A Reflection from Hanoi

Regional Innovation Centre UNDP Asia-Pacific

6 min readNov 21, 2019

This post is cross-published and first appeared in April 2019 by Courtney Savie Lawrence

This week I’ve been in Vietnam’s ‘city of peace’ for the UNDP Youth Co:Lab Summit and a side track, the Government Innovation Lab, hosted in collaboration with the Asia and the Pacific Regional Innovation Centre (RIC). In short, the Co:Lab has been a pilot project turned multi-faceted platform, one that has scaled to over twenty countries in just a few short years. As Head of Exploration for the RIC, I was here to help curate and run our Gov Lab prototype, along with Co:Lab’s Beniam Gebrezghi, which pulled together a cross sector group of 50+ participants, yet primarily designed for government officials from around the region. Our working premise was to explore the future of work, employment and entrepreneurship from a systems change and policy perspective.

As irony would have it, within the first 48 hours of being on the ground counter provocations were launched from the edges: one from a government official, the other from an intermediary organization: ‘what is the value add of all of these labs, we have been doing labs forever..’ and the other: ‘I hope not [everything] is full of empty buzzwords’…

As with most things there are truths to explore under this veil of intellectual counter insurgency. In fact, what I embraced in these questions is their chide and candor. What if we could all — in our organizations, institutions, governments, companies- hold the space for the reflection necessary to make sense of what we do and ultimately become intentional about how we choose to navigate the complex change making pathways forward. That is, after all the essential point of a lab yes? To explore, learn, critique and ultimately make (positive) change more expedient. In the context of the UNDP Accelerator Labs launching now, you will see this intention voiced loud and clear- a dedicated space to make rapid learning happen at scale for the end game of meaningful impact.

All this to say: in our pop-up ‘labs’ of the week, there were some powerful insights and take-aways I discovered. A few of which I’ll map below:

1- the value of labs in shaping the culture and mindsets that accompany experimentation: during our quick 2 day Gov Lab ‘sprint’- expertly led by Charlie Leadbetter and supported by cutting edge scenarios and provocations thanks to our Centre’s director, Giulio Quagiotto, we dove into the mechanics of deep systems and transformational change. What became clear is that those in the room were hungry for leading next generation change, yet weren’t sure how to make it happen. This sense of humility, vulnerability and truth us impossible to surface without a process and place to facilitate this type of dialogue. In fact, Charlie, on many occasions would ask a question and tell the participant to ‘keep the mic’. In other words, I am here to learn from you- let’s not rush this. Labs, in this case, and their ‘value add’ is the container they offer to have authentic conversations that aid a sensemaking process. This allows new reframes and ideas to surface. The soft skills, empathy and self-awareness required for individuals to meaningfully participate in this arena is often not the first thing one thinks about when crafting a lab, but it can make or break the effectiveness. Beyond practicing deep listening, we also drew on multiple systems dynamics theories- and touched on Otto Sharmer’s Theory U — Leading from the Future which emphasizes this intra-personal exploration.

2- the desire for people to move beyond the convention of what we know — from the passive stance of ‘let’s work across silos’ to active questions like ‘how do I bridge the gap’ and carve systemic pathways that mobilize transcendent collaboration: the elephant is still in the room- but at least we know it and are more poised to take action and learn how to kick (or gently guide) it out. On day two we ran a mini reflection session and asked participants, now that we had explored outer-space and back in terms of systems theory, how might we ground this in our daily practice, our daily context. Specifically we asked- ‘what are your top two ‘how do I…’ questions. After a few moments of quiet self-reflection and contemplation the group then plotted their ‘how’ questions’ against a time scale- inspired by the Three Horizons Framework. After 10 minutes of crowdsourcing we were able to distill these as insights and discovered the meta pattern: participants want to be empowered leaders who can ‘bridge the gap’. Specifically, how do I: shift mindsets; build meaningful, effective, strategic partnerships and collaborations; structure programs, systems to be inclusive and impactful; introduce, apply and practice innovation (experiments, disruptions) in governments and bureaucracies. So what happens now? Well we created a 2.0 working group to organically continue to build forward on these insights.

3- ushering the transition with skillful leadership from ‘system 1’ to ‘system 2’ mechanics: In our contemporary world dripping with instant gratification opportunities, it sometimes seems overwhelming to consider having the patience to wait for the future you envision. It perhaps is human nature to have such disposition. Yet, as Charlie shared, he is interested in the space in between- actually the transformation process itself. There were three specific frames he shared that I found to be interesting lenses to approach one’s change work as we operate in ‘system 1’ yet create the infrastructure that allows us to manifest ‘system 2’:

Building on the work of Frank Geels, he shared frames related to the socio-technical evolution of society — one that emphasizes transition not disruption

He provoked the participants to consider and understand where on the continuum solutions sit — when placed on a 2 by 2 that plots where interventions are in respect to their level of systems development as well as empathy
And for the impatient- he exposed another way to think about transformation- in waves that can cycle across 10 years, for example. He shared the Mondragon Cooperative as one long game case study — a social transformation narrative that comes from the Basque Region.