Your search

Addressing 21st century development challenges requires investments in innovation, including the use of new approaches and technologies. Currently, many development organisations prioritise investments in isolated innovation pilots that leverage a specific approach or technology rather than pursuing a strategic approach to expand the organisation’s toolbox with innovations that have proven their comparative advantage over what is currently used. This Working Paper addresses this challenge of...

Large publicly funded programmes of research continue to receive increased investment as interventions aiming to produce impact for the world’s poorest and most marginalized populations. At this intersection of research and development, research is expected to contribute to complex processes of societal change. Embracing a co-produced view of impact as emerging along uncertain causal pathways often without predefined outcomes calls for innovation in the use of complexity-aware approaches to...

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques...

Think. Act. Lead.It seems simple enough. But understanding your desired impact and how it fits into a larger picture, connecting your work to others and finding new collaborators, and bringing those collaborators together and moving them in a unified direction is never easy.Governments, businesses, and nonprofits all have unique approaches and ideas that many of us learn through our work. Yet, we rarely consider the skills needed to create and maintain the partnerships between them. Most of...

In this blog we are sharing a digest of some of the many useful and innovative monitoring, evaluation and learning resources and efforts that have come through the M&E Sandbox in 2022. A lot of these resources have been shared by our community in response to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the launch of the Sandbox (please keep them coming!). We hope you find it useful. We have grouped these efforts and resources under six broad questions: - How do we measure systems...

Considering Systems Thinking (ST) as a cognitive skill can create greater acceptability of and openness to the discipline from practitioners and researchers outside operations research and management science. Rather than associating ST with frameworks and methodologies, ST as a cognitive skill can help popularize and democratize the discipline. This paper highlights how the conceptual lens of Holistic Flexibility can help practitioners deploy ST as a cognitive skill without the application...

So you have just hear about systems thinking and systems innovation and are keen to know more, Ok sparky let's get started.We have structured all the content into four main areas that we think you ...

Over the last 15 years the concept of scale has become a foundational part of the apparatus of the social and environmental change sector. A business mindset of growth has been seamlessly transferred to the social and environmental problems we are collectively trying to shift in the world. Scaling up, (influencing policy) has been considered the strategic pathway to systems change. Scaling out (spreading new models) is seen as a pathway to success. The allure of these scaling theories lies,...

Systems thinking approaches are gaining traction as an effective way of understanding and working with increasing complexity. They are being put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as the World Health Organisation as a way to tackle the complex and unpredictable environments we now operate in. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, national or local boundaries cannot isolate and control social problems. The climate emergency, war and...

Acknowledgements 3 1. Introduction 4 1.1. System Innovation 6 1.2. Systems Investing 7 2. News from the Frontier – An Emerging Field 10 2.1. Foundations 11 2.2. Private Capital 12 2.3. Government 12 2.4. Community Capital 13 2.5. Movements 14 2.6. Framers 14 3. Systems Investment Strategy and Intent 15 3.1. Improvement or Transformation 16 3.2. Solving Problems or Opening Up Possibilities 18 3.3. Pragmatic Steps or Transformational Intent 20 3.4. Four Keys to System Innovation 25 4....

Steff had the pleasure to co-author the first SenseMaker Practitioner Guide with a group of friends and colleagues supported and published by Oxfam and CRS. This practical guide is for those who wish to use SenseMaker to conduct assessments, monitor progress, and undertake evaluations or research. Drawing on more than a decade of experience, the authors share dozens of examples from international development, providing practical tips and ideas for context-specific adaptations. They show how...

By Søren Vester Haldrup, UNDP’s Strategic Innovation Unit

This guidebook codifies the principles and methods of applying systems change and portfolio approaches to complex development challenges with practical tools and examples. It is based on the empirical learning generated from the collaborative initiatives in UNDP Country Offices in Bhutan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Viet Nam with support from Regional Innovation Centre for Asia and the Pacific.

Getting serious about systems change

Systems approaches are currently being advocated and implemented to address complex challenges in Public Health. These approaches work by bringing multi-sectoral stakeholders together to develop a collective understanding of the system, and then to identify places where they can leverage change across the system. Systems approaches are unpredictable, where cause-and-effect cannot always be disentangled, and unintended consequences – positive and negative – frequently arise. Evaluating such...

This guide is a basic reference on systems thinking and practice tailored to the context and needs of the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). It is an output of the FCDO Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D), which facilitated a Learning Journey on Systems Thinking and Practice with FCDO staff during 2021 and 2022. The guide offers a common language and shared framing of systems thinking for FCDO and its partners. It explores what this implies for...