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Healthy Cities for Adolescents Phase II (HCA-II) is a multi-country programme that supports projects working to improve adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in intermediary cities. Guided by the principle of shifting the status quo, with adolescents at the centre of this, HCA-II aims to catalyse meaningful changes in how cities function for young people. This guide aims to help you influence the systems that shape adolescent and young people’s health and wellbeing in the...

This paper shares an insider's perspective on the spread of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting lessons learned along the way that are relevant even beyond the dissolution of the Agency in 2025.

While enthusiasm for systems change has grown steadily over the past decade, we find a significant gap persists between this enthusiasm and execution. Funders attempting to implement systems change consistently face 9 challenges, including unclear outcome attribution, long commitment horizons, and complex stakeholder coordination. When faced with these challenges, it is understandable why many funders find themselves defaulting to patching the system rather than changing it. The pressures...

Today’s critical challenges are complex and require system level change. Issues like ending poverty, reversing biodiversity collapse, creating more equitable and sustainable food systems, or ending health inequalities, will not respond to neat siloed technical interventions. These are not problems we can tackle head on. Rather, we need to change the conditions (systems) that create these problems. Consequently, many of the most ambitious philanthropic foundations are adopting ‘systems...

A tool to deepen your understanding of the status quo, envision desirable futures, and engage with ecosystems more intentionally.

Government offices are filled with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that strain their capacity to make decisions, use data effectively, and achieve ambitious sustainable development goals. Public investments in digital development, transformation, and infrastructure can only meet citizen needs if data and systems are consolidated and interoperable. While interoperability is a sensible approach to building digital public infrastructure, transforming existing systems is easier said...

Explore Climate KIC’s S-ToC guide A practical and flexible resource designed to help teams and partners navigate the complexity of systems change in the face of the climate crisis. Our S-ToC approach integrates systems thinking to support adaptive monitoring, evaluation, and ongoing learning. This guide empowers users to analyse systems, identify leverage points, and co-create change-oriented strategies that evolve with context. Whether you’re working on a small-scale pilot or a...

This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence. --- A framework for embedding learning in systems change strategies and for testing strategic uncertainties. Learning and evaluation approaches that accompany systems change efforts need to fit with and support the emergent...

Based on a case study of the Kullana Liltanmia (All of Us for Development) (KLP) Contextual Analysis (CA) course in Sudan, this paper tells the story of how training and capacity building in Political Economy Analysis (PEA) made a difference in the lives and experiences of those involved, including in particular young people. The paper highlights three critical lessons: • At the country level, the twists and turns of Sudan’s recent history reinforce the importance of people deepening their...

The Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) toolkit is a practical resource designed to help humanitarian practitioners overcome monitoring challenges in reduced access environments. Reduced access can be caused by natural disaster, conflict, political instability, or other factors, and typically makes it difficult to conduct normal monitoring of program implementation. The RAAM toolkit offers technical and managerial tools for a menu of analytical methods that can fill information gaps...

The Local Systems Position Paper describes the key approaches USAID will use to translate systems thinking into systems practice. It focuses on ways USAID can better understand and engage local systems to support them in producing more sustainable results. Systems thinking is a mindset and set of tools that we use to understand how systems behave and produce certain results or outcomes. Systems practice is the application of systems thinking to better understand challenges and strengthen the...

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to...

The guide begins with a section on what we at TAF have learned about practicing Strategy Testing, highlighting things that we didn’t know when we started out. Some of these lessons may seem obvious, but others may strike you as less so. In any case, we believe that, when taken together, they provide a useful reminder of some of the pitfalls that arise in efforts to practice Adaptive Management. Moreover, they help to remind us that there are multiple layers to doing Strategy Testing...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

The CommunityFirst Framework is intended to be implemented by field teams at MSF. The theoretical aspects and evidence presented on the importance of community engagement are intended for all MSF staff seeking to learn more about why and how to shift the way we work with communities as humanitarians. We believe this guideline, and other tools like it (including OCA’s Person-Centred Approach Guidance07, and MSF Vienna Evaluation Unit’s Guidance for Involving Communities08), to be an important...

Any mission-focused government should be well equipped to define, from day one, what outcomes it wants to bring about. But radically changing what the government does is only part of the challenge. We also need to change how government does things. The usual methods, we argue in this paper, are too prone to failure and delay. There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing...

Doing weeknotes brings together various things I’ve written about weeknotes in different places. This text expands on things I wrote in The agile comms handbook, as well as various blog posts. Quite a lot of it is brand new. - Weeknotes for beginners - Why write weeknotes - The weeknotes rules - Weeknotes within the corporate environment - What weeknotes can bring about - Examples of good weeknotes - How to write weeknotes - Weeknotes tips and tricks - Further reading