Your search
Results 198 resources
-
Drawing on action research, this paper recasts evaluation as ‘action inquiry’, an embedded evaluative learning practice that can help navigate complexity when enacting collective leadership. It is offered as an invitation to inquiry amongst a reasonably well-informed audience of policy makers and practitioners who work in and for public services. It will particularly interest those who provide research, evaluation and facilitation support, and those seeking to develop a more relational...
-
The world is complex. If we want to contribute to creating positive social outcomes, we must learn to embrace this complexity. This is the New World that funders and commissioners are discovering: • People are complex: everyone’s life is different, everyone’s strengths and needs are different. • The issues we care about are complex: issues – like homelessness – are tangled and interdependent. • The systems that respond to these issues are complex: the range of people and organisations...
-
This paper draws on the science of complexity to outline alternative approaches to analysing and understanding problems faced in humanitarian and development work.
-
For AC practitioners, systems mapping is essential but also difficult. To lessen obstacles, Peter Woodrow proposes a scaffolded approach. An Experiment in “Fast Forwarding” Drawing upon our near-decade work on corruption, we recently decided to try an experiment: we would present “common patterns” of corruption as tentative models to adapt and add to—rather than try to teach people to do systems mapping from scratch. In this teaching experiment, each common pattern would function as a kind...
-
This Field Guide is designed to support budding systemic designers to facilitate and lead systemic design projects. It’s designed for systemic designers who have basic familiarity with SD concepts and are looking for some practical tips and tools to put theory into action. While this Guide was designed with Government of Alberta staff in mind, the content applies across a range of issue areas, sectors, and intersections. The Guide goes through a systemic design project from concept to...
-
Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. The book starts by laying out a theoretical framework based on complexity thinking, before going on to explore the ten most prevalent kinds of unintended effects of foreign aid: backlash effects, conflict effects, migration and resettlement...
-
Five simple rules for foundations seeking to create lasting social change.
-
Responses to sustainability challenges are not delivering results at the scale and speed called for by science, international agreements, and concerned citizens. Yet there is a tendency to underestimate the large-scale impacts of small-scale, local, and contextualized actions, and particularly the role of individuals in scaling transformations. Here, we explore a fractal approach to scaling sustainability transformations based on “universal values.” Universal values are proposed as intrinsic...
-
This report takes the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), a twophase pre-procurement innovation programme that aims to match social challenges with new ideas, as its primary case study. It suggests augmenting the excellent design thinking deployed through SBRI with a think like a system, act like an entrepreneur lens in order to drive better social outcomes from SBRI-originating innovations. Programmes like SBRI have great potential to drive change and address pressing challenges, but...
-
Research on the Information Society, the Digital Divide and Information and Communication Technologies for development
-
As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...
-
From the Waters Center For Systems Thinking. See: https://thinkingtoolsstudio.waterscenterst.org/courses/habits https://thinkingtoolsstudio.waterscenterst.org/cards
-
Recent advances in the study of complexity have given scientists profound new insights into how natural innovation occurs and how its power can be exploited. Now two pioneers in the field, Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, provide leaders in business and government with a guide to complexity that will help them make effective decisions in a world of rapid change. Building on evolutionary biology, computer science, and social design, Axelrod and Cohen have constructed a unique framework...
-
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...
-
In 2010 I was introduced to the Berkana Institutes’s Two Loop model, and I come back to it again and again. As I’ve moved across different…
Explore
Theme
-
Adaptive Approaches [+]
- Systems Thinking / Complexity
- Adaptive Learning (9)
- Adaptive Management (27)
- Adaptive Rigour (1)
- Agile & Lean approaches (2)
- CLA (Collaborating Learning Adapting) (1)
- Design Thinking / HCD (6)
- MSD - Market Systems Development (2)
-
Other sectors
(27)
- Environmental (9)
- Military (7)
- Organizational Management (10)
- Philosophical roots (3)
- Participation (1)
- PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) (1)
- PEA (Political Economy Analysis) (1)
- Positive Deviance & 2 loops model (2)
- Systemcraft (1)
- Cases (7)
- Courses (1)
-
Development Actors Perspectives
(18)
- AFD (Agence Française de Développement) (1)
- China (2)
- DCED - Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (3)
- FCDO/DFID (UK) (3)
- GIZ (Germany) (3)
- KOICA (Korea's International Co-operation Agency) (1)
- OECD/DAC - Results Based Management (1)
- Private Companies - Development Industry (1)
- Private Donors (OSF, Hewlett...) (1)
- UNDP, UN Global Pulse, UN... (2)
- USAID (5)
-
Geography
(14)
-
Africa
(6)
- Central Africa (1)
-
Eastern Africa
(4)
- Mozambique (1)
- Rwanda (1)
- Uganda (2)
-
Southern Africa
(1)
- South Africa (1)
-
Asia
(7)
-
Eastern Asia
(7)
- China (7)
-
Eastern Asia
(7)
- Oceania (1)
-
Africa
(6)
-
MEL4 Adaptive Management
(55)
- Action Inquiry/Collective Leadership (2)
- Desk based research/lit review (1)
- Ethnography / Rapid Ethnography (1)
- Impact evaluation (1)
- Indicator-based approaches (1)
- Innovation System Analysis (2)
- Knowing Unknowns (1)
- Mapping Visualization Methods (4)
- MEL in International Development (4)
- Most Significant Change (1)
- Narrative Based Approaches (2)
- Network Analysis (1)
- Outcome Harvesting (1)
- Outcome Mapping (1)
- Participatory Action Research (2)
- Participatory Evaluation (1)
- Political Economy Analysis (1)
- Portfolio Management (2)
- Process Tracing (1)
- Qualitative Comparative Analysis (1)
- Randomized Controlled Trials (2)
- Realist Evaluation (2)
- Rubrics (2)
- Scenario Planning (1)
- SenseMaker (3)
- Stakeholder Feedback (1)
- Surveys (1)
- Systemic Change (27)
- Systems Mapping (6)
- Theory-based evaluations (2)
- TOC (Theory of Change) (8)
- Trans-disciplinary Research (1)
- Utilisation focused evaluation (1)
- Networks and Communities of Practice (1)
- Organizations (1)
-
Practical
(22)
- Tools (3)
-
Sectors [+]
(39)
- Agriculture (1)
- Alternative Development (10)
- Citizen Engagement (1)
- Economic development (1)
- Education (2)
- Environmental Management (2)
- Governance and Accountability (2)
- Health (2)
- Humanitarian Aid (1)
-
Innovation (in Development)
(12)
- Funding (1)
- Institutional Capacity & Change (3)
- Knowledge to Practice (1)
- Locally driven development (1)
- Locally led development (1)
- NGOs (2)
- Organizational Change (3)
- Pastoralism (1)
- Peace Building (1)
- Scaling up / Propagating (5)
- Social Accountability (2)
- Social Change (1)
Resource type
- Blog Post (21)
- Book (36)
- Book Section (10)
- Conference Paper (1)
- Journal Article (36)
- Magazine Article (9)
- Map (1)
- Newspaper Article (1)
- Presentation (2)
- Report (76)
- Software (1)
- Video Recording (1)
- Web Page (3)
Publication year
-
Between 1900 and 1999
(12)
-
Between 1940 and 1949
(1)
- 1948 (1)
- Between 1950 and 1959 (2)
-
Between 1970 and 1979
(1)
- 1978 (1)
-
Between 1980 and 1989
(1)
- 1985 (1)
- Between 1990 and 1999 (7)
-
Between 1940 and 1949
(1)
- Between 2000 and 2024 (186)