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Adaptive programming suggests, at a minimum, that development actors react and respond to changes in the political and socio-economic operating environment. It emphasises learning and the development practitioner is encouraged to adjust their actions to find workable solutions to problems that they may face. Being prepared to react to change may seem like common sense – and indeed it is. However much development thinking and practice remains stuck in a linear planning model which...
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The UNDP has been exploring new approaches to M&E to better understand and address complex systems challenges. Traditional linear project-based planning and evaluation methods are insufficient for dealing with the unpredictable nature of such systems. The UNDP’s new Strategic Plan calls for a shift in M&E practices to align with the complexity of today’s global challenges. Key points from the blog post include: Learning and Adapting: There’s a need for continuous learning and adaptation in...
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While agile approaches can be extremely effective at a project level, they can impose significant complexity and a need for adaptiveness at the project portfolio level. While this has proven to be highly problematic, there is little research on how to manage a set of agile projects at the project portfolio level. What limited research that does exist often assumes that portfolio-level agility can be achieved by simply scaling project level agile approaches such as Scrum. This study uses a...
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This paper presents a framework for better managing policy messes and draws implications for bad and good mess management in policy analysis and management. The framework has three foci: (1) the cognitive space in which policy messes develop, particularly in terms of gaps between macro-designers and micro-operators; (2) the unique domain of competence within that space where professionals manage the resulting messes by virtue of their skills in recognizing system-wide patterns, formulating...
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There are increasing criticisms of dominant models for scaling up health systems in developing countries and a recognition that approaches are needed that better take into account the complexity of health interventions. Since Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, Chinese government has managed complex, rapid and intersecting reforms across many policy areas. As with reforms in other policy areas, reform of the health system has been through a process of trial and error. There is increasing...
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This paper explores participatory methodologies (PMs) associated with a paradigm of people, contrasted with a dominant paradigm associated with things.
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Guest post from Chris Roche on practical ways of introducing adaptive management, learning from failure etc in aid programmes
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"John Kay tells a fast-paced detective story as he searches for the surprising secret to success...Brilliant." -Tim Harford, author of The Logic of Life In this revolutionary book, economist John Kay proves a notion that feels at once paradoxical and deeply commonsensical: the best way to achieve any complex or broadly defined goal, from happiness to preventing forest fires, is the indirect way. We can learn how to achieve our objectives only through a gradual process of risk taking ...
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Governments and organizations invest huge sums of money in development interventions to explicitly address poverty and its root causes. However, a high proportion of these do not work. This is because interventions are grounded in flawed assumptions about how change happens -- change is rarely linear, yet development interventions are almost entirely based on linear planning models. Change is also characterized by unintended consequences, which are not predictable by planners and by power...
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The focus of this book is on how experts adapt to complexity, synthesize and interpret information in context, and transform or "fuse" disparate items of information into coherent knowledge. The chapters examine these processes across experts (e.g. global leaders, individuals in extreme environments, managers, police officers, pilots, commanders, doctors, inventors), across contexts (e.g. space and space analogs, corporate organizations, command and control, crisis and crowd management, air...
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A step-by-step guide on how to develop a Transformative Theory of Change, for innovation projects, programmes and organisations working on systems transformation. The MOTION project was initiated with one key question in mind: how can we help projects and organisations be more transformative, using the framework and concept provided by the multi-level perspective? And what kind of tools, methods and frameworks can we co-design that translate scientific concepts into practises relevant for...
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In South Sudan, a new water treatment system that provides a community with more clean water at a lower cost. In Sierra Leone, a poster explaining how to prevent the...
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Last month, Duncan Green was kind enough to post my overly ambitious multi-book review on complexity thinking in development on his From Poverty to Power blog. It covered three books: Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos; Jean Boulton, Peter Allen, and Cliff Bowman’s Embracing Complexity; and Danny Burns and Stuart Worsley’s Navigating Complexity in International Development. It...
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This systems change rubric describes different performance levels according to various systems elements, such as policy (formal rules), practices and relationships and connections. Programmes can use the rubric to assess the performance of systems to help decide where and how to intervene, or during and post-implementation to conduct progress assessments, and assess the effectiveness of interventions and type, breadth and depth of systems change. Each performance level description...
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What are the conditions for political development and decay, and the likelihood of sustained political order? What are the limits of established rule as we know it? How much stress can systems tackle before they reach some kind of limit? How do governments tackle enduring ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems and environments? These are some of the big questions of our time. Governance in turbulent times may serve as a stress-test of well-known ways of governing in the 21st century....
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This field guide helps to navigate crises using the Cynefin framework as a compass. It proposes a four-stage approach through which we can: - assess the type of crisis and initiate a response; - adapt to the new pace and start building sensing networks to inform decisions; - repurpose existing structures and working methods to generate radical innovation; - transcend the crisis, formalise lessons learnt and increase resilience. The guide stresses the importance of setting and managing...
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Adaptive Approaches [+]
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