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This paper proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow are significant and differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations. A multi-typology framework is presented, identifying the conditions under which pastoralists can be considered real-time reliability professionals in systems with mandates preventing or otherwise avoiding key events from happening....
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Systemcraft is our applied framework to help leaders and organisations get started and keep going when faced with complex problems. It is built on our practical experience. It draws on a broad body of research, action and theory from the worlds of complexity thinking, systems theory, adaptive management, leadership development, social movements, development theory and beyond. Systemcraft has been designed to make systems thinking something any leader can apply when they find themselves faced...
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There are many definitions of the term ‘transformation’ or ‘transformational change’. The first section of the report develops a basic understanding of transformations or transitions (used synonymously) viewed from various perspectives. In this, transformations are defined as processes that use disruptive innovations to change systems into fundamentally new systems that subsequently form the new mainstream. Section two describes existing approaches to environmental and climate finance in...
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This paper tackles a key problem in path dependence research: how can locked-in organizations regain their scope for maneuver? Leveraging insights from two surprising and thus revelatory cases of organizations that have successfully escaped from path dependence, we develop the theoretical argument that regaining scope for maneuver can be achieved by interrupting the logic of a path’s underlying self-reinforcing mechanisms. More specifically, we argue that, through a targeted interruption of...
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Development and radical uncertaintyFeinstein, O. - 2020 - Development in Practice, 30(8), 1105–1113
Development strategies, programmes and projects are designed making assumptions concerning several variables such as future prices of outputs and inputs, exchange rates and productivity growth. However, knowledge about the future is limited. Uncertainty prevails. The usual approach to deal with uncertainty is to reduce it to risk. Uncertainty is perceived as a negative factor that should and can be eliminated. This article presents an alternative approach which recognises that radical...
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Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...
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The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.
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This Green Paper intends to review key elements of the problem that Development actors will confront as a new decade opens up ahead of us. It will articulate a solution that we believe should become an inherent feature of Development programs and initiatives. This is the outcome of an intense period of experiences and reflections in the Development space across different geographies and institutional mandates and activities, during which the Foundation has collaborated with institutions such...
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Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes. Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but...
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This scoping paper explores the question ‘what would it take to build a culture of learning at scale?’. It focuses on systems-wide learning that can help to inform systems change efforts in complex contexts. To answer this question, literature was reviewed from across diverse disciplines and the realms of education, innovation systems, systems thinking and knowledge management. This inquiry was also supported by in-depth interviews with numerous specialists from the for-purpose sector and...
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The issues of poverty, inequality, racial justice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on industrial models of production and power to "solve" social problems, are not helping. In fact, they are designed to entrench the status quo. In The Systems Work of Social Change, Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici draw on two hundred years of history and a treasure trove of stories of committed social changemakers to uncover...
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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,...
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This paper presents the case for systemic organisational change in the humanitarian system. The paper firstly shows that that organisational learning has tended to reinforce existing ways of working and has not been able to shift a culture that values action over reflection. As a result, the rest of the paper asks about the most significant changes in the humanitarian sector
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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.
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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