The first step towards creating a successful strategy is creating a map of the territory and diagnosing the situation-at-hand. We’ll need to go beyond asking “What’s going on here?” and look for patterns and facts that might steer our thinking into new and different directions. It’s important for our team to understand that the diagnosis is not the solution. It’s something we should be able to play with and poke from many different directions.
The classic book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy says that a good diagnosis does the following:
- Links facts into a pattern and at a minimum names/classifies the situation into a certain type;
- “Replaces the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects“ and thus enables/encourages more attention to be paid to some issues/feature and less to others;
- “Does more than explain a situation, it also defines a domain of action” that is to say it is actionable, it identifies one or more levers that can be pulled; and
- Is explicit and thus permits an independent person to evaluate the strategy (diagnosis, guiding policy, set of coherent actions).
Below I’ll talk through what we discovered in our week of stock-taking, bring in some outside considerations, and do my best to articulate a diagnosis that will allow us to poke and experiment until we create the best road map forward.
WE ARE AWAYS-ON RESEARCHERS
Imagine that you are in a castle. It is a dark, moonless night, and the castle has no electricity. As you look around, you are surrounded by darkness on all sides. The castle is large and complex, and in order to navigate you’ll need to make a map. You’ve been given a crayon, a piece of paper, and a whole lot of matches. With each strike of a match, you’re able to see just a bit more of the castle - a bit of furniture here, an open hallway there. With each strike, and each bit of new information, you add just a little bit more to your map. Your understanding of the castle expands in tiny, thoughtful increments over time.
This is what the process of learning about the UN system has felt like for our team. We have spent the last six months researching and learning about the realities of the UN System. The UN Secretariat - our particular area of impact - is a large and complex organization. Understanding its structure, culture, capabilities, challenges, and opportunities are critical to our team’s ability to positively impact the organization. Research is, and will continue to be, on-going and fundamental to our work in the Innovation Team. In order to learn about the United Nations system, we engage in the following research methods:
- Interviews (both formal and informal) with stakeholders working within the UN system
- Literature review of existing UN system structure and initiatives, with a particular focus on innovation initiatives.
- Participatory Action Research (PAR) within the the UN system.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
Much of the institutional knowledge of the Secretariat lies in the heads of people who’ve worked within its system over time. Interviews allow us to extract that knowledge and experience and allow it to inform our work. In many cases, the word “interviews” might be misleading, and the word “conversations” might be more appropriate.
Stakeholders have represented a wide range of people, including:
- UN consultants and employees - mostly in middle management (P2 - P5) positions
- People from private sector companies and NGOs who have worked with the UN (including friends from Frog Design)
- ...who else? Is that really it?
Each member of the Innovation Team is asked to consider every conversation within and about the UN system a research and interview opportunity. As researchers, we are always on. Whenever possible, each team member has, and will continue to, share learnings with the rest of the team.
At the moment of this writing, our team has shared our learnings from these conversations in relatively informal ways, including conversations with team members and written notes and posts to our internal team blog.
As our team grows (both in size and maturity), we will need to consider more structured ways of capturing, sharing, and archiving our collective knowledge.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Spread across the internet and tucked away in books are collections of information that have helped us understand the territory we’re working to impact, including:
- The structure and system of the Secretariat, and the functions of each Office and Department
- The existing innovation ecosystem across the UN, including agencies and within the Secretariat
- Details and case studies from specific projects and initiatives that can inform our own work
I’ve been loosely collecting relevant research in an Evernote Notebook. Our team may want to consider a better method of collecting and sharing relevant literature.
PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH
Participatory Action Research (PAR) emphasizes doing research with the communities the researchers are trying to understand, using action as a tool for generating findings, and using reflection and comparison with other research to extract and ground the findings.
Within a PAR process, "communities of inquiry and action evolve and address questions and issues that are significant for those who participate as co-researchers" (Reason & Bradbury). In other words, groups of people are brought together around central questions or activities and through their exploration of the question or engagement with the activity, shed light on various realities of the communities those people represent.
Participatory Action Research has allowed our group to facilitate activities that have intrinsic value to the participants (like leading educational workshops or taking on consulting projects), but, at their core, are achieving the larger goal of helping our team learn about different realities of people working in the UN system.
PROJECTS AS TROJAN HORSES
Using PAR as a research method has meant that the primary function of each project has been simple: To use real-world experience to unearth important insights that will inform our future strategy.
Each project is a tool to help us:
- Create reality checks to validate or refute our early strategic assumptions
- Learn about the needs and challenges of the Secretariat
- Examine strengths, weaknesses, and strategic advantages of our team
- Expose strategic opportunities
- Create the beginnings of a like-minded community and support network
We think our projects as open-ended questions. Or, if you prefer, Trojan Horses that have given us access to people and experiences that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Those learnings will include two types of insights:
- Strategic insights, which inform our understanding of the UN Secretariat and can lead us towards a diagnosis.
- Functional insights, which will help us improve operationally as we move into the future.
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