Usaid Complexity Event - Group journey - Mapping exercise report outs

In our group, we were focusing on the first two elements of the program cycle, so the first one, I call it strategy. What it was called here is assessing and planning, and the themes that really came out, actually I would say the most prominent theme is the importance of engaging a breadth of perspectives in the planning or strategy development process, and that means working across the usual boundaries that divide our thinking and our planning up, so sectoral boundaries, institutional boundaries, cultural boundaries, and so on. It also means not having foregone conclusions about what kinds of development interventions are needed, so really taking a very broad, expansive, intellectually curious approach to assessing and planning, or strategy development. The other component that we dealt with was program and project design, and the key theme that came out there is the critical importance of building and learning flexibility and adaptability so that we're able to learn as we go, and we can make improvements in real time as opposed to just waiting until we've conducted a formal evaluation. So, in other words, building in the room to make continuous feedback, and learning and iterative course correction in a way that compliments the kinds of course correction that we can make after formal evaluations that take place at the midterm or the end of a project. Thank you. We just did a group exercise, where we all sat around and wrote on Post-it Notes some of the challenges we face during the project cycle of assessment, to design, to implementation, to evaluation that are brought about by the complexity of the environments that we work in. After we put up lots of ideas about these challenges and circumstances and complex environments, then we put up other sticky notes about what some of the magical or even practical solutions to those challenges could be, and we were encouraged to be very creative about this. So, it was a lot of fun to see what ideas people had, and that other people, who you may not have known before in the agency or even from other agencies or academic institutions, have similar ideas, problems, and have come up with some ideas that you find relevant to your work, as well. So, some of the stuff that came up for us as themes were: We just don't always know the theory of change in these environments, and a strong theme was the lack of data and ability to collect data, and our inability to really connect with the local people in a way that doesn't induce bias. So, it's hard for us to build a theory of change, to build a baseline, the right indicators, without that knowledge, so this brought up another theme, which is that we need to be flexible and that we need to get comfortable with being flexible, and that led to sort of a takeaway or a conclusion that some of our mechanisms and some of the incentive structures institutionalized in the agency need to allow us to be flexible and not be too risk-averse to allow us to be creative. Those were some of our takeaways. I guess the biggest impact this process of the exercise had for me was just seeing how other people in the agency are also dealing with working in complex environments and facing some of the same challenges, and it was good to hear some of their ideas. My name is Jason Ladner, and I'm with the Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, and what I took away from the breakout session was actually, it was an honor to be able to speak with a host of practitioners that clearly have a lot of experience trying to put what is a complexity approach into their day-to-day work. It was clear that, in many ways, it's the structural constraints, the bureaucratic constraints, the legislative constraints that get in the way of what we're talking about here, which is the ability to have tighter feedback loops, the ability to have much more hands-on work and more time, and the ability to fail constructively, which would be useful to pushing forward the complexity agenda. So, I took that away from folks in the health sector, the agriculture sector, the DG sector, and it was really fascinating to see that, and so then the big question is looking institutionally, looking as USG as a whole, how do we then incentivize the complexity approach, how do we then make room for us to fail in ways that are both accountable to what we're trying to do and what we're trying to achieve. So, I look forward to the next session. What did I get out of working with my colleagues in Section 3? Well, first of all, there was a lot of different perspectives, not just within AID. We had former mission directors all the way down to new foreign service officers, like myself, but we had colleagues from DOD and the State Department, and it was interesting that even though we're at different points in our career and we are coming from the process of design and implementation and evaluation differently, we all saw some of the same things. Even though our perspectives were different, the problems that we identified were more or less similar, and some of the solutions had some of the same undercurrents. Personally, I'm new to the organization, and some of the questions about complexity are things that I've thought about, not only in grad school but when I was deciding to take this job, "Are these challenges too much for this organization?" and it's really heartening to see that they're not, and that there's a lot of people talking about them, and there's a lot of energy going into creating solutions- not solutions, but creating ways to embrace complexity instead of fearing it, and sort of using the energy of the system to change it instead of let that overwhelm our development efforts. We need to absorb more influences from outside of the agency, and we need to become more of a learning agency and an agency that integrated learning into all phases of our work. The group session, our group was very diverse and included experienced people, people fairly new, from different offices doing very much different types of work, and all of us pretty much agreed that we needed to change the paradigm of the way we do business. Essentially, we had to have a more collaborative process, we need to be more flexible, we needed to well, we need more resources, of course. I'm sure most people would say that. We also need to have more flexibility in what we spend our money on, but that of course is a wish list because the budget is outside of our control. But, in terms of what we could do within our powers, most of us thought that striving for more flexible mechanisms, contracting mechanisms, the way we do our evaluations, other things, that this was something that we actually could do in order to make us more capable of handling complex problems, and many of us agreed on this, actually, who wished we had more time to actually do the work, just to put it briefly, rather than just report on it, manage contracts, do a lot of the other things that we do that we wish that we could be on site more, on the ground, know what was happening, have more control over it, all of these things. Again, it's a matter of resources and the way we do business, but I think that was the consensus of most people in our group.