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State fragility as a wicked problem?

Posted in Conflict and peace building, Evaluation, Evolution, Leadership, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on February 15, 2012 | 7 Comments »

Fragile states are growing in importance on the development and humanitarian  agenda. One of the most concrete outcomes of last years aid summit in Busan was the New Deal for fragile states. Most major donors are looking to increase their presence and effort in fragile states, and implementing agencies are having to work out what this means for their work. The stakes are high: current data suggests that no fragile state has or will achieve any of the MDGs. This post explores whether we are thinking about fragility in ways that actually helps us work well in such contexts.

First, some basics. There are a lot of debates about fragility and what it means. Some academics argue that fragility is part and parcel of a new Western hegemony, with echoes of 19th century imperialist justifications. It is certainly hard to deny that state fragility has risen up the agenda since 9/11, the ‘global war on terror’ and increasing international concerns about security.

There are now wide range of indices to measure and track state fragility. The Fund for Peace has a failed states index which looks like this:


Separately, the Centre for Systemic Peace publishes an index of state fragility which looks like this:


Of course, there are methodological differences, and any number of research projects could be undertaken to explore these in detail. But what is interesting is that both frameworks indicate that fragility is not the norm but the exception. As one analyst puts it: “state weakness has been a problem for as long as the state itself has been evolving into a universal form of political organization….Indeed, a compelling case can be made that it is the modern Weberian state that is the exception.”

This observation was made by Ken Menkhaus of Davidson College, who for the past 20 years has led work on how international agencies work in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. He argues in a recent article that fragile states are best seen as ‘wicked problems’. Take a look at the characteristics of wicked problems below, and think about situations like Afghanistan, Somalia or DRC:

  1. Wicked problems are difficult to clearly define The nature and extent of the problem depends on who has been asked and different stakeholders have different versions of what the problem is.
  2. Wicked problems have many interdependencies and are often multi-causal. Successfully addressing wicked policy problems usually involves a range of coordinated and interrelated responses, given their multi-causal nature; it also often involves trade-offs between conflicting goals.
  3. Attempts to address wicked problems often lead to unforeseen consequences. Because wicked policy problems are multi-causal with many interconnections to other issues, measures introduced to address the problem frequently lead to unforeseen consequences elsewhere.
  4. Wicked problems are often not stable Often a wicked problem and the constraints or evidence involved in understanding the problem are evolving at the same time that policy makers are trying to address the policy problem. Policy makers have to focus on a moving target.
  5. Wicked problems usually have no clear solution Since there is no definitive, stable problem there is often no definitive solution to wicked problems. Problem-solving often ends when deadlines are met, or as dictated by other resource constraints rather than when the ‘correct’ solution is identified.  To pursue approaches based on ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ may cause policy makers to act on unwarranted and unsafe assumptions and create unrealistic expectations.
  6. Wicked problems are socially complex. The social complexity of wicked problems, rather than their technical complexity, overwhelms most current problem-solving and project management approaches. Solutions to wicked problems usually involve coordinated action by a range of stakeholders working at every level from the international to the local.
  7. Wicked problems involve changing behaviour. The solutions to many wicked problems involve changing the behaviour and/or gaining the commitment of individual citizens.
  8. Some wicked problems are characterised by chronic policy failure. Some longstanding wicked problems seem intractable. Development has many examples where the persistence of a problem has not been because of a lack of sustained effort.

Menkhaus is clear that the ‘wickedness’ of such fragile contexts needs to be understood and integrated into our strategies and practices:

How we conceive of the condition of state fragility is critical to our ability to fashion effective strategies in response. To date, our efforts to define, categorize, measure, interpret, and predict state fragility have been at best partial successes. As with many important political concepts, state fragility is maddeningly difficult to pin down, all the more so because on the surface it appears to be so self-evident (and solvable) a syndrome. In reality, the notion of state fragility constitutes a complex cocktail of causes and effects, a syndrome that has proven largely impervious to quick, template-driven external solutions.

The key message from Menkhaus is that the way in which aid agencies work needs to undergo a major rethink if we want to see improved results from our efforts. This is consistent with recent mainstream thinking – as the Busan New Deal document states: “the current ways of working in fragile states need serious improvement.”

Myself and others with an interest in complex systems have been doing some initial work on what this new approach might look like. Last year I attended a roundtable at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), organised by Bill Frej, a USAID Minister and former Mission Chief in Afghanistan. The focus of the event was how complex systems thinking could be used to improve foreign policy efforts, especially in fragile states.

Bill and I followed this up with a co-authored SFI Working Paper, published in June 2011, which synthesised our overall findings. In it we set out a number of principles, distilled from the combined insights of the complexity scientists and foreign policy experts at the roundtable:

Principle 1) To work to understand the systemic nature of the problems faced in foreign policy and how these problems evolve over time.

Principle 2) To involve those people who matter the most in the decisions that matter the most.

Principle 3) To avoid ‘silver bullet’ strategies and instead attempt multiple parallel experiments.

Principle 4) To establish real-time strategic analysis & learning as a key form of operational feedback.

Principle 5) To be open to the fundamental adaptation of efforts, along with changes in local contexts and conditions.

Principle 6) To reframe the overall foreign policy efforts as dynamic networks of multiple systems and actors.

Subsequently, Bill and I have been involved as part of a team assessing a major donor’s ongoing efforts in fragile states. It has proved a fascinating process, which we are just in the stages of wrapping up. What was especially interesting, from the perspective of the current post, was the extent to which the principles above seemed to ring true for the organisation in question.

Once the final report is published next month, I will post a piece illustrating these principles in more detail. For now, I would be interested to know if others working on issues of fragility and conflict also find this to be an interesting area for exploration.

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South Africa’s democracy: Complexity theory in action

Posted in Accountability, Economics, Evolution, Innovation, Institutions, Leadership, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 16, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Dr Brian Levy is a Public Sector Governance Advisor at the World Bank, andused to head up the unit responsible implementing the Bank’s governance and anti-corruption strategy.

In this guest post, cross-posted from here, he explores the relevance of complexity theory insights for South Africa. A fascinating read.

The edge of chaos is the balance point where the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either…The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive…”
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity.

We human beings do not like uncertainty. We seek to understand what events portend, taking comfort in coming up with an answer. So whenever something new in South Africa makes headlines – and that’s been happening quite often recently, the news not always happy – people ask me, “What do you think? Is the political settlement falling apart?”. And always, the expectation is for a definitive answer, one way or the other.

Yet sometimes there is more wisdom, and more comfort to be taken, in acknowledging a more humbling truth – that which of many alternative futures (including ones we cannot imagine) will come to pass is unknowable, is a product of decisions and actions that have not yet been made. This understanding of change as something ‘emergent’, evolving, which can unfold in far-reaching yet ex ante unpredictable directions, is the key insight of ‘complexity theory’ – an insight which can offer a useful dose of humility to governance prognosticators.

In a previous post, I described South Africa’s abiding tension between democracy and inequality. As that post suggested, one of the results of that tension could be a rise of patronage, personalized decision-making as to how to share the ‘spoils’ of power. Indeed, the strains on the country’s constitutional democracy are visible in the drumbeat of daily headlines, as I found when I recently spent some time in the country. Consider the following:

  • Over the past year, the country’s estimable Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, investigated and made public compelling evidence of corruption on the part of two sitting cabinet ministers, and the chief of police. For many months, President Zuma did nothing – until October 24th  2011, when he unexpectedly fired the cabinet ministers, suspended the police chief, and announced the appointment of a judicial commission to re-investigate long festering allegations of corruption (including against himself) in a weapons procurement deal.
  • Then there’s the populist demagoguery of the leader of the ruling African National Congress’s Youth League, Julius Malema, whose political star, and polarizing influence on South Africa’s political discourse, seemed to be rising – until a disciplinary committee of the ANC announced on November 10th, 2011 that it had found Malema guilty of bringing the ANC into disrepute, and suspended him from the party for five years.
  • There’s the China connection. Across Africa, a context is raging between China and Africa’s erstwhile Western colonial (and post-colonial) hegemonies – for hearts, minds, natural resources, and business more generally. With its sophisticated institutions, and proud transition to constitutional democracy, it might be thought that South Africa would be unambiguously in the Western camp. So against that backdrop, the failure to grant the global human rights icon, the Dalai Lama, a visa in time to attend the October 2011 80th birthday celebration of his friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is startling – and can best be explained by a desire to curry favor with the Chinese.
  • Finally, there’s the on-again, off-again – but then on again – Protection of Information Bill which (after numerous delays, and promises of consultation before finalization) was rushed through South Africa’s parliament on 22nd November 2011. Passage of the bill was seen as a catastrophe by many in South Africa’s civil rights community. Indeed, it signals a startling turn away from a post-apartheid commitment to openness. But no less an observer than The Economist, noting that the bill had been ‘vastly improved’ over earlier versions, suggested that some of the doomsday criticism ‘may be over the top’. And, in light of the ANC’s hitherto ironclad hold on the loyalties of its core constituencies, it is surely no small matter that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (a stalwart part of the ANC alliance) has threatened to take the bill to the Constitutional Court if it is not amended to incorporate a ‘public interest’ exception for whistleblowers.

In the face of all of these cross-currents, any claims of certainty as to where this interplay of forces will lead is surely illusory. Each of them could turn out to be a salutary example of checks and balances in action – of how democratic institutions can keep a country on track, even in the face of pressures to the contrary. But they could also be portents of a future that will become increasingly challenging for the country’s constitutional order.

But in South Africa’s case, and surely elsewhere, too.   perhaps the lack of certainty is a source of comfort. Knowing that the future is not preordained can free us from endless preoccupation with what is inherently unknowable, enabling us instead to direct energy towards action, in service of a hopeful future that we can, perhaps, yet help to create.

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What are leaders really for?

Posted in Accountability, Campaigns, Conflict and peace building, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Self organisation on December 7, 2011 | 5 Comments »

A continuing theme on this blog has been the issue of leadership. Many reports and studies call for it, reforms are seen as impossible without it, critical challenges will not be met without it, and we are all ready to point out the lack of it (in others, at least).

Despite the fact that leadership is one of the most researched topics in management literature (or perhaps because of this fact) , our understanding of leadership remains vague and ambiguous.

A blog on HBR by Duncan Watts of Yahoo’s Human Social Dynamics research group eloquently explores the concept and ideas with reference to recent social movements.

His argument resonates strongly with ideas of complex adaptive leadership explored in a previous post here.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has both perplexed and frustrated observers and analysts by its persistent refusal to nominate an identifiable leadership who can in turn articulate a coherent agenda. What is the point, these critics wonder, of a movement that can’t figure out where it’s trying to go, and how can it get there without anyone to lead it?

It’s a reasonable question, but it says at least as much about what we want from our social movements as it does about the way movements actually succeed.

Typically, the way we think of social change is some variant of the “great man” theory of history: that remarkable events are driven by correspondingly remarkable individuals whose vision and leadership inspire and coordinate the actions of the many. Sometimes these individuals occupy traditional roles of leadership, like presidents, CEOs, or generals, while at other times they emerge from the rank and file; but regardless of where they come from, their presence is necessary for real social change to begin. As Margaret Meade is supposed to have said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It’s an inspiring idea, but over 100 years ago in his early classic of social psychology, “The Crowd,” the French social critic Gustave LeBon, argued that the role of the leader was more subtle and indirect. According to LeBon, it was the crowd, not the princes and generals, that had become the driving force of social change. Leaders still mattered, but it wasn’t because they themselves put their shoulders to the wheel of history; rather it was because they were quick to recognize the forces at work and adept at placing themselves in the forefront.

Even before LeBon, no less an observer of history than Tolstoy presented an even more jaundiced view of the great man theory. In a celebrated essay on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin summed up Tolstoy’s central insight this way: “the higher the soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history.” According to Tolstoy, in other words, the accounts of historians are borderline fabrications, glossing over the vast majority of what actually happens in favor of a convenient storyline focused on the skill and leadership of the great generals.

Thinkers like Le Bon and Tolstoy and Berlin therefore lead us to a radically alternative hypothesis of social change: that successful movements succeed for reasons other than the presence of a great leader, who is as much a consequence of the movement’s success as its cause. Explanations of historically important events that focus on the actions of a special few therefore misunderstand their true causes, which are invariably complex and often depend on the actions of a great many individuals whose names are lost to history.

Interestingly, in the natural world we don’t find this sort of explanation controversial. When we hear that a raging forest fire has consumed millions of acres of California forest, we don’t assume that there was anything special about the initial spark. Quite to the contrary, we understand that in context of the large-scale environmental conditions — prolonged drought, a buildup of flammable undergrowth, strong winds, rugged terrain, and on so — that truly drive fires, the nature of the spark itself is close to irrelevant.

Yet when it comes to the social equivalent of the forest fire, we do in effect insist that there must have been something special about the spark that started it. Because our experience tells us that leadership matters in small groups such as Army platoons or start-up companies, we assume that it matters in the same way for the very largest groups as well. Thus when we witness some successful movement or organization, it seems obvious to us that whoever the leader is, his or her particular combination of personality, vision, and leadership style must have supplied the critical X factor, where the larger and more successful the movement, the more important the leader will appear.

By refusing to name a leader, Occupy Wall Street presents a challenge to this view. With no one figure to credit or blame, with no face to put on a sprawling inchoate movement, and with no hierarchy of power, we simply don’t know how to process what “it” is, and therefore how to think about it. And because this absence of a familiar personality-centric narrative makes us uncomfortable, we are tempted to reject the whole thing as somehow not real. Or instead, we insist that in order to be taken seriously, the movement must first change to reflect what we expect from serious organizations — namely a charismatic leader to whom we can attribute everything.

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, we will probably get our wish, for two reasons. First, if OWS grows large enough to deliver any lasting social change, some hierarchy will become necessary in order to coordinate its increasingly diverse activities; and a hierarchy by nature requires a leader. And second, precisely because the outside world wants a leader — to negotiate with, to hold responsible, and ultimately to lionize — the temptation to be that person will eventually prove irresistible.

Leaders, in other words, are necessary, but not because they are the source of social change. Rather their real function is to occupy the role that allows the rest of us to make sense of what is happening — just as Tolstoy suspected. For better and worse, telling stories is how we make sense of the world, and it’s hard to tell a story without focal actors around which to center the action.

But as we witness a succession of popular movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, we can at least pause to appreciate the real story, which is the remarkable phenomenon of a great many ordinary individuals coming together to change the world.

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Complexity and Growing Up

Posted in Evolution, Leadership, Public Policy, Strategy on October 20, 2011 | 8 Comments »

Ted Cadsby, MBA, CFA, is a corporate director, principal of TRC Consulting, former executive vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and author of two books on investing. This was cross-posted from Huffington.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that history teaches us nothing. A decade after the “mission accomplished” banner debacle, many voters still clamor for simple solutions captured by tidy slogans, such as “no new taxes” or “no new spending.” As an electorate, we still don’t seem to grasp how complex our 21st-century challenges are — how they defy simple, sound-bite solutions. Never mind President Obama growing into his role by becoming “more presidential.” When are we voters going to mature?

Witness the preposterously overblown confidence of our 20/20 hindsight. As in, “Unemployment would be lower if Obama’s initial financial rescue plan had been bolder,” or, “The economy would be on stronger footing if Obama had not increased the deficit so much.” Really? The fact that economists didn’t agree then and don’t agree now should be proof enough that nothing was or is obvious.

Or the seemingly perfect clairvoyance with which we predict the future. As in, “We have to spend a lot more to get unemployment down,” or “Our only choice is to reduce the deficit if we’re going to keep the country strong for the next generation.”

The reality is that 21st-century problems are too complex to know definitively how they can be solved. They are more than just complicated — they comprise multiple causal factors that interact in intricate ways that are impossible to perfectly assess and predict. How much better or worse the economy would be now had the original fiscal stimulus been different is fundamentally unknowable. Same for the impact of policy decisions being taken today — we are limited to best guesses at how all the moving parts will shift and adapt. To think that anyone, including the president, can assess and respond to complex problems with certainty, is to be caught in a child-like mindset where an economic system can be fixed as easily as glue repairs a broken toy.

This doesn’t mean public policy has become just a crap shoot. We do have ways of tackling complexity, largely emanating from the two fields of complexity science and cognitive science. Complexity science reveals that the more complex aspects of reality are best analyzed as whole systems that can only be understood by examining the deeply-imbedded, non-linear interrelationships of the system’s parts. Cognitive science reveals that our minds evolved to think not with a systems mindset, but to rely on simple, linear, cause-effect modeling that served our ancestors well but is inadequate for grappling with modern public policy issues. Therein lies the source of our intellectual immaturity: the mismatch between how complex things work and the simple cognitive methods we use to understand them. Our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world cannot be described with our default preference for clear, black and white solutions. Complexity demands a more sophisticated cognitive approach.

Complex problems require multiple perspectives, a variety of possible explanations and constant testing and retesting of hypotheses before it is safe to draw any conclusions. Even at the point of concluding, the best we can hope for are provisional solutions. In fact, while our natural operating style is rushing to certainty on the back of a simple model of causality, complexity is best handled with experimentation. Because the information cues we need to make sense of complexity lie below the surface, complexity forces us to try something, interpret the feedback, and then try again. While political leaders such as Obama may appear to be vacillating, they may be the best complexity managers around, because they never assume “mission accomplished.”

Obama deserves some benefit of the doubt that he’s managing complexity in the best way anyone can. It’s time for us to grow into our roles as a mature and sophisticated electorate who resist the temptation of Republican-style “sloganism” — especially the Tea Party variety.

The race is on between the complexity that is exploding around us and our ability to understand and manage it. We’re behind and the only way to catch up is to grow up.

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USAID’s Complexity Journey

Posted in Conflict and peace building, Evaluation, Innovation, Leadership, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on October 17, 2011 | 5 Comments »

Last week saw a remarkable meeting in Washington, bringing together USAID staff with scientists and practitioners working on complex systems. This post reflects on the event and outlines some of the emerging lessons.

Background

There have been a number of meetings on the topic of complexity and development in different locations around the world in the last few years (see here for a list of the ones that I know about). The one I have just attended in Washington was the first such event put on by a major donor, for its own staff, with a focus on what it should be doing differently as a result of the insights of complex systems research (see more about the agenda and participants here)

Organised by Tjip Walker and colleagues at the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, the day started with an exploration of ideas from complex systems research. It then moved onto case studies of specific applications followed by a series of facilitated discussions on what USAID should be doing to take account of the principles of complex systems research in their work.

Contexts

In his opening remarks, David Kilkullen of Caerus Associates shared some pertinent reflections on the importance of complex systems thinking for modern foreign policy problems. David is a political anthropologist by training and a world-leading counter-terrorism expert by trade, and his talk illustrated his wide-ranging knowledge. He argued that the key to addressing complex systems was a combination of rigorous, data driven approaches to track patterns and dynamics of change with ‘deep dives’ – namely, on-the-ground research to test hypotheses and sense the emerging issues. He gave the example of Somali piracy being seen as a closed and static problem – “send the Navy in, dammit!” – to an open dynamic problem that was the manifestation of intricate interactions between multiple actors following their own interests. These actors included transnational criminal networks, shipping companies, insurance firms, security agencies and – last but not least – aid agencies.

The first chaired session saw Chris Wood, deputy chief of the Santa Fe Institute present on how his organisation – widely acknowledged as the leading institute in complex systems research – was dealing these issues. His presentation was eclectic and communicated some challenging ideas with a light touch. Chris highlighted that complexity wasn’t a science – yet – but a slowly coalescing set of ideas, methods and tools. Michael Quinn Patton gave a characteristically thought-provoking presentation, with evaluation as a starting point, but with references to strategy formation, the nature of systems, and the nature of social change. I gave a presentation on my $0.02 worth as to why development agencies need to engage with complexity research and the potential benefits. (you can download my presentation in pdf form here).

The next ‘case study’ session focused on concrete applications of complex systems thinking, ranging from terrorism and civil wars, systems mapping of conflicts and the importance of ‘design thinking’. Highlights for me included:

· the analysis of civil war dynamics presented by Aaron Clauset, which powerfully illustrated the kinds of insights that can be derived from existing data sets. Aaron’s detailed analysis of PRIO data yielded some fascinating hypotheses about the structure of different kinds of violent insurgencies and conflicts. As Aaron suggested, some of the most valuable lessons are about things that won’t work.

· Rob Ricigliano’s presentation of a system dynamics map, a tool popularised by Peter Senge in his work on learning organisations, but which is being applied in many other settings. Rob showed how his work in South Sudan helped develop a map of the complex feedback loops that can spin off from, and fundamentally challenge, pretty much any external intervention.

· Alexa Courtney talked about the need to understand and embrace ‘design thinking’ of the kind that Apple and others have made their core competency. Takeaway: the key is to build innovative platforms that unlock existing capacities, rather than deliver over-specified, top-down solutions.

Discussions

Later sessions proved equally fascinating, and were built around a technique called ‘journey mapping’ and run by Richard Tyson, an inspiring facilitator who specialises in innovation strategies. The participants worked together in small groups to think through what should be done differently in the face of a world characterised by interlocking complex adaptive systems. This session was especially liberating because Richard called for all of the presenters to take off their ‘expert hats’ and engage with the issues on an equal footing with the conference participants.

The final session had USAID staff reflecting in plenary on lessons from the event and key next steps. Highlights for me included:

· The need to admit where things aren’t working and look for alternative ways of thinking and working. This includes areas such as fragile states and conflict, resilience, urbanisation, growth dynamics, global nature of food security, health systems strengthening – the list goes on…

· The need to pilot complex systems ideas with a clear analysis of where they might add value. This means digging deep into assumptions we currently hold which may be inappropriate and testing the alternative assumptions of complexity research which could prove more relevant to the problems we face.

· Applying a portfolio approach across the full range development investments – which means focusing on the simple stuff where that is what matters most, but not denying or ignoring complexity where it is present. Notions of risk and reward matter a great deal, and needs to be thought about in a more strategic fashion.

· The need to make adaptive management a watchword for all aid programmes, enabling programmes to evolve along with the context they face. As a starting point, this means engaging with critical problems in the spirit of scientific inquiry and experimentation, grounded in a clear understanding of what we want to achieve, but with more flexibility as to how we achieve those goals

· The need for better quality dialogue within the organisation across disciplines, and across organisational boundaries - silos are a reality of working life, but the some of the most important issues we face seem to fall through the cracks in our organisational matrices. The best way we have so far of addressing this is to ensure better, more participatory dialogue on shared challenges.

Reflections

Reflecting on the event afterwards over a couple of beers with a couple of  fellow speakers, we were struck by five things.

First, USAID-ers are sharp operators. I must have spoken to 80% of the 75-plus participants and everyone was critically engaged with the key issues facing their area of work, displayed fluency in their specific fields, were self-aware and good communicators. There was also a lot of self-deprecating humour apparent on the day, which made for a relaxed and collegiate atmosphere. USAID is not without its problems, of course – just as in all organisations, aid-related or otherwise. And there was no doubt a degree of self-selection going on – those staffers interested in a meeting in complexity science may well be those with higher-than-average GPAs. But I came away feeling that this was an agency with a lot going for it intellectually. If a smart, well-trained, scientifically literate & dedicated cadre of staff is a prerequisite for dealing with issues of complexity and uncertainty, then USAID seems to be ahead of the curve.

Second, the politics of aid – both global and local – matter a great deal, and they do not always make for a fertile ground for engaging with complexity. The recent cuts proposed to US foreign aid are one manifestation, but there are numerous others. In the face of this, there is a need for strong aid leadership, which can play the short-term political game while keeping a clear eye on the need for new ways of thinking about & doing things. Not easy, but essential.

Third, on the bureaucracy of aid. There are some – some say too few – examples of the weight of the aid system being navigated deftly, while of course ensuring the necessary accountabilities. If we are going to take on the so-called ‘aid counterbureaucracy‘, it may be vital to understand these instances of where the system didn’t inhibit innovation and learning, and use them to justify and inspire more such efforts.

Fourth, on the ideas of complexity, it was great to have experts from across the complexity spectrum, from ‘hard scientists’ like Chris Wood and Aaron Clauset to evaluators like Michael Quinn Patton, to conflict specialists like David Kilkullen, Rob Ricigliano and Alexa Courtney. I have been to a few such ‘cross-disciplinary’ events this year and this was one was unique in that everyone seemed to strive for, and perhaps even reach some common ground. Personally, I think it was because everyone was open to learn and put their own preconceptions aside.  For a while, anyway :)

Finally, given how wedded the aid system is to assumptions that are in direct contrast to the implications of complex systems research, putting on this event was a courageous move by USAID and PPL. The gamble paid off – the event was met with appreciation and positive feedback across the broad from the participants. By the end of the day many of the participants were even more convinced of the need to move away from the methodological and philosophical monoculture that increasingly limits aid efforts. A small but clear manifestation of the old adage: courage begets courage.

USAID’s PPL is working on various forms of follow-up, both in terms of documenting the event and on how to take some of the suggestions forward. I will share more details on this important initiative soon.

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The Complexity of Scaling Up

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Evolution, Healthcare, Innovation, Leadership, Malaria, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on October 3, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Despite increased prominence and funding of global health initiatives, attempts to scale up health services in developing countries are failing, with serious implications for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. A new paper argues that a key first step is to get a more realistic understanding of health systems, using the lens of complex adaptive systems.

Much ongoing work in development and humanitarian aid is based on the idea  of ‘scaling up’ effective solutions. Healthcare is one of the areas where this idea has played a central role – from WHO’s Health for All in the 1960s to UNICEF’s child healthcare programmes, from rolling out HIV-AIDS, malaria and TB treatments to the package of interventions delivered to achieve the Millennium Development Goal on health.

However, despite the fact there are many cost-effective solutions to health problems faced in developing countries, many agencies are still frustrated in their attempts to deliver them at scale. This may be because of a widepread failure to understand the nature of health systems.

Melissa Leach, director of the superb STEPS Centre, has described health systems as:

complex systems made up of networks of many heterogeneous components that interact non-linearly. While pathways of change can be shaped by governance and are influenced by path dependencies, they are not entirely controllable or predictable; there will always be uncertainties and unintended consequences and new ‘emergent’ interactions and behaviours.’

If we accept this eminently sensible description, then it is little wonder that scaling up efforts continue to be frustrated. The paper by Ligia Paina and David H Peters, published in Health Policy and Planning in August, argues that there is a drastic need for a shift in thinking:

…from the current models around scaling up health services, which revolve around linear, predictable processes, to models that embrace uncertainty, non-linear processes, the uniqueness of local context and emergent characteristics.”

Their argument is supported by the fact that existing assumptions about the nature and hoped-for successes of scaling up have led to a lot of disappointments. Moreover, these efforts ‘offer little insight on how to scale up effective interventions in the future.’

The paper explores 5 concepts of complexity science, illustrated below.


All of these ideas carry relevant lessons for the design, planning, implementation and evaluation of health policy and programmes. As the authors conclude:

The implications include paying more attention to local context, incentives and institutions, as well as anticipating certain types of unintended consequences that can undermine scaling up efforts, and developing and implementing programmes that engage key actors through transparent use of data for ongoing problem-solving and adaptation.”

The authors close with a proposal that future efforts to scale up should adapt and apply complex systems models and methodologies which have been used in other fields but which remain underused in public health. These include network scinece approaches, modelling techniques, and tools to better understand systems dynamics.

The potential benefits are clearly stated:

This can help policy makers, planners, implementers and researchers to explore different and innovative approaches for reaching populations in need with effective, equitable and efficient health services.”

These ideas are already being applied in practice, The authors are involved in a capacity strengthening programme on complexity and health systems in China. Separately, the WHO has published a guide to using systems analysis in health systems strengthening, which builds on a number of the concept described above.

These are all fascinating developments, and suggest that health may be a key area where the ideas from complexity science can prove of tangible value for development and humanitarian work.

Interested readers can hear an podcast about the article here, with David Peters talking about his ideas and experiences (and me saying a few words about the history of complexity science and the relevance for health efforts.) David has also blogged about it here.

Previous Aid on the Edge posts relevant to this topic include MDGS and theories of change, Scan HIV-AIDS Globally, Reinvent Locally and How do you solve a problem like malaria?.

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Results 2.0: Towards a portfolio-based approach

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Healthcare, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Malaria, Meetings, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on June 30, 2011 | 9 Comments »

The international development sector has been in a tug of war around the ‘results agenda’ for the past few months. This post explores the tensions and suggests a way to bring the sides together by focusing on the relevance and appropriateness of different approaches.*

I: The Results Tug of War

Development results is one of many areas where discussion and debate seem increasingly polarised. On one side of the results tug of war are those calling for more and better results, more rigour in analysis and more discipline in reporting. The failure of development, they argue, is basically about the failure to focus on results. ‘Modern management techniques’, especially those that are embodied by ‘results-based management’ are seen as the answer.

On the other side are those who argue for a ‘push back’ against this approach. Such reductionist approaches are seen as only suitable for certain kinds of development interventions, and that at their worst, these approaches inhibit the creativity and innovation needed to achieve results in the first place. The danger here is that we throw out the results baby with the reductionist bathwater (see here for a previous Aid on the Edge post on this).

What is increasingly evident is that, in the diverse and dynamic aid landscape we face today, all agencies attempting to genuinely strengthen accountability and learning face a number of common challenges. This is a preliminary list, I am sure readers will be able to think of more.

  • Data availability, coverage and quality are perennial problems
  • Participation and ownership - as Robert Chambers might ask: ’whose results count?’
  • Incentives and disincentives to use information and results, especially when they run counter to individual and institutional interests
  • Bureaucratic inertia: all too often results-related work is placed on top of and increases the already considerable bureaucratic and administrative burden on aid agencies, rather than simplifying and reducing it
  • Risks and fear of failure: How can we manage and be transparent about the different kinds of risk failures inherent to development projects & programmes?
  • Many conflicting imperatives: learning vs accountability, policy vs operations, domestic vs international

The key point is that these apply equally to both sides of the results tug of war. As a result, a lot of effort is being wasted, with problems being dealt with in entrenched intellectual silos rather than in a collective manner.

So what to do to move beyond the ‘tug of war’? I would argue that a first step would to think about how to bring the different results approaches together to establish a more constructive dialogue. What is needed is a more flexible and differentiated approach to results, one which takes account of the diversity of the development and humanitarian portfolio.

II: A Draft ‘Portfolio of Results’ Framework

What might such a portfolio-based approach look like? There are a number of useful approaches from academia, civil society and business strategy that can help here. These include Brenda Zimmerman’s simple-complicated-complex distinction, the Cynefin framework of Cognitive Edge, work done by Alnoor Ebrahim at Harvard University, work done by Eliot Stern on relevance of different approaches to impact assessment and finally a recent model put forward by Patrick Moriarty of IRC.

All of these suggest in their different ways that appropriate strategic approaches (and by extension, results approaches) need to be based on:

(a) the nature of the intervention we are looking at, and

(b) the context in which it is being delivered.

Reading across these approaches we can suggest a preliminary framework which may prove useful in bringing together different results approaches in a productive and mutually beneficial way.

First, imagine an agencies projects and programmes being distributed across a spectrum of the ‘nature of interventions’, placing relatively simple interventions on one end, and more complex issues, at the other.

Then let’s add in a vertical axes on context. Again, think of a spectrum, this time from stable / identical to dynamic / diverse.

This gives us a 2 by 2 framework for analysing and mapping different development interventions - in effect, this is a draft ‘portfolio of results’ framework. Where an intervention is positioned on this framework has implications for the kinds of results orientation we can take, as shown below.

In the top left corner of simple interventions in identical stable settings, is the Plan and Control zone – here ‘traditional’ results-based management approach, conventional value for money analyses and randomised control trials work well.

The bottom right corner of complex interventions in diverse, dynamic settings is what I have termed Managing Turbulence – here the philosophy is less ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ (as in the Plan and Contol zone) and more ‘Fire, Ready, Aim’. Here we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in dynamic and fluid contexts.

In between is what I have called Adaptive Management, where either because of the nature of the intervention or the nature of the context, multiple parallel experiments need to be undertaken, with real-time learning to check their relative effectiveness, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that don’t.

III: Applying a Portfolio of Results Approach: A health-focused illustration

By way of illustration, let’s look at three health interventions – vaccines, HIV-AIDs, and rebuilding national health systems. I would argue that they could be distributed on the matrix something like this.

So if we are looking at simple interventions in a stable / identical environment, or what might be called the plan and control domain, randomised control trials, traditional cost-based ’value for money and results-based management approaches work great. Vaccines are perhaps the best example here. And as the ongoing MSF campaign on reforming GAVI suggests, a focus numbers and bean-counting can be of vital importance to ensuring effectiveness.

But we may find ourselves managing interventions that are more complex, in stable contexts. We can also think about situations where the intervention is simple but the context is dynamic. In both of these instances we may need to move away from blueprints towards a more adaptive management approach, trying out multiple parallel experiments and monitoring progress and rates of success and adapting to context. In HIV-AIDS responses, the optimal mix of responses is key and almost always locally determined (see previous Aid on the Edge post here). Also increasingly relevant are global malaria responses which need to adapt to the changing patterns of incidence and the evolution of resistance (ditto here).

Finally, in environments where our interventions are complex and the context is dynamic and diverse, we have to take a leaf out of the book of those who work in high risk environments – professional crisis managers, military and so on. Programmes to rebuild health systems, especially in fragile states, are a good example here. Here we need to be doing action research, real-time assessments and learning by doing.

This is not a rigid framework and there is overlap between the different areas. But different approaches to results can be shown to be more or less effective in different domains. In general terms, you can do a detailed RCT in the bottom right quadrant, but it may be a thankless task and not the best use of resources. You can do an RCT in the top right quadrant, but it could well prove to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. And so on.

(This also helps think about the concerns of one side of the tug of war – that there is a pressure to push development to the top left domain, and a widespread misapplication of the top-left tools for the other domains.)

Obviously this is a preliminary framework based on reflection and discussion, and is open to critique and debate. The key principle is that a more nuanced approach to results will have to be based on a systematic assessment of, at a minimum, our interventions and the context we are working within.

IV: Taking the Results 2.0 agenda forward

This kind of framework can also be used to think strategically about our overall portfolio of projects and programmes. How is our overall spend allocated between these ‘domains’? What are the implications for risk? I think there is a useful analogy with investment portfolio managers are used to diversifying their portfolios in order to reduce their exposure (see diagram below).

We urgently need to develop new ways of analysing the different elements of our portfolio. Through this we can start to unpack and understand the diversity of our efforts, and ensure we don’t take a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to results and all that entails.

There are a number of follow-on issues about how we might take this area of work forward.

  • We will need to refine or adjust the draft ‘portfolio of results’ framework, based on more in-depth analysis, discussion and debate. Of course, we may need something completely different to what is proposed here (all feedback, however critical is warmly welcomed!), but the key is that we need something to bring diverse constituencies and approaches together.
  • We need to think about which sectors are amenable to a portfolio type  approach to results, where we can pilot a ‘Results 2.0 process’ and we need to think about what new kinds of tools and methods might be required. I think health would be a great sector to start on.
  • Different kinds of interventions will need different kinds of information, which will call for different tools for managing this information. New kinds of tools and techniques will be necessary. Importantly, these should help to consolidate and simplify, rather than just increase, the reporting and administrative burden on the sector.
  • We urgently need to think about how this affects development communications, and how we can start to develop more sophisticated framing and messaging of positive and negative results, based on the different elements of our portfolio. This will be perhaps the hardest part of this new results agenda, as it means that we will have to tell our key stakeholders things like ‘we don’t know’, or even worse, ‘we failed’. This may mean riding with punches in the short-term. But this will also mean we will need to think hard about what different stakeholders expectations are, and how they can be best met. The overall legitimacy and sustainability of such efforts demands greater involvement of national governments, civil society and poor communities.

I want to close with this thought from a cross-country study of results-based  management looking at Western countries – that results are not an end in themselves, but are a means by which to establish trust in the system. I would add: and within the system.

Because we do so many different things in development, we have to do different things to earn trust of our diverse constituencies. (We may also have to accept that in some quarters, trust will never be established, but that is another story.) What we cannot do is move forward without finding ways of trusting each other, whatever our methodological or conceptual background and prejudices.

Bringing our diverse opinions and ideas together to test their relevance and appropriateness seems like an essential first step.

* This is the summary of a talk I gave at the June 2011 IDS-ODI roundtable on results with the UK Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell, revised following useful comments from participants. Special thanks go to Robert Chambers and Simon Maxwell for thoughtful and constructive feedback.

Fellow participants have also blogged on the meeting:

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Success, failure and what lies between

Posted in Accountability, Economics, Evolution, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Meetings, Public Policy, Strategy on June 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Earlier this week Tim Harford, also known as the Undercover Economist, gave a fantastic talk at ODI on the topic of ‘Development as Trial and Error’. Drawing on his latest book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim provided the audience with a compelling account of the need for a different way of thinking about and navigating complex problems. (click here and scroll down for videos of the talk and
subsequent discussion)

One of his starting points was to highlight the considerable complexity of the economy, drawing on the work of Eric Beinhocker. This compared the ‘product space’ in different societies – the number of distinct products that are on offer. In hunter gatherer societies, it amounts to some 300 products. In the average Wal-Mart, it is 100,000. In a city like New York or London, it is 10 billion. (you can see Eric’s explanation of this in his presentation at a UKCDS workshop in May)

Tim used this concept, and a story about an unusual project to build a toaster from scratch, to argue that this kind of complexity can most effectively be navigated through evolutionary principles of ‘variation, selection and amplification’ that enable lots of small ‘trial and error’ experiments to be aggregated as effectively as possible.

The market was given as one example of such an aggregator, but there are obvious shortcomings. It has worked for some kinds of problems – Western affluence, most notably. But there are other problems where the market has failed, or where its influence has been far from desirable. Other examples include the scientific enterprise, consisting of diverse means of submitting and peer review of new ideas and experiments. But of course the scientific establishment is also prone to conservatism and inhibiting innovation.

So what can we say about situations where the market is not working or cannot work, where peer review mechanisms are not in place, and where tolerance of failure is impossibly high? The public sector was the example that everyone kept coming back to. How do you get the process of trial and error working in such settings? There are numerous ways Tim touched upon, including innovation prizes, creating artificial marketplaces, finding ways of supporting entrepreneurs, and so on. This is a great article he wrote for Slate, drawing from the book, on exactly this topic. As he puts it there:

Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: It’s a price worth paying. We don’t expect every lottery ticket to pay a prize, but if we want any chance of winning that prize, then we buy a ticket. In the statistical jargon, the pattern of innovative returns is heavily skewed to the upside; that means a lot of small failures and a few gigantic successes.

The paradox at the heart of the need to be more systematic (i.e. controlled,
managerial) about innovation (i.e. disruptive, entrepreneurial) is one that is
not easily overcome. Tim’s remarkable achievement in Adapt is in his clear and
eloquent articulation of this challenge, along some excellent accounts of how it
has been addressed. Let’s hope we in development and humanitarian aid are able to take his ideas and lessons on board.

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Gender bias as an emergent property in international agencies

Posted in Gender, Institutions, Leadership, Organisations on June 1, 2011 | 12 Comments »

UPDATE 03/05/2011 – Shotgunshack has posted a great piece on this issue as it plays out in INGOs – check out ‘Gender and NGOs – Pretty on Paper’
Most international agencies backed International Women’s Day in March, and – some valid concerns about the political  appropriation of the gender movement aside – this is right and proper. But sadly too few agencies can point to changed internal behaviours and attitudes as a result of the ‘gender mainstreaming’ efforts of the last 20-plus years. Recent events highlight the importance of international agencies walking their talk in this area.
First, some statistics from the business world:
  • Since the 1980s women have been earning about one-third of the MBAs awarded in the U.S., yet they comprise only two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and eight percent of top leadership positions
  • For the same period, women have made up more than 40 percent of new entrants to the legal profession, but they are still less than one-fifth of law firm partners, judges, and general counsels
  • In most democracies, women constitute a majority of voters, but hold proportionally less ‘seats’ of power
  • Across Europe, women constitute about a third of managerial positions but only three percent of CEOs
How about their international counterparts that apparently do so much to promote gender balance and equality in the wider world? Sadly, it seems that  few aid agencies can claim to be free of the gender glass ceilings evident in their corporate counterparts.
  • In the UN, as of 2009 women made up 40% of all of all staff  in the professional and higher categories with appointments of one year or more; but only 26% of all staff at director level and above, equivalent to the legal profession.
  • 17% of UN-equivalents of CEOs are women, which is a marked improvement on other sectors. But actual gender balance has only been achieved at the P1 and P2 levels – the lowest professional grades.
  • Of the most powerful roles in the sector - UN Secretary General, World Bank and IMF chief - none has been held by a woman – but watch this space…
  • Little comparative statistics appear to be publicly available from NGOs, Red Cross or bilateral agencies (if anyone has access to such data, please do share)

Importantly, gender bias is not just about equal representation – this is just the most visible tip of the iceberg. The overall status of female staff can be described as an emergent phenomena of organisational culture that may have little to do with stated rules and regulation. In leadership and management contexts in particular (as a post from a fellow blogger will illustrate shortly), there are a variety of micro-level and informal attitudes and dynamics that while acceptable in themselves add up to an overall institutional bias against women. And this particular version of the ‘invisible hand’ sinks many hopes.

The recent dramas involving the head of the IMF is a point in case, revealing a disturbing degree of tolerance towards sexist attitudes. In 2008 a female colleague – whose relationship with Mr Strauss-Kahn was the subject of a public investigation by outside lawyers – described the former IMF chief as “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command”.

And yet his position was not compromised by this. In fact, he is still widely described as an outstanding leader for the organisation. One wonders how these two statements could possibly be true at the same time.

While this clearly needs to be explored further in the context of international agencies, it is clear that women navigate a different societal and organisational terrain from their male counterparts. Could any reader imagine a world where someone was described as ‘ill-equipped to lead an organisation with men under her command’, but was still seen as an outstanding leader?

As long as treatment of women remains an side-issue at the most senior levels of an organisation - and as long as this kind of moral and ethical gymnastics between the public statement and private attitudes continues - it seems inevitable ‘gender  mainstreaming’ in the wider world will continue to be empty jargon within international agencies.

Overall, we are unlikely to see a shift from the damning assessment made by a major bilateral agency: “the benefits of gender mainstreaming and impacts on gender equality are at best embryonic and at worst still to become visible“

Thanks to Shotgun Shack for comments and to Nandini Oomman for pointing out my error regarding the date of International Women’s Day.

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How do aid agencies deal with wicked problems?

Posted in Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Strategy on April 5, 2011 | 6 Comments »

The term ‘wicked problem’ was used here last week to describe the challenges of humanitarian coordination. This post is a response to a number of requests to explain a little more about this concept.

The term ‘wicked problem’ was originally proposed by two American urban planners, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, in the 1970s. The term has since been applied to a whole host of social, economic and political problems that cannot be successfully navigated with traditional linear, analytical approaches.

Regardless of the context, wicked problems are said to have some key common characteristics, which include the following:

  1. Wicked problems are difficult to clearly define The nature and extent of the problem depends on who has been asked and different stakeholders have different versions of what the problem is.
  2. Wicked problems have many interdependencies and are often multi-causal. Successfully addressing wicked policy problems usually involves a range of coordinated and interrelated responses, given their multi-causal nature; it also often involves trade-offs between conflicting goals.
  3. Attempts to address wicked problems often lead to unforeseen consequences. Because wicked policy problems are multi-causal with many interconnections to other issues, measures introduced to address the problem frequently lead to unforeseen consequences elsewhere.
  4. Wicked problems are often not stable Often a wicked problem and the constraints or evidence involved in understanding the problem are evolving at the same time that policy makers are trying to address the policy problem. Policy makers have to focus on a moving target.
  5. Wicked problems usually have no clear solution Since there is no definitive, stable problem there is often no definitive solution to wicked problems. Problem-solving often ends when deadlines are met, or as dictated by other resource constraints rather than when the ‘correct’ solution is identified.  To pursue approaches based on ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ may cause policy makers to act on unwarranted and unsafe assumptions and create unrealistic expectations.
  6. Wicked problems are socially complex. The social complexity of wicked problems, rather than their technical complexity, overwhelms most current problem-solving and project management approaches. Solutions to wicked problems usually involve coordinated action by a range of stakeholders working at every level from the international to the local.
  7. Wicked problems involve changing behaviour. The solutions to many wicked problems involve changing the behaviour and/or gaining the commitment of individual citizens.
  8. Some wicked problems are characterised by chronic policy failure. Some longstanding wicked problems seem intractable. Development has many examples where the persistence of a problem has not been because of a lack of sustained effort.

Wicked problems are often contrasted with tame problems. The latter are not necessarily simple - in fact, they can often be very technically complex. But they are distinguishable from wicked problems, first because they can be clearly and tightly defined and second because they do have readily identifiable solutions.

Attempting to tame wicked problems is a very natural and common way of coping with the challenges they pose to policy and practice. Instead of dealing with the full extent of a wicked problem, we – and by extension the organisations we work for – often simplify them in various ways to make them more manageable and solvable.

This ‘taming’ happens in a number of ways, according to Jeff Conklin, who also notes that:

…while it may seem appealing in the short run, attempting to tame a wicked problem will always fail in the long run. The problem will simply reassert itself, perhaps in a different guise, as if nothing had been done; or worse, the tame solution will exacerbate the problem…”

Here are some of the common strategies employed for taming wicked problems, as observed by Conklin. All of these will be familiar to regular readers of this blog.

  1. Lock down the problem definition. Develop a description of a related problem that you can solve, and declare that to be the problem. Specify objective parameters by which to measure the solution’s success.
  2. Cast the problem as ‘just like’ a previous problem that has been solved. Ignore or filter out evidence that complicates or messes up the picture.
  3. Give up on trying to find a good solution. Just follow orders, do your job and try not to get in trouble.
  4. Declare that there are just a few possible solutions, and focus on selecting from among them. A specific way to do this is to frame the problem in ‘either/or’ terms, such as ‘Should we attack Iraq OR let the terrorists take over the world?’

All of this leads me to the following question: Are Aid Agencies Problem Solvers or Problem Tamers?

PS For those interested in finding out more - there is a large and growing literature on this topic. A good starting point, as always, is the source material for the Wikipedia entry, available here.

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