Over the past two years in ALNAP, we have been leading work on humanitarian innovations which resulted in a major study, an international conference and a significant investment in innovation processes by a major donor. It is clear to us that the term innovation is being used more and more across the aid sector, whether by senior leaders like Rajiv [...]
Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
Complexity and Innovation: A Plexus Institute interview
Posted in Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Strategy on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
New York Times Article on Making Sense of Complexity
Posted in Conflict and peace building, Financial crisis, Healthcare, Public Policy, Strategy, Technology, Urbanisation, Water on May 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Today’s New York Times Review has a nice piece on ‘making sense of complexity’ which cites the work of Brenda Zimmerman, noted complexity specialist whose work on health systems has featured on two previous Aid on the Edge posts (here and here). Here it is in full: The Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and [...]
What happens when you are busy making other plans
Posted in Climate change, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on April 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
John Lennon famously quipped that life was what happened when you were busy making other plans. A new book Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice from the fantastic STEPS centre at the University of Sussex focuses on how much the same contradiction plays out in the global movements toward development, environmental sustainability and social justice. [...]
Powerpoint, complexity and the art of hypnotising chickens
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy, Technology on April 27, 2010 | 2 Comments »
An article in yesterday’s NY Times launches a scathing attack on the use of Powerpoint in the US military, and draws some interesting conclusions about how such tools can inhibit understanding of complexity. Exhibit A, below, is a now-infamous slide that is intended to represent the complexity of American military strategy in Afghanistan. As General Stanley A. McChrystal, [...]
Three recent articles on complexity and aid-related issues
Posted in Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Reports and Studies, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Owen Barder on the coming collapse of the development system and on the need for variation and selection in improving the aid system Bill Easterly on spontaneous order on getting cabs in New York, and the relevance for development. Susan Curran on the complexity of cooperation, drawing from a seminar at the James Martin 21st [...]
Complexity and Healthcare: Reformer, First Change Thyself
Posted in Healthcare, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on March 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
One of the biggest stories this week is that US President Barack Obama has signed a landmark healthcare bill into law – the largest expansion of the US federal social safety net since the 1960s. But work by leading healthcare analysts around the world would indicate that the safe passage of the bill is only the [...]
From traffic management to development management?
Posted in Leadership, Organisations, Public Policy, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic, Urbanisation on February 22, 2010 | 3 Comments »
(2nd of 2 posts exploring self-organisation and emergence in transport / traffic and the relevance for aid strategies – first was last week’s piece on slime moulds) Traffic planners are increasingly moving away from signs and regulations to increase traffic safety and address congestion. Rather than legislating for driver behaviour, they are requiring drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists [...]
Bank of England Director uses complexity theory to explain global financial crisis
Posted in Financial crisis, Networks, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England gave a speech earlier this year which focused on the idea of the global financial system as a complex adaptive system. In his speech, Haldane focuses on applying the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to [...]
Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign
Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on December 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Obama presidential campaign owed its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organisation whose influences go back to landmark civil rights movements. Many of the principles were consistent with the emerging ideas of ‘complex adaptive leadership’. A recent MIT lecture featured Marshall Ganz, veteran of the [...]
An Equation for Copenhagen: Conformity + Rapid Change = Collapse
Posted in Climate change, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 1, 2009 | 1 Comment »
American scientists using agent-based modeling techniques have linked excessive conformity to societal collapse and even mass extinction. The implications for the Copenhagen negotiations next week seem stark. The researchers at Dalhousie University and the University of California-Davis have modeled how well different learning strategies work in different learning environments, and found that under certain circumstances societies can be [...]
