innovation

7 July 2017

Posted on July 7, 2017 Leave a Comment

Jackson G. Lu and al’s “‘Switching On” creativity” provides new and counter-intuitive evidence on how to boost creativity. While many focus on the negative impacts of multi-tasking, this paper demonstrates that frequent back and forth between tasks can increase one’s capacity to produce novel, unique, and useful ideas. This is because task-switching prevents “cognitive fixation”, i.e. getting the mind stuck on one path or a dead end. People do not typically select task-switching as a work method. And they don’t naturally realize when they reach cognitive fixation. So, task-switching for increased creativity needs scheduling. This is useful evidence as creative thinking is an increasingly big asset in the workplace. But as we embrace task switching, let me add two personal notes: (i) not all assignments require creativity, and (ii) the positive benefits identified by this research are valid when switching between two creative tasks (not between one creative task and [insert social media of choice]).

Maria Popova’s “10 learnings from 10 years of Brain Pickings” distills the substance of her blogging decade into 10 lessons. I am sharing these because I often find her blog inspiring: Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind; do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone; be generous; build pockets of stillness into your life; when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them; presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity; expect anything worthwhile to take a long time; seek out what magnifies your spirit; don’t be afraid to be an idealist; don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Each lesson is unpacked with accompanying book recommendations that make a good summer reading list.

My graph this week is from the World Unplugged study. It summarizes how 1000 students in 10 different countries felt after unplugging for 24 hours. Note the super high levels of negative emotions. This is old news as the data came out of a 2010 survey. But as we enter the summer season, it is a good reminder of the need for regular digital detoxes.

My quote is from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad which is on my summer reading pile: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime”.

2 June 2017

Posted on June 2, 2017 Leave a Comment

Nora Rosenberg et al’s “The effect of HIV counselling and testing on HIV acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review” finds that despite big investments in HIV counselling and testing, we don’t know much about its impact on prevention. That is because this impact has not been systematically evaluated: only 8 decently-designed studies were found for sub-Saharan Africa. And they show that individual HIV counselling and testing is neither consistently good nor bad for prevention. These important findings come out of a systematic review of the literature on the topic. Systematic reviews are often seen as the “poor relation” of research methods. They don’t bring academic glory. Yet, as argued here before, they produce the most useful evidence for policy makers. And with the advances of natural language processing and text mining techniques, we could automate large parts of the search process to increase our capacity to conduct systematic reviews that inform our work. I, for one, am excited about the future of systematic reviews.

I spoke to several colleagues about Mia Schaefer’s “The new kid” this week. The school-commissioned personal essay describes a 14-year-old’s mixed emotions about having a new baby brother. I thought she did a good job at articulating this. But of course, as the mother, I am biased.

My graph is from SITRA’s “This is how we create a circular economy in Finland” because it is super clear and because SITRA is hosting the World Circular Economy Forum next week. We pointed to the rise of the circular (or sharing) economy, in Horizons, two years ago. When looking at the list of speakers it struck me that all UN professionals engaging in that conversation were environmentalists. Why? There are huge opportunities for “social” practitioners in this space from restructuring service delivery systems, to reducing inequalities, to formalizing invisible economic relations, to fundraising. So I was happy to also see this week that NESTA had selected 8 organizations from the social sector to support via their ShareLab Fund.

My quote this week is from Cate Blanchett’s interview with David Miliband in Town and Country: “Being a mother was, for me, undeniably a central point of connection to the refugee crisis. Learning that more than 10 million of the world’s refugees are children, and then meeting refugee parents in Jordan and Lebanon who had fled to protect the lives and futures of their children—well, that was personally heartbreaking and galvanizing. As a parent I connected with their desire to protect their children and provide them with every possible opportunity in life: a safe home, an education—but most important, a childhood free from the horrors of war.”

And to make you smile at the end of a week full of bad world news, you get this.

Informed action in an age of uncertainty: Can horizon scanning play a role?

Posted on April 11, 2017 Leave a Comment

[Originally published as a Disrupt & Innovate blog post. Written with Eva Kaplan, Innovation Specialist with UNICEF Jordan]

In early 2015, as Ebola was still ravaging West Africa, and markets experienced high volatility, our unit at UNICEF began our annual predications blog by announcing an end to predictability. At least in this we were correct: volatility has only amplified since and, in retrospect, 2015 seems like a more stable time.

In reaction to this context of rapid change, UNICEF’s Policy Planning Unit sought to systematise our use of methodologies to anticipate emerging trends—both those with negative and positive potential. One such methodology is Horizon Scanning, which involves scanning a wide variety of information sources for trends and clustering them according to predefined categories. At UNICEF, we use STEEP + H categories (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political + Humanitarian). Horizon Scanning allows us to pick up on so-called weak signals that might be pointing to the next mega-trend. However, identification of emerging trends is not the same as taking action. Indeed, a classic bottleneck of Horizon Scanning work in large organisations is the “and-then-what?” phase. Using concrete illustrations where our scanning exercises had impact and helped spur innovation, here are a few lessons that we hope can initiate a discussion with other organisations developing similar functions:

Get your message out there. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff members located in 190 countries. In order for any of them to take action on our work, they have to know about it. Over the years we have developed a number of knowledge products with various formats and degrees of analytical depth. We recommend having a range of options to share your Scanning work—some can be written analysis (e.g. our Horizons, a quarterly digest on trends affecting children) and some can be conversational (e.g our Conversation with Thought Leaders series involving senior management). In general, we know that colleagues don’t always have time to read heavy reports. We try to keep it short and fun, with links to further analysis.

High-level support matters. In 2015, UNICEF’s Executive Office asked us to explore the use of unconditional cash transfers in emergency settings. Our work consisted in identifying peripheral trends affecting the role, household and systemic impact, and operational modality of cash transfers. For example, one line of inquiry was related to trends in digital money that were revolutionising access to finance, from bitcoin to GiveDirectly to Tencent. We proposed solutions that would leverage these trends to define new financing modalities, allowing for instance direct peer-to-peer transfers for emergency affected populations. Having high-level buy-in from the beginning made it easier to convene colleagues from across UNICEF to gather existing knowledge and experience, test our initial ideas, and get the early buy-in required to turn them into action.

“Anchors” within the organisation are needed to translate Scanning into action. The team that scans cannot always, or even usually, be the team that takes action. In the case of the cash transfers study, three teams took the ideas forward: the global emergencies team, the social policy team and the innovation team. For instance, the innovation team took the lead in initiating private sector partnerships to improve the delivery and monitoring of cash transfer programming at a global level while the social policy team of UNICEF Jordan took the lead at field level by initiating action around each of the ideas presented in the paper.

Absorbing the risk/learning curve is key. In some instances, the Scanning team may absorb some of the initial risks and uncertainty associated with new ideas. Early 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, UNICEF Scanning function started engaging in conversations on the need to use real time data to monitor the impacts of the crisis on the most vulnerable, and was instrumental in the creation of the UN’s Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System that later became the big data initiative UN Global Pulse. UNICEF’s engagement in Global Pulse activities was originally led by the scanning team working closely with the innovation team to better understand the risks and opportunities associated with the data revolution. Eventually that function was anchored in the innovation team. Monitoring the advances of big data and machine learning, the scanning function initiated another round of conversations inside UNICEF in 2014, led UNICEF’s engagement in the Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, and used that opportunity to ignite the development of UNICEF’s new data strategy, later anchored in the Division of Data, Research and Policy.

The need to “bring it home”. People who do Horizon Scanning develop an ability to “connect the dots”—i.e., to see and understand how different elements can impact each other. When flagging emerging issues, the Scanning team should spell out their potential relevance to the work of busy decision makers throughout the organisation, and be clear about why they should care. For instance, in our work around the rise of automation and artificial intelligence in the labour market (not directly within UNICEF’s mandate), we make the connections to the education system, which needs adapt to focus on skills like creative problem solving that cannot be replicated by machines (well within UNICEF’s mandate).

Patience. The goal of Scanning is to keep up with the pace of change. But that may not always be possible. Game-changing innovation based on emerging trends should be understood as a long game—it often requires organisational culture shifts, steep learning curves, and new skill sets. Seeing impact at scale may take some time. For example, we initiated our work on the new data landscapes in 2009 (what we now refer to as the “data revolution”), and only last year we saw this translated into the development of a new UNICEF data strategy.

Here we have focused on lessons from where we have seen Horizon Scanning make the needle move. Of course, issues we surface aren’t always translated into action. Often, blockers to action are essentially the opposite of our lessons of success. When we have not found an anchor or clear business owner within the organisation, we have not seen action. When we have not made the connections to UNICEF’s bottom line as loudly or as clearly as we should have, we have not seen action.

One additional issue stands out: for an organisation such as UNICEF, which has an emergency, life-saving mandate as well as a longer term development mandate, we have seen that the opportunity cost of managing the rising number of protracted crisis is often the actions which have a 5 – 10 year view. As an organisation, we fully understand that failure to anticipate will leave us ill prepared for new crises. What we face is a question of trade-offs and balancing acts. We actively seek, therefore, not only new methodologies for understanding new risks and opportunities, but also new operational modalities for taking action. This brings us outside of Horizon Scanning and into other key areas of work—e.g. longer-term financing mechanisms, or strengthening resilience programming.

As we continue to learn, we look forward to sharing experiences with other organisations engaged in similar activities. Please feel free to share your lessons and views on ours!