Phase I: A Systems Innovation Learning Roadmap 

The IDIA Systems Innovation Working Group’s journey with Learning Partners at ROCKWOOL Foundation’s System Innovation Initiative

By: Anna Gillespie (R4D), Morag Neill-Johnson (R4D), Benjamin Kumpf (OECD) and Nina Strandberg (Sida), Shawn Smith (Rockwool), Charlie Leadbeater (Rockwool), and Jennie Winhall (Rockwool). Images provided by The System Innovation Initiative, ROCKWOOL Foundation.

Introduction to IDIA’s Systems Innovation Roadmap

The International Development Innovation Alliance’s Systems Innovation Learning Roadmap is driven by the intent to infuse more clarity in development innovation efforts: is the intent to strengthen a system, to transform it or perhaps to help shape a new system? This matters for development challenges overall, and it is particularly relevant in light of the required economic, social and cultural transformations in response to the climate crisis. This intent suggests the need to advance the diversification of innovation for development efforts and investments. Through a five-part blog series, working group co-chairs Benjamin Kumpf and Nina Strandberg shared initial insights on the complexity of advancing systems innovation in international development agencies. The first blog post described what systems innovation is. The second post made the case for systems innovation. The third post discussed some lessons from international development cooperation that informed the working group’s approach and in the fourth post, we presented promising practice and building blocks of systems innovation. The fifth and final post shared five questions to help advance systems innovation practices in international development organisations:

Using these questions as a starting point, IDIA’s Systems Innovation Working Group partnered with experts from the Rockwool Foundation’s System Innovation Initiative, Charlie Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall, who produced a Green Paper on Building Better Systems. In addition to building collective learning alongside one another, the objective of the Learning Partnership was to investigate the context, need and capacity of IDIA agencies for Systems Innovation. The Learning Partners hosted three co-curated sessions for IDIA agencies and other systems practitioners which were based on five key themes articulated by participants: case-making for systems innovation, systems-centred design, locally-led systems change, collaboration & avoiding silos, monitoring and evaluation.

Making a Case for Systems Innovation: Where do we begin?

Within the five themes, Working Group participants grappled with their experience of the ambition for Systems Innovation being at odds with many of the organisational constraints, mind-sets and incentive systems in international development organisations. Therefore, the Working Group participants saw the need for making the case of Systems Innovation, including how to begin. 

Most Working Group participants work at ‘mothership’ organisations that are predicated upon inflexible multi-year planning instruments, risk aversion and often concepts of scale that promote standardisation over adaptation. The hypothesis of working group co-chairs and most participants is that the integration systems innovation approaches - to work more systemically, politically informed and to put a premium on context-appropriate, diverse forms of innovation along with putting people living in these very systems in decision-making positions – will improve development outcomes and effectiveness overall. Under Rockwool’s leadership, we brought participants back to the foundational components of Systems Innovation, encouraging the examination of how what they frame as the Four Keys to unlocking systems shifts - power, purpose, relationships and resource flows - could inform our vision for what’s possible.

At this time, we would argue that most development innovations are created to improve the current system or system 1. The initial questions an agency should ask is: what is the social-technological system we intend to invoke change in? What are its paradigms and outcomes, and should we set out to strengthen this, or to help transformation efforts of partners? And, where is the current system open to possibilities of change? Might we nudge the current system in such places to see how the system reacts? Learning from such experiments can provide insights on what to do next. But this begs yet another question, how do we do this in a way which minimises the probability of unintended negative effects on people and the planet? The dominant notion of development innovation and scaling underestimates factors such as social norms, power relations among genders and different social groups and institutions. It also does not adequately take into account the intangible changes that are the result of different actors and organisations developing and testing a new way of working or a notion of a new system. Such collaborations are sometimes a struggle in the best sense and these struggles can pave the way for longer-term changes.

Transforming a system requires evidently more than an updated toolkit. To be part of the intended transformation efforts, led by people living in the very systems, we require a set of new tools, alongside some of the ones our organisations already possess. Finding new tools, ways of working and practices requires trial and error and is not a linear process.

Key Learnings

A number of key learnings emerged from the Working Group sessions, but the main and most intriguing takeaways were on power, localisation and monitoring & evaluation.

Power & Development Agencies

Power relations uphold current systems, and it is vital to work with power to unlock systems transformation. 

The initial step of Systems Innovation is for actors in the system to talk about the power they hold. Development agencies tend not to talk about power in the context/system they are trying to change. Either because they have to play a delicate political line of neutrality or don’t understand how to go about understanding the power relations at play. It’s vital for agencies to ask: who are we listening to when we want to understand power & power dynamics? Which forms of power are we assessing? Does it include the role of our own agencies and the international development cooperation itself? Are we asking those who do not have power over decision-making processes what they define power to be? And in what ways does it play out in their lives?  

Though development agencies do hold a lot of power in most low and middle-income countries, Working Group participants noted that the power donors hold is often overestimated in terms of what they can influence, yet they are often insufficiently reflective of the power they exercise in practice with their partners. Charlie Leadbeater of the ROCKWOOL Foundation noted that “people who are powerful do not see that they are, it’s just the water they are swimming in.” Letting go of power begins with being humble and demonstrating vulnerability, which can assist in building trust with other actors in the development space. 

The need for better power analysis within the context in which they’re working is clear, but the current tools are easier to conduct a power analysis retrospectively. Power analysis can help answer the question—are development agencies challenging themselves enough or are they reinforcing power structures? Furthermore, could there be a shift from ‘us’ conducting the power analysis to supporting partners in the context donors are working in to conduct the power analysis? How could we change how everyone sees power in international development? 

In addition, donors can enable and make the space available to question the current system. Part of the challenge is that the development system is not set up to be forgiving and collaborative. Currently, agencies have certain forms of power over the partners they are funding, but it’s the partners that sometimes have power to make the system shift. Donors need to allow partners the flexibility and space to begin to shift the system, and donors themselves need to make space to question and challenge the power they hold. 

Another role that donor agencies could fulfil is to utilise their power to convene, convince and enable collaboration between actors in the system. Donor’s power to incite systems transformation is greater than just monetary contributions, but they need to allow the space for systems change to even begin. 

If you’d like to learn more about the role power plays in systems innovation, read The System Innovation Initiative’s article titled ‘The Power to Shift a System’.

Localisation

Localisation has gained traction in the development sector in recent years for good reason, as it centralises the local communities’ ownership of programmes. But we must question, is localisation a new way of seeing System 1, or can it be used to get to System 2? How can we use localisation to imagine a locally led change to System 2, rather than simply improving System 1? What can donors do to enable the space to question System 1 and put forth blue-sky thinking of what System 2 could be, and do so in a way that is led by the very people living in the places affected? 

Those in power drive the agendas, but how do we know that these are the right agendas? It is of vital importance to listen to the voices of those in-country when driving systems change to ensure that System 2 is developed in a manner where localisation along with values of equity and human rights is at its core. Development agencies need to share - or shed - the power to define the challenges and for systems change to be owned and driven by the people in that system. Only then can new, and hopefully more equal, power relations emerge. 

In the third session of the Rockwool Learning Partnership, participants were asked to consider what localisation looks like in the current system and how locally-led systems change would look in System 2. Participants thoughts are organised within The System Innovation Initiatives Four Keys: Purpose, Power, Resource Flows, and Relationships.

Monitoring and Evaluation for Systems Change

Systems innovation is a learning journey and there is no one right perspective or indicator to measure its success. It’s as much about measuring the ‘in between’ as it is measuring the outcome. As systems transformation is a relatively nascent area of practice, reflections and learnings should be articulated clearly throughout the systems change process so that decisions can be based upon these learnings to advance the transformation forward. 

Evaluation for Systems Innovation should be built in from the beginning and occur at multiple points of the systems change process rather than something that is done at the end of a project. Currently, most of the evidence and indicators generated reinforces the current system, keeping the power within the development agencies. 

Systems transformation is a collective effort and collecting and utilising the indicators and evidence of the shifting system should be a wider undertaking than just the M&E team. By opening up evaluation practices and bringing more people into the evaluation process, it is more likely to create a more robust knowledge base, and perhaps even “epistemic justice”. 

Evaluation is a continuous practice, more of a space or a mindset. Evaluation can be seen as a trigger of conversations, which can make evaluators more of convenors of such conversations. 

Portfolios can also be evaluated to see if they have transformative characteristics. This can raise questions such as: Are we fostering niches? Are we unlocking dominance? Are we seeing early signs of systems change? We can also challenge our assumptions about viewing casualty as 1:1 and instead look for configurations of causes that together help shift the system, known as principles based evaluation.  

It’s important to question–who is the client in evaluating the success of a transformed system? Is it the one who pays for the transformation to occur, or the system’s end user? 

Moving Forward

One of the biggest constraints to systems innovation is how to move from concept to action. Where would it be most effective for development agencies to invest their resources and time to translate these concepts into action? 

Being part of an alliance, such as IDIA and the Systems Innovation Working Group helps development agencies co-learn and become part of a shared movement as there are others taking action within this shared goal. It is challenging to move forward in systems transformation when there’s only one actor pushing it forward. 

The Working Group continues to discuss whether development agencies should start with transforming themselves or what they want to achieve? 

The Learning Partnership with the Rockwool Foundation was invaluable in challenging our mindsets and bolstering theoretical knowledge of systems innovation within the participatory development agencies. These learnings outlined in this blog post highlight the key takeaways from the learning partnership sessions, and have provided an invaluable starting point for what is to come, which raises the all important question–what’s next? 

What’s Next? 

Next on the Systems Innovation Roadmap, IDIA will develop a Systems Innovation Interrogation Framework with the aim of assisting agencies in moving from theoretical discussions to action. The Framework is intended to support people in organisations with the ambition to take on, track and learn from their systems transformation efforts. The framework will not be prescriptive or act as a guide to achieving systems innovation but rather will provide key guidance for desk officers who want to ensure that their programmes and portfolios have a more systemic impact. The framework is being designed in conjunction with emerging systems innovation theory and practice from external experts and learning partners, in consultation with the Systems Innovation Working Group.

This framework will continue to interrogate the initial questions from the five-part blog post, yet from a practical perspective, and providing a prospective analysis of systems efforts.

If you’d like to join IDIA on this journey, please contact Anna Gillespie at agillespie@r4d.org to learn how to get involved in this work.

Join the ROCKWOOL Foundation’s upcoming System Initiative Conference Week on 28th November - 2nd December! Session on November 30th will be focused on system evaluation. For more information on the conference, please be in touch with the ROCKWOOL Team.