Managing innovation is terrifying. It’s terrifying for many different reasons, but here I’ll just outline four: 1) Expectations are huge; 2) Resistance to change is not insignificant; 3) The need for innovation in our sector is not small; 4) You have to manage people.
There’s been a load of research carried out on the need for innovation in the humanitarian world. Lots of private sector examples that we can’t (realistically) follow, lots of commiserations, and cathartic conversations with colleagues across the sector who have also been charged with driving innovation. But now it seems that there has been enough of a push, and innovation is here to stay…at least for a while.
Innovation is the focus of the fourth pillar of the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 and is also on the radar of the UN Secretary General. Needless to say, it is now an area of focus and a recognised need. There are good practices, good examples, and an increasing amount of data and information on Things That Worked and, more importantly, Things That Didn’t. We’re now – as a sector – in more of a position to talk about innovation in that mystical place we call ‘The Field’. But now that it’s moved beyond a buzzword, and is now actually becoming a practice, these are the questions we now face:
How do we manage it?
Why should we manage it?
Can it be managed?
And what would that look like?
For our team, the ‘management’ of innovation focused primarily on getting UNHCR Innovation off the ground. This was painful, and it was extremely hard work. We needed to have a strategy in place, we needed projects, we needed the ever elusive ‘Quick Wins’, and we needed co-opters within the organisation. To add to all of that, we needed projects on the ground to verify, justify, and prove the theory and rhetoric.
There’s still a lot of the above to do – don’t get me wrong – but we’re now in the position of needing to manage a set of processes that we put in place over the course of the past two years. We have Innovation Labs – a virtual and real ‘safe space’ for experimentation. We also have Innovation Fellows, an Innovation Fund that provides a budget for operations that want to prototype some of their ideas, an Innovation Circle, that consists of external friends, advisors, and supporters from a range of academic and corporate sector entities, and now, an Engagement and Communications pillar. Each of these pillars of our work needs to be managed as a service to an organisation spanning 124 countries, over 8,500 staff and affiliates, and works with and for over 50 million displaced people. Managing this is not easy. And managing a team to run this is not easy.
In the 2015 Humanitarian Innovation Jam that we’re hosting together with Georgetown University, we’re going to be talking about Innovation Management with a range of partners from across the globe. This 2-day series of practical and interactive workshops will stimulate more dialogue, more consensus on the right tools for the sector, and it’s going to help to further improve the way this sector engages, encourages, and manages innovation.
UNHCR Innovation’s challenges
I wanted to talk about three challenges we’ve faced over the past 2 years of our existence.
1) Trying to position UNHCR Innovation as a complementary service to UNHCR operations.
It’s become really important to communicate that innovation (as a practice) isn’t siloed within the agency; it belongs to all divisions. UNHCR Innovation’s role is to work together with UNHCR operations around the world to find more sustainable, more efficient ways to protect and assist refugees. That’s why the first part of our three-step approach is to Amplify. We recognised that UNHCR has/is/will always be innovating, and so when we started, we placed greater emphasis on finding and amplifying the innovations that already exist within the agency, and on the connecting role that our team could play. We wanted to be able to find the innovations and innovators and make fruitful connections between things and people that were already working. Finally, Innovation wanted to seek to explore, and to match external expertise with internal expertise, in order to create healthy feedback loops, and ultimately the best solutions that the world could offer.
2) Trying to remain agile, responsive, and relevant within set rules that protect the (largely) publicly funded UNHCR.
There’s a fine line between being agile, and being swallowed by bureaucratic impediments. Have we managed to remain all of the above? Yes and no. We’ve made a ton of mistakes. At times we’ve been almost too agile, and have moved ahead without being as consultative as we perhaps should have been. At times we’ve been too bureaucratic, and tried to ‘manage’ too much, which can stifle members of the team, which then becomes a problem. What we’ve arrived at is maintaining a set of engagement processes that differ across field operations, divisions at headquarters, and external partners. We’re constantly iterating, learning from, and improving how we engage. We’re not there yet, and there will undoubtedly be more mistakes and lessons learned along the way.
3) Measuring success…and failure.
We’ve spent a lot of time as a team developing indicators in order to measure and compare successes and failures at the project level, Lab level, and at the team level. As with everything else we do, we’re very much treating these indicators as prototypes that we will test, and iterate. Once we have a set of core indicators that cover these three levels, it will make future resource allocations and performance management a lot easier. Ultimately we want to be as accountable and as transparent as we can be – for and to Refugees.
So, how could technology help?
Quite early on we set out to find the perfect management tool. This naturally drew us to online platforms. We wanted tools that we could use with external organisations because partnership collaboration is a core part of our approach. We try to blend external expertise and core competencies with internal expertise and core competencies. Project teams – both internal and external often work across different countries, continents, and time-zones. While one person is waking up, another person is eating lunch, and someone else is rattling along a dusty road on the way to a refugee camp. What this means is that we also need to have flexible project management tools. We agreed that project managers should choose their own tool for organizing their workplans, as long as they could keep track of how projects progress, and to try to avoid (or at least side-step) pain points and roadblocks. Most recently we partnered with Podio.com under their not-for-profit partnership.
We’ve been given free access to Podio.com for our team, which is an insanely generous contribution to UNHCR’s Innovation cause. It’s another high-quality tool that we can offer our team, and I really like it because it interacts pretty much seamlessly with tools that we already use – Google Drive for our online repository of documents and knowledge, and Outlook as our mail client, for example. Once it’s set-up, you can try out a range of different app add-ons to suit whichever project you’re running. I’m currently using it to put together our 2015 strategy, as it happens.
So did we find the perfect tool for project management in UNHCR Innovation? No. Nor should we seek to. What we’ve found is that different tools work better or worse for different combinations of people and organisations. This doesn’t mean that we have non-uniform processes across the different Innovation Labs for example, but it does mean that the tools we use to monitor and drive processes are and can be different.
And we’re always searching for more tools to test and to try out with our internal and external partners. What challenges do you face in managing humanitarian innovation. How is technology helping you to do that more efficiently?
If you’d like to repost this article on your website, please see our reposting policy.