Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

Innovations are driven by risk-takers. Part of UNDP’s role in innovation is to provide the space for risk-takers to develop and test their ideas. And it turns out that sometimes these are not individuals, but entire programmes! The Pacific Risk Resilience Programme (PRRP) covers the Pacific countries of Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu, and takes an unusual approach within UNDP’s programme portfolio. Now in its fourth year, it didn’t exactly follow the standard programming approach in which a challenge and a development model is identified in the beginning, and a set of interventions is designed that would then be rolled out over the course of the next years, with clear activities and results prescribed for each year. Instead, PRRP didn’t actually describe the model or the interventions themselves at all. Instead, they let the model emerge over time by running sprints of interventions and evaluating them frequently, something that is known in the information technology world as...

I recently came across this blog post by a start-up that is developing an Artificial Intelligence that is being trained to read and write at the level of a specialized human analyst and produce briefings in human language based on a set of different information resources. It’s just one example of many different companies that are currently working on this challenge. The obvious clients are intelligence agencies, governments, or news agencies, but eventually this will enter all of our everyday work very soon. I thoroughly believe that this is what knowledge management in large organizations will look like in 10-15 years from now. In my organization, we’re challenged daily to consolidate the key lessons and insights from all our country-level programmes and experiences, lest meaningfully combine them with information, trends and insights from the larger development sector. We complain that we’re overwhelmed by the information overload that social media, Yammer and knowledge network...

During the last few weeks I was heavily involved with the SHIFT Week of Innovation Action , a series of parallel events taking place in 21 different country offices. Over 50 practitioners were invited to ‘shift’ from one country office to another to share their experience on innovation methodologies and what they learned from their ongoing innovation projects (many of them funded by UNDP’s Innovation Facility ), learn from others, and ‘shift mindsets’ in the process. As part of the team that coordinated the event week I was in awe of the incredible energy coming from country office colleagues and the enthusiasm, creativity and time commitment on the side of organizers, participants, and the coordination team here in New York. And from the feedback that has been rolling in so far (the evaluation survey shows about 95% of participants were satisfied or very satisfied with the event) it seems the SHIFT initiative was a success all around. Yet, we all remember other instances of w...

In November 2013 I got deployed for 3 months  to Amman  on a consulting assignment to support the setup of UNDP’s Sub-Regional Response Facility for the crisis in Syria. A key role of the Facility is to operationalize the Strategic Plan’s key area of ‘Resilience’ in an environment of crisis by marrying the humanitarian response for Syria with a development response. So far there has been a primarily humanitarian angle to the Syria crisis, with OCHA, UNHCR, WFP and FAO leading the response efforts in the region. UNDP’s interest in this situation is to widen the perspective and highlight that there is a dramatic development cost for Syria’s neighbor countries Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, which deal with the largest refugee movement since the WWII. Given that most refugees are not staying in camps are embedded in host communities with families and friends, the host communities face a heavy strain on local services such as access to housing, water, sanitation, health care, ed...