Navigating the challenges of humanitarian-academic collaborations

Image credit: International Committee of the Red Cross/Jacob Zocherman.

In the quest for innovation and progress, partnerships between humanitarian and development organisations (HDOs) and academia have become increasingly common. However, a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) sheds light on the practical challenges faced by such collaborations. Authored by Louis Potter — Managing Partner at Outsight — and a group of seasoned innovation practitioners, the article critically analyses the dynamics of partnerships between HDOs and academia, emphasising the need for a more strategic and efficient approach.

Link to the Article: Read the Full Article

Understanding the Landscape

The article delves into the motivations behind collaborations between HDOs and academic institutions. Highlighting the involvement of prominent organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the authors acknowledge the noble intentions of these partnerships—to leverage academic research and scientific expertise to address real-world problems in challenging environments.

Identifying Pain Points

Through a critical analysis informed by workshops and interviews, the authors identify three main categories of pain points along the technology development timeline: resources, deployment strategies, and roles and responsibilities. Each category poses unique challenges that, if not addressed proactively, can hinder the success of collaborative efforts.

1. Funding and Human Resources:

   • The article emphasizes the importance of securing adequate funding throughout the project duration.

   • Challenges arise from differing expectations between HDOs and academia regarding funding sources and project scopes.

   • A lack of commitment of human resources from both sides hampers the initial stages of project development.

2. Deployment and Sustainability:

   • The success of a technology is measured by its deployment on a wide scale, yet this remains a rare outcome.

   • The article highlights the lack of profit motivation, leading to neglect in maintenance, improvement, and training for deployed technologies.

   • Questions of self-sustainability and market outreach are critical considerations often overlooked in early project stages.

3. Roles, Responsibilities, and Expectations:

   • Clear definition of roles and responsibilities is identified as crucial for successful partnerships.

   • The authors argue that the classic academic approach to technology development may not perfectly align with the requirements of HDOs.

   • Expectations play a significant role in determining the success of partnerships, emphasizing the need for transparent communication.

Moving Forward

The authors advocate for a more strategic and informed approach to collaborations between humanitarian and academic sectors. They stress the importance of comprehensive planning, clear communication, and a critical partner selection process. The article concludes by calling for a literacy in technology innovation and development processes within HDOs to ensure a more nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by collaborative initiatives.

Conclusion

As we navigate the complex terrain of humanitarian-academic collaborations, the insights provided by this PNAS article serve as a valuable guide. Acknowledging the inherent challenges and proposing solutions, the authors encourage stakeholders to approach partnerships with a strategic mindset, fostering a more efficient and impactful collaboration that addresses real-world challenges in a holistic manner.

How to deal with Intellectual Property Rights in humanitarian innovation

Outsight International recently supported the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in developing an intellectual property (IP) framework to help staff navigate the complex — and sometimes scary — world of IP. In this post we discuss the common concerns that those unfamiliar with the topic face when understanding their options and choosing an IP strategy.

Why is intellectual property an issue in humanitarian innovation?

Humanitarian innovation refers to the creation, adaptation, and application of new solutions to address challenges faced by individuals and communities affected by crises. These crises can include natural disasters, conflicts, epidemics, and other emergencies.

Over the last decade, humanitarian innovation has led to many new products and services being designed and implemented. These might be hardware, software creations or processes. Unlike the private sector where the end goal is to create profit from these products/services, the the primary goal of humanitarian innovation is to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of humanitarian efforts in providing assistance, protection, and support to those in need.

Although different in their goal, humanitarian innovators usually have to work with IP tools created for the private sector, which can lead to fear and a lack of clarity as to what’s the best approach to reach their goal.

This is for a number of reasons: firstly, IP is seen as an incomprehensible legal topic; second, the perceived risk of getting anything ‘wrong’ in the legal space is greatly feared; and thirdly, many practitioners in the humanitarian/development space see intellectual property rights as a negative thing, usually employed by the private sector to protect profits over people. We now breakdown these fears and try to allay them.

FEAR #1: IP is too complicated to grasp

To say that IP is not complicated would be unfair — there are indeed a lot of component parts to think about: types of IP protection, extent of IP rights, enforcement in multiple jurisdictions, contract wording, registration processes, etc. Among unacquainted innovators, the questions we often hear are:

• ‘How do we file a patent?’

• ‘Should the organisation own patents at all or should we aim to share the innovation as widely as possible for public good?’

• ‘How can we prevent others from appropriating or misusing an innovation?’

• ‘Is it worth it to spend resources enforcing patent protection in a fragile context?’

• ‘Are open source licences always the best alternative for our software?’

• ‘What is a licence?

• ‘Would all of this be the same if the innovation has been developed in partnerships with the private sector?’

• ‘What if the partner is a university?’

Despite all this confusion, IP can be simplified by thinking about options in straightforward language. At a base level, intellectual property can refer to anything created by the mind. This asset could be incorporated in a tangible creation (such as a newly invented device or a piece of art), but not necessarily (it could also be a process, a design, a trademark, or software). Intellectual Property rights comprise a range of rights over a creation, including economic and moral (being recognised as author).

In simple terms IP rights determine who is entitled to use that creation and under what circumstances. To protect these rights, a wide range of mechanisms are available, which can be roughly grouped into three categories: legal, contractual and informal.

1. First, legal mechanisms (often referred to as formal IP protection) offer the most sophisticated safeguard, but require technical knowledge and are harder to enforce, especially in fragile jurisdictions. Among these legal mechanisms, some require a complicated registration process (e.g., patents or utility models), while others are automatic (e.g., copyright) or easy to use (e.g., copyleft or FOSS licences).

2. Second, contractual mechanisms are agreed rules embedded in partnerships, employment or consulting contracts. Some examples include confidentiality or recruitment freeze clauses.

3. Last, informal mechanisms comprise all other protection mechanisms not emerging from laws or contracts, such as secrecy, protective publication, documentation, division of duties, and many others.

Fear #2: Getting IP ‘wrong’ is high risk

One of the main reasons humanitarians are so fearful of IP is because they believe there is a right and wrong way to deal with it. This is not the case. IP clauses written in contracts are — at their base level — just a fancy-worded version of a decision of ‘who has the right to use a creation and how?’.

In some instances, this decision will be influenced by existing IP rights — for example, when adapting something existing you will be bound by the IP rights of that existing thing, or an employee contract might dictate who owns creations invented during work activities. In instances of ‘true’ invention, there is a decision to be made based on a spectrum from closed to open, which also involves an assessment of risks and trade-off.

To determine what IP approach makes the most sense, innovators should consider not only what goals they are aiming for and what resources they have, but also what risks are involved. A systematic risk assessment must be conducted considering risk for the users of the innovation, risks for the organisation and its members, risk for third parties and risks for the innovation and its sustainability.

For example, disclosed IP may be used by third parties for unintended purposes, negatively affecting vulnerable groups. Organisations should consider the diverse profile of people in terms of gender, age, location, legal status or any other personal circumstances that might put them at harm due to IP disclosure to other parties.

FEAR #3: IP protection serves profit maximisation, not humanitarian goals

Historically, intellectual property rights were developed to protect economic and moral rights of creators, with an understanding that this would also facilitate innovation and fair knowledge sharing. Patents, the most IP protection tools, were designed to control who can access innovations, which is very well suited for the patent owner to exploit the innovation and make profits out of it. However, ethical concerns may arise if access to an essential innovation is limited by economic or legal barriers. In recent years, COVID-19 vaccines reignited this debate, with many government and international organisations advocating for a waiver on patent protection to facilitate vaccine accessibility.

Within this context, it is understandable that IP raises suspicions among many humanitarian staff as a tool tailored for profit maximisation, not humanitarian goals. However, since IP rights can be highly customised, humanitarian actors can use them for their own goals as well.

Overall, humanitarian organisations aim to maximise positive impact for people affected by armed conflict and violence. The most logical assumption is that people would usually be better off benefiting from an innovation, and therefore, in principle humanitarian organisations are likely to lean towards more open access IP approaches than the private sector. Open IP approaches allow collaboration, reuse and a more efficient resource allocation in the sector as a whole.

However, even open approaches involve some kind of IP strategy and management to meet the goals of the humanitarian sector. For example, software creators may want to share their code for reuse in the sector, but they still need to make a thoughtful decision among multiple free or open licences, each with its own characteristics, as well as understand the risks, resources and trade-off associated with it.

There are IP options available to innovators which require little ongoing management. Protective/defensive publication is one such tool. This involves publicly disclosing detailed information about an invention to prevent others from patenting the same idea. While the disclosure may not result in obtaining a patent, it acts as a defensive measure to ensure that others cannot claim exclusive rights to the invention.

Developing an IP framework

To address these concerns and develop a common IP understanding within an organisation, it is recommended that organisations working in the humanitarian innovation space develop a comprehensive IP framework, tailored to the organisational context.

In close contact with internal stakeholders and informed by sectoral best practices, the IP framework serves as a clear guidance for decision making, informed by humanitarian principles, risks, and resources available.

Outsight International can help organisations to this end: having already worked on hundreds of innovation projects aiming to serve the public good and helping organisations create these frameworks. If you’d like to learn more or you think we can help, please get in touch.

About the authors

Louis Potter
Louis has a wide range of experience covering development, health, innovation, technology and research. He has worked on over 100 humanitarian initiatives and helps humanitarian organisations, universities and companies to improve innovation processes and outcomes. Recently, he has been helping actors navigate paths to scale in the humanitarian sector and strategise business models.

Pablo Busto Caviedes
Pablo is a researcher with a legal background, who specialises in monitoring and evaluation (M&E), policy research, qualitative and quantitative data analysis. His experience includes a diverse range of social and economic development topics such as rural development, agriculture, or social inclusion.

Worth the risk? Humanitarian innovation's risk challenge

Any meaningful change comes with new risks. The merit of the change depends on the balance of benefits and risks that the change offers. Ideas that deliver essential value that cannot be obtained elsewhere may well easily justify the risks that are incurred. Deducting the risk against potential benefit can offer a way of visualising if an intervention can be justified or not. 

Humanitarian innovators have become increasingly aware of the risks associated with new creative processes, services and products. These risks are of concern when they are borne by already vulnerable people. In particular, technology change has the unintended potential to create widely distributed ripple effects that are often not immediately visible. Understanding these consequences can be daunting in their scope, as illustrated by the 2018 ICRC report “Doing No Harm in the Digital Era”, which catalogued over 100 pages of digital risks in the humanitarian context. The current humanitarian discourse is to do no harm. But is doing no harm possible when also innovating?

The Dilemma - Risk as a Barrier to Beneficial Change

The range of innovation risks is not limited to digital technologies. Drones, robotics, and even construction projects all inevitably create new risks when they change the status quo. Considering risks is an essential step in any proposed innovation, particularly one that affects people with limited resources or resilience. However, a too narrow focus on risk can bring even valuable change to a standstill.  

Whilst it is clearly wrong to needlessly expose people to risks and harm, it is also unreasonable to deny communities of potentially beneficial innovations that could substantially improve overall wellbeing.

The risks and benefits of an innovation should be assessed and measured using the same scale and common indicators as status quo programming, helping the innovators to compare, contrast and make an informed decision on whether this idea is taking acceptable risk. This is especially important as there can be a tendency to veto innovation proposals based on small risks due to perception biases. For example, risks are perceived as irrationally high when:

1. The risk taken is involuntary.

2. Prevalence and reach of the innovation increase to affect more people.

3. An innovation is particularly novel.

Overall, this inherently tips the scale in favor of the status quo when dealing with innovations even though more good may be achieved through the means of innovation at equal or lesser risk as the status quo.

And what type of risk? Usually, we don’t go further in depth during risk assessments. Any sort of ‘harm’ closes the door and the idea is put ‘on hold’ indefinitely. ‘Risk’ as a general term is vague and abstract: harm needs to be considered on relative levels if it is life-threatening, financial, legal or if it is compromising the future plan of a specific person. This needs to be entered into the calculation before pausing a new idea. 

Within the humanitarian and development space also there is an added imperative to include financial risk within this calculation: money spent on an innovation that fails, could have been spent on proven methods such as vaccinations or supplies instead. This seems a legitimate points, but this is not the whole picture. As a new report from Elrha will detail, there are financial resources available to humanitarians, outside of an organisation’s operational budget i.e. through organisations like Grand Challenge Canada, foundations and impact investment grants. Through this, the level of financial risk can be mitigated. 

Finally, on how risk is assessed, we reach the problem of individual prestige. Identifying such risks in projects is a profession. Ensuring that there are people there to raise risks where they have been missed is undoubtedly important. However, such assessments often have a clear leaning towards detail, rather than the bigger picture and, as such, can lead to excessive scrutiny and stop a project in its tracks.

Comparing risk and benefit on the same scale

The relative weighing of benefit — or utility from a philosophical standpoint — is something that harks back to political philosophers of the past. John Stuart Mill – an ardent support of individual liberty — famously described the correct use of weighing utility as: 

"that actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."

Mill is one of the founders of modern liberalism, widely regarded as underpinning many of the foundational principles of the current world governance. Therefore, why would we choose not to apply this principle in the case of humanitarian innovation when it’s good enough for the operation of modern democracy? 

Ultimately, the benefit and risk of two whole systems need to be compared. For example, the mortality rates for women undergoing childbirth in remote areas can be dramatically reduced through the use of drone deliveries of blood supplies.  The first system - unassisted childbirth - is the status quo, which has substantial unmitigated risks of death. The second system leverages the delivery of blood supplies by drone. This system offers strong medical benefits that are amplified by the lack of other effective alternatives. Yet, drones also come with concerns associated with safe operation in a shared airspace.  These whole systems need to be compared and contrasted with each other. 

If, as often happens, the questions around privacy or the risk of crashing a drone are seen in isolation, it’s easy to understand why permissions are difficult to obtain. Yet, if you’re to consider the possible gains of an overall system in terms of lives or disability-adjusted life year’s (DALYs), then the situation can look significantly different. 

When deciding on whether the risks of a clinical trial are acceptable, an Ethical Review Board will consider the possible improved patient outcomes in a relative manner. It seems odd this luxury is rarely extended to innovation projects, often dealing less directly with patients. Indeed, many innovation projects are deemed unacceptable because of a perceived risk to privacy or data management. Whilst this is a significantly less serious risk than the risk of side-effects in a clinical trial, it is given a disproportionately high prescience. 

Finally, when considering potential harms, it’s important to consider how we each operate within the social norms of our societies. Engaging with beneficiaries’ points of view is commonly accepted as best practice. Yet, there lies significant contradictions when considering the normative nature of humanitarian and development work. One classic example is identity and privacy. For those operating from Europe and North America, there is a tendency to see the right to privacy as fundamentally essential. Take the UK public’s resistance to identity cards, or the French law prohibiting the collection of ethnographic data for example. However, for many other regions, especially where having a recognised official identity can lead to greater access to social service provision, there is less concern for hiding personal details. Whilst this may be based on the levels of trust in government, the debate is far from definitive. Given the decolonisation of aid narrative in the humanitarian and development space, these cultural differences seem to rarely be accounted for. 

Using Systems to Support Responsible Innovation Tradeoffs

Discussions surrounding risk and harm need to be based on a broader view of the opportunity for change. This does not imply there is a blank check for change: a rigorous review of the benefits and harms alongside a consideration of alternative systems should be done for any proposed innovative change. 

A well-reasoned discussion can only be had with a big picture of both the current situation and an open mind to the proposed new combination of benefit and risk. The work that has already been done to identify potential sources of risk has laid a solid foundation on which to take this next step in analysis.  

It is now time to routinely embrace taking a more holistic view of status quo challenges and the alternative systems that are proposed to replace them. This whole systems view would not only allow a more balanced view of the value of change, it would also offer a broader range of alternatives for mitigating potential risks, or at the very least make them better understood to those involved.

About the authors and Outsight International

Dan McClure, Lucie Gueuning, Denise Soesilo, Monique Duggan, Louis Potter for Outsight International
Outsight International provides services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

With data, responsibility: The Importance of Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) in aid

Is your organisational data sufficiently secure?

Aid agencies, public health bodies, and health innovators are harnessing the rapidly accelerating improvements in data capabilities to deliver better health and wellbeing outcomes for service users and beneficiaries. Increasingly, smaller organisations are empowered to gather, process, analyse, and act on larger databases with attractively small investments in time and capital. Ostensibly, the calculus is clear: if gathering large quantities of personal data that informs strengthened decision-making is becoming easier, it would be irresponsible for an organisation not to build databases with the intention of improving outcomes.

Yet, this era of year-on-year emergence of new, reality-changing tools has demonstrated an unavoidable truth: technology is never neutral. Technology used in aid contexts is usually developed far from where it is deployed, and can carry with it implicit biases that distort its utility and curb its benefits. Equally, improvements in technological capabilities in the hands of healthcare and aid providers can serve -at least initially- to further widen inequalities between those with access to innovative and those without. Often in aid, these inequalities manifest clearly along the dynamics of provider/recipient.

“Technology is never neutral: it can magnify implicit biases and -if deployed irresponsibly- further entrench inequalities, particularly in aid settings”

The ability to gather large sets of personal data are an acute example of this divide. Take, for example, healthcare and aid providers working in low-resource settings. If they choose to harness large personal data gathering and processing tools to build large datasets, comprised of personal information relating to local beneficiaries, they are at once equipped with technological potential that is likely inaccessible locally and additionally entrusted with highly sensitive material relating to many local individuals. It is incumbent for such actors at the privileged end of a power disparity to use their position with utmost responsibility.

“Good data practice is not only an ethical responsibility - international regulation now makes it compulsory”

This is where Data Protection becomes paramount. Many humanitarian actors now are subject to the European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The donor community — including EU Humanitarian Aid — now require their partners to demonstrate good data practices, including the implementation of Data Protection Impact Assessments for projects that may process, store or share personal data. This includes names, photographs of people, and even CVs. Data ethics goes beyond the procedural programming of safeguards and several guidelines and frameworks exist that can help build projects and teams on solid ethical foundations.

We are ready to support you in implementing the most appropriate tools and frameworks to your operations: analysing your system in order to apply the most relevant adaptation without disturbing your day-to-day operations, in a smooth and efficient manner. With the growing complexity of the data-driven services offered and the risk of social exclusion inherent in opting out of various technologies, individuals are disadvantaged when asked to provide informed consent for their data to be collected and used. This gulf between uptake and understanding has been met by legal frameworks implemented by governments and intra-governmental organisations (such as the EU’s GDPR), aimed at regulating data policies and enabling individuals to trust that their information is being handled responsibly. We help your organisation anticipate needs, and to actively shape the data ecosystems to meet said needs.

For more information, see our complete DPIA Service offering here.

If you would like to collaborate with Outsight International, please use our contact form to get in touch.

The Hollywood Model: Dynamically built teams for creativity at scale

Outsight works with its network of Associates using the Hollywood model — a way to build dynamic teams, quickly, that are best-suited to a particular project. This can be particularly useful in the humanitarian and development sectors, where the tendency is to hire based on narrow technical competencies. But how does it work? And why is it called the Hollywood model? Dan McClure, an Outsight Associate explains more…

How many organisations can produce the equivalent of a hit movie? While it’s easy to roll your eyes at some of Hollywood’s efforts, the reality is that this industry is capable of repeatedly undertaking new and original initiatives: leveraging a myriad of different skills in the service of a complex and rapidly shifting market. Their survival and success depends on the ability to repeatedly do creativity at scale.

Until recently, few other industries had to meet similar creative demands. Most organisations — whether they were commercial businesses, government agencies, or non-profits — could focus on mastering the things they already did. A leader’s goal was to make sure things were well run and competent. Any incremental improvements reinforced established capabilities.

Committing to a steady course like this requires a stable world. Unfortunately, disruptive change is sweeping through one industry after another. Even before the advent of the global pandemic, it was clear we had entered into a turbulent era where new ideas, bold action, and systemic change would be necessary to claim a relevant place on the world stage. The winds driving this change are powerful: new technologies of a fourth industrial revolution, trans-border problems like climate change, and massive societal shifts in education, economic capacity, and urbanisation.

This is a world where being good at bold imaginative change has become a necessary core competency. For that reason, it is well worth taking a closer look at what Hollywood did to prepare for a business based on creativity at scale.

The Hollywood Studio System

Organisations are built to address the type of challenge they face. When mid-twentieth century Hollywood had to produce primarily for middle America’s host of movie theaters, the studio system arose. Large integrated movie studio operations bought together, under contract, the many types of talent needed to imagine and create a movie. Actors, directors and a host of other professionals in the employ of the studio execs — establishing a model that could efficiently produce a steady stream of films for a single major distribution channel: local movie houses.

This is not so different from the approach most large commercial and public sector institutions take to professional staffing today. As projects come and go, the organisation’s portfolio of skilled individuals are moved within the organisation, perhaps augmented by consulting resources that expand or fine tune the skill set.

Assuming a stable world, organisations can align the skills they have on staff with their mix of needs.

The studios’ comfortable level of control was challenged in final decades of the century, when the movie industry faced an increasingly challenging creative environment. New competitors threatened their entertainment monopoly and audiences demanded a more sophisticated and varied fare. Movies yielded ground to TV, which gave way to cable, and has now fragmented into a host of streaming services and other specialised media platforms. The quantity and sophistication of content has rushed ahead too, with last decade seeing the number of scripted shows growing by over 150% ushering in an age of peak TV.

The industry had to produce more demanding creative work at an ever accelerating pace. The unique demands of ambitious projects made it increasingly difficult to effectively bring the talent needed for the varied efforts under one roof. While a big budget action film might be best served by one set of skills, these could quite different from those needed to successfully realise an intimate drama or scripted TV series on a streaming service.

As creative projects grew in ambition and became increasingly unique, the studio lost its role as the centralised home of talent. Thus, more projects were assembled from a pool of individuals and organisations that had specific skills and resources.

Dynamic Collaborations: Building the Right Team

This shift from highly centralised team to custom-created networks of collaborators makes sense when program efforts must be both ambitious and original. Big ambitious challenges need a wide range of different skills, so there is creative power in a model where the right talent can be bought together for each unique project.

An organisation with its own ‘studio’-style teams inevitably find it difficult to overlay their fixed set of organisation skills on such shifting needs. Mismatches and gaps quickly emerge. In some cases, additional capacity will be needed, while in others, exceptional skills will go to waste. Gaps emerge in areas of expertise either because existing staff are insufficiently skilled or because the role is entirely new.

In this turbulent creative environment, the value of a stable, highly optimised, organisational skillsets is eroded. The new Hollywood Model recognised this, assembling a tailored team for a specific initiative and then allowing the various professionals to move to another project.

It should be noted that this ability to build dynamic teams is not about fighting for the top 1% of super skilled individuals. That’s a game that large well funded organisations will almost always win. Instead, highly effective teams are created by tailoring the right type of talent to the task. Someone who might be of marginal value on one project, could be a premier contributor on a different type of initiative. Leaders don’t need to fight for the widely recognized superstars, but rather can focus on finding the uniquely right contributor.

The ability to align complex projects with diverse talent also provides creative returns to the project contributors. Practitioners with a unique set of skills can cobble together a series of similar projects where their talents are fully appreciated. It also becomes possible for those with a more vagabondish soul to diversify their work, avoiding pigeonholes by embracing a number of different efforts.

Fostering Dynamic Creative Ecosystems

As the demands for creativity at scale grow in the world, other sectors can and should look for opportunities to adopt a Hollywood Model of dynamic collaboration building. Of course, this shift comes with new demands. One of the crucial advantages of traditional self-contained organisations is that the infrastructure for managing and integrating teams is clearly defined. When Hollywood abandoned the studio system, a number of new supporting services needed to emerge to fill these ecosystem building needs.

This is not trivial work. Dynamically constructing a collaboration requires the ability to identify and validate talent, negotiate acceptable terms of engagement, and integrate day-to-day activities. Simply trawling the world talent pool for potential matches between a project and a professional creates excessive overheads for all involved.

An ecosystem of both formal and informal support for collaboration building is needed to make the model viable. Across different sectors, nimble supporting services are rising to the challenge. A wide range of approaches are emerging, ranging from bare-bones freelance marketplaces to far more sophisticated program facilitators that take an active role in execution of collaborative work.

Other aspects of the collaborative ecosystem evolve more organically. For example, a study of video game development, where the product is created by many different collaborators, found that within the shifting networks of contributors were informal clusters of professionals and teams that regularly worked together.

Time to Embrace of the Hollywood Model

As organisations find that their challenges are increasingly defined by disruptive change, rather than stable performance, the need to create at scale becomes more urgent. Leaders may be tempted to see this as an issue of imagination, driving them to promote ideas and innovations from within an organisation’s walls. Encouraging creative thinking certainly isn’t a bad course of action, but it fails to recognise the systemic barriers a self-contained organisation faces when it seeks to actually realise an ambitious new vision.

Reaching outward, creating a more flexible organisational structure by dynamically building the teams that tackle initiatives, opens the door to effective action on big ideas. Ideas can be more original (tapping the right unique skills) and bigger (assembling larger creative teams). This is done while still making it possible for each new initiative to pursue possibilities that are different from the program before.

This is the kind of creative capacity our era of disruptive change demands. Whether an organisation is working in business, government, or non-profit action, it’s time to take inspiration from the Hollywood Model, and break down walls in the name of creative prowess.

ABOUT DAN AND OUTSIGHT INTERNATIONAL

Dan McClure has spent over three decades working on the challenge of disruptive systems innovation. He has advised global commercial firms, public sector agencies, and international non-profits in support of their ambitious efforts to imagine and execute agile systems level innovation.

Outsight International is an organisation specialised in providing services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with Dan and the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

Decrypting human-centred design: Why it is important for the third sector

What role can human-centred design practically play in development and humanitarian work? As a researcher and designer, Gunes Kocabag — an Outsight Associate — is often asked this question. Sometimes with scepticism — but more often with genuine interest.

Human-centred design has become a respected practice in certain parts of the humanitarian and development sectors (aka the third sector). However, while many people may have seen references to its techniques, it may not be obvious how it is applied in practice. In this article, she outlines: what is human-centred design; why it is necessary; and how to apply it in humanitarian and development contexts.

FROM DESIGN AS A CRAFT TO DESIGN AS A MINDSET, and FROM USER-CENTERED TO HUMAN-CENTERED

Design has historically been categorised as an art, a craft, or as a way to improve the look and functionality of products. However, from the 80s onwards a new perspective on design has progressively taken hold – an approach that defines design as a process and a mindset that can be applied to solve diverse problems. The term ‘Design Thinking’ was popularised by the design firm IDEO in the early 90s and today has gained increasing popularity in the business world as a methodology to approach complex problems.

A key principle of the design mindset is its emphasis on placing user needs and expectations at the centre of the process. As users (aka customers) in the commercial context are more and more empowered with their decision making, companies are racing to understand their users and identify their innermost unmet needs to create the next winning product in the market. That is why user-centred design is increasingly popular in corporate innovation circles.

Global development work often happens within complex systems made up of multiple partners, people on the ground, multiple end beneficiaries and various contextual factors. So it is not only about creating solutions that work for the end-user but also for all key stakeholders within the system. It requires an approach that is not only user-centred, but human-centred, which takes into account the complexity of all stakeholders. Thus, in humanitarian and development innovation, the term that is predominantly adopted is human-centred design (HCD).

WHY HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN?

Although human centred-design is becoming increasingly recognised and embraced by leading third sector actors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF and WHO working regularly with innovation, there remains lack of clarity on how human-centred design can be properly harnessed to ensure better interventions for a greater range of projects.

Here are three key reasons why human-centred design can greatly improve the success of humanitarian and development projects.

Reason 1: HCD complements system thinking to reveal differences between how the system works in theory and how people actually engage with it

Systems thinking is often referred to as a go-to approach to solve complex problems — and rightfully so — as it provides a great way to break down and make sense of the parts of a system and the relationships between them.

The systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows defines social systems as “the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths and weaknesses.” Human-centred design can help dig deeper into those external manifestations to get to the core of human behaviours, needs and expectations behind them.

By placing the focus on the human actors within the system, HCD helps bring abstract concepts such as beneficiaries, government officials or private sector initiatives to life.

By placing the focus on the human actors within the system, HCD helps bring abstract concepts such as ‘beneficiaries’, ‘government officials’ or ‘private sector initiatives’ to life: identifying the human stories behind each, with their unique needs, motivations and goals. HCD’s emphasis on qualitative data helps us move beyond an understanding of what people do to an understanding of the social, cultural, and psychological patterns that reveal why people behave the way they do.

Understanding not only how the system theoretically works, but also how people live and breathe within the system, we can create effective solutions that meet needs and expectations at both functional and emotional levels.

Case study: Improving the adoption of home-based immunisation records (HBRs) in Africa

Home-based records are medical documents issued by a health authority, and provide a record of an individual’s history of primary healthcare services (e.g. vaccinations) received. They are maintained in the household by an individual or their caregiver. Since the beginning of the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in 1974, home-based records have served an important role in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of immunisation programs around the world. However, retention rates in many countries remain significantly low, which is particularly worrying in countries with a high birth cohort.

To tackle this problem, we first need to understand the system and the actors within the system. A systems-thinking approach focuses on understanding the key parts of the system and how they interact with each other. Adding human-centred design to that, we glean a better understanding of the human actors behind the institutions and the human actors that affect and get affected by the system.

When I worked on this challenge in collaboration with WHO and multiple other development partners, focusing on six African countries, our first task was to understand the system map and identify the key stakeholders. Then we applied HCD to dig deeper. Through ethnographic, immersive research on the ground with health workers and caregivers as well as officials in the Ministries of Health, we were able to challenge the big picture.

During pilot research, we brought together Ministry of Health officials, caregivers and health workers to compare their knowledge of how the system should be working, with an understanding of how it is actually working. Being able to observe what was actually happening, the physical and emotional burdens on the ground, what unofficial, makeshift solutions were put in place by those who had to solve problems on the ground helped us all view the system under a different light and helped shift priorities at the institutional level. Through this nuanced understanding, we were able to align key stakeholders on prioritising the needs of the end beneficiaries and health workers on the ground, as well as creating a roadmap for successful implementation that balanced the different priorities of the stakeholders involved.

Reason 2: HCD goes beyond creating solutions to creating end-to-end experiences that drive adoption

For successful adoption of a developed solution, a functional framework focusing on efficient delivery is not enough. To deliver a solution that is efficient and effective, we need to ensure it fits into the lives of those who will be using it. The main premise of HCD is to frame the whole challenge from the perspectives of the human actors, be this the end beneficiary, a specific actor in the value chain, or a key decision maker. We then design interactions and experiences tailored for the specific context and expectations of those who will be interacting with the particular product or service.

When designing services, HCD addresses these interactions not only at one point in time but through the whole journey of service delivery: before, during and after. This helps us understand the functional and emotional highs and lows of the experience, developing fixes to mitigate the lows and catalysers to enhance the highs. Through this methodological approach we can identify potential pitfalls early on and design solutions that work end-to-end.

A service journey maps out the user’s experience step by step, as well as the people, processes, policies, and systems behind the service delivery.

Case study: Improving the quality of data in humanitarian emergencies

Access to high quality and timely data can be a life and death-defining factor when monitoring humanitarian emergencies. The MSF REACH project, coordinated by my colleague, Lucie Gueuning, is an initiative addressing exactly this problem through creating a web-based platform to support MSF staff on the ground. The platform combines institutional data with crowd-sourced information from various sources.

While all are working towards a common goal, the platform needs to be used by different types of users with different levels of familiarity with the technology, different environments of use, culture and legal context, different skill sets and mental models. The quality of the data, which is key to the platform’s success, depends on providing an inclusive experience to all its different users.

A human-centred approach to solution development in such a context, can ensure that the user experience of the platform is designed to maximise its effective use by different users, taking into account all steps of the experience from accessing the service to data entry to making sense of the data. To give one specific example, the design of the user interface can have a significant impact on the quality of the data as well as how users perceive and prioritise data.

By putting users at the centre, human-centred design ensures that the interactions fit the users’ different mental models and drives the adoption and successful use of the platform. For MSF REACH this means high quality data, which is critical for saving lives.

Reason 3: Through divergent thinking, HCD catalyses new perspectives and out-of-the-box solutions

HCD is a process that can be applied to different problem spaces. It is made up of iterative cycles of divergent and convergent thinking, following a pattern of exploring possibilities before narrowing down on one solution. This emphasis on divergent thinking allows its practitioners to ask ‘what if…’, think out of the box and imagine possibilities beyond established patterns of thinking. Divergence is then followed by a structured and criteria based process of convergence that defines what is possible.

HCD follows an iterative process where divergent thinking is followed by structural convergence, both for problem definition and for solution development.

Bringing together different mindsets and skills sets is essential for divergent thinking. This helps explore the problem space from different perspectives and create richer solutions. Thus, HCD projects rely on a combination of different topic expertise combined with the perspectives of stakeholders on the ground. Participatory design, co-creation with communities, design sprints are common methodologies that are used to catalyse divergent thinking in a structured way.

Case study: Developing a strategy for 10 years from now

Developing strategies and roadmaps in the humanitarian and development context is a complex task. It involves multitudes of stakeholder (often with very specific areas of expertise) who need to understand one another, if not reach a common understanding. Building empathy between stakeholders is key to having a meaningful conversation around priorities. HCD, with its emphasis on divergent thinking, can create a space for building empathy among stakeholders, a safe space to step into someone else’s shoes and think creatively. It is here that HCD practitioners can thrive in a facilitating role, helping structure discussions, outcomes and strategic roadmaps.

When I worked with a global foundation as a consultant on HCD, our challenge was to bring together employees to co-create a future strategy while introducing the HCD methodology. Using a HCD approach, we were able to get participants from different groups within the foundation to work together and collectively discuss how the foundation should evolve to support its global network of partners. In a workshop setting, participants stepped into the shoes of policy makers, advocates, scientists, end beneficiaries and other actors they interact with day to day. With this new perspective, they articulated how the future could impact those actors and what this could mean for the foundation’s strategy. This approach enabled participants to leave behind their roles and titles and explore the problem space from a new angle, providing a strong foundation for the definition of a new strategy.

To sum up, human-centred design can greatly improve the success of humanitarian or development projects by:

• Revealing the nuances between how the system works in theory and how people actually engage with it.

• Creating end-to-end experiences that drive adoption.

• Catalysing new perspectives and out of the box solutions.

HOW CAN WE APPLY HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN IN THE THIRD SECTOR?

Going back to my initial question, ‘What role can human-centred design practically play in development and humanitarian work?’, I would like to finish this post by providing some concrete pointers on when and how you can incorporate HCD into your work:

• During scoping and need identification - to ensure we’re accounting for the experiences, needs, mindsets and context of the all human actors involved and not just making assumptions about what is needed.

• During solution development - to develop solutions that fit into the lives of the target group and provide an end-to-end experience that drives adoption.

• During implementation - to prototype and test solutions with users and stakeholders, to learn and iterate to improve the solutions.

• During monitoring and evaluation - to complement quantitative data on what is happening with qualitative exploration of why it is happening.

• Throughout our work - to catalyse collaboration, out of the box thinking, iterative solution development and experimentation through design sprints, co-creation workshops or methodological training.

Human-centred design is not just a high-level theory, but a practical tool that can add value over different project phases. For those who use it, it quickly becomes indispensable for achieving efficient and effective implementation. It is exciting to see its increased adoption in the global development field, yet there are still many more situations in which humanitarian or development practitioners are not taking in the whole picture, and thus missing opportunities to implement much more efficient projects and systems.

ABOUT Gunes AND OUTSIGHT INTERNATIONAL

Gunes is a researcher and service designer specialising in the development of human-centred solutions in complex stakeholder environments. She has worked as a consultant for public and private sector entities as well as global development organisations in areas including global health and financial inclusion.

Outsight International provides services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with Gunes and the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

Making development self-sustaining: Seven essential principles

The Kit Yamoyo diarrhoea treatment kit under local production in Zambia for the local Zambian market. The kit was designed, and the local market developed, using one-off donor funding.

What is self-sustaining development and why is it important? Simon Berry — Outsight Associate — explains…

The term ‘sustainable development’ appears often in international development discussions. But what does it mean? The phrase can be used interchangeably to mean one of two things which are, in fact, very different. In the environmental sense it means ‘living within our environmental limits’ — development that ‘meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The term, however, also describes development that carries on once the resources used to create it are removed. Here, I refer to the latter form of sustainable development as ‘self-sustaining development’, to distinguish it from what one might call ‘environmentally sustainable development’.

In 2010, my partner and I started discussions with stakeholders in Zambia around transforming access to oral rehydration salts (ORS), the globally recommended treatment for childhood diarrhoea. Having established that there was local interest, we set-up a UK-based charity, ColaLife, to take the idea further. We started with a trial of the idea and went on to a national scale-up. By 2016 a locally designed and tested diarrhoea treatment kit was available nationwide in supermarkets and in hundreds of small shops. Additionally, the government were showing interest in a government-branded version for distribution through its clinics.

Donor funding finished two years ago (March 2018) and ColaLife formally completed its role in September 2018. It is early days, but all indications are that the transformation we achieved while we were involved and donor funds were flowing will continue to be self-sustaining. In fact, things have developed further with the government adopting the diarrhoea treatment kit as the standard in the public sector. The change that was created with the help of donor funding and external support from ColaLife has survived following the withdrawal of both. It has proved to be self-sustaining.

How does one achieve development that is self-sustaining?

Here are some key principles I have developed over the years while working with others on development projects that I think are crucial if you are to achieve self-sustaining development.

1. Plan for self-sustainability from the outset - You don’t achieve self-sustaining development while being forced to come up with ‘an exit strategy’ two years before donor funding comes to an end.

2. Don’t do anything that makes you or your organisation a permanent part of the solution - This is crucial and is the foundation for the other principles. If you allow yourself to become a part of the solution, then, by definition, when you leave, part of the solution will leave too! It is alarming how many ‘development’ initiatives fall into this trap, always with at least two negative consequences: firstly, the change they created while operational is not sustained; secondly, while operational they are likely to have undermined and weakened the capacity of local organisations who have the long-term responsibility for creating and sustaining the desired change.

3. Do everything through local systems and structures - If you are not to become a permanent part of the solution, then you will have to work through local systems and structures. Where these lack capacity or direction, help build the capacity, help refine or improve the direction. Above all, avoid setting-up parallel systems or structures.

4. Build a ‘smart partnership’ to guide planning, testing and scale-up - It follows that you will need to work in partnership with local stakeholders. However, it is important how these partnerships are formed and operate. It is important that partnerships are formed around a shared vision not around an organisation or an individual. When this is done successfully, it promotes engagement, ensures shared ownership of the vision and helps ensure that the partnership will survive the departure of any single member. We call partnerships formed around a vision ‘smart partnerships’. From the outset, be open and inclusive: invite everyone in, as part of a process where a broad membership can self-select their level of engagement. Some may go on to become implementation partners, while others may continue as a broader consultative group.

5. Self-sustaining development should fit with government policy - If it doesn’t, seek to better align plans or work with government to influence or advocate for policy change. It is unlikely that any initiative that doesn’t fit with local policy will be self-sustaining.

6. Engage your intended beneficiaries from the very outset - This sounds obvious but it often overlooked. It is essential to operate on the basis of what you know people want, rather than on what you think they need.

7. Be invisible - The urge, on the part of donors and development agencies, to brand everything they fund or support is overwhelming. However, this must resisted as it completely changes how the intervention is perceived. For example:

This was the original artwork for the billboard for the promotion of the diarrhoea treatment kit - Kit Yamoyo – at the start of the scale-up in Zambia.

In a second phase of marketing a USAID project, run by JSI, agreed to fund additional billboards but insisted on having their logos on the billboards and these ended up looking like this.

This was a mistake. Inherent in ColaLife’s self-sustainability approach is that any donor assistance should not be permanent. This approach is not compatible with donor branding being on any customer-facing aspect of the intervention.

Integrating these principles into your project

Undoubtedly, many of these principles may require a more extensive level of planning and analysis than was originally thought necessary, yet there is no such thing as too much preparation. As explained by Dan McClure (another Outsight Associate) in his blog post on ‘Mastering the art of hard problems (and avoiding the rush to easy solutions)’ — mapping the complex systems and stakeholders involved with a problem or possible solution is essential in order to ensure that these principles can be integrated efficiently into development initiatives. Do not be scared to think big and think ahead early on in order to ensure you’re not putting out fires or having to re-orientate the project at significant extra cost further down the line.

Investing in the right things at an early stage — system design thinking, researching the existing structures, analysing the problem, and stakeholder engagement — will ensure a project stands a much better chance at becoming self-sustaining and, thus, create a greater positive impact for beneficiaries.

ABOUT Simon AND OUTSIGHT INTERNATIONAL

Over a 40-year career Simon has been a leader in the voluntary, private and public sectors. He has lived and worked in South America, the Caribbean, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the UK. He is an expert on self-sustaining development – development that out-lives the resources that were used to achieve it.

Outsight International provides services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with Simon and the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

Mastering the art of hard problems (and avoiding the rush to easy solutions)

Forward looking organisations take the need for innovation seriously, seeking original ideas that help avoid disruptive threats and pursue original opportunities. Unfortunately, these much needed initiatives often fail to deliver on their promise of impactful change.

There are a number of common stumbling blocks. Good ideas may fail to earn the required investment, while even those that are funded find that they are unable to muster on-the-ground support necessary to drive adoption. Unexpected barriers, tangled dependencies, and ongoing change in the surrounding environment can also derail the innovator’s plans. Perhaps the most disappointing projects, are those that succeed only by staking out a small vision, taking incremental steps that make little impact on future success.

Surprisingly, these varied failures are seldom driven by a team’s incompetence or lack of creative imagination. Instead, they are more often tied to a specific, but crucial, step that is missed in the creative process. In a team’s rush to embrace a solution, they fail to first immerse themselves in the full messiness of the problem that underlies an important challenges.

Rushing to Design

Innovation typically begins with lots of energy. Well trained innovators listen attentively to those who are immersed in the area where change is needed. They use these insights to identify a good idea and then quickly move forward with design decisions that are informed by user engagement (option #1 on the diagram). They fail fast and learn quickly.

This approach drives directly to a usable solution, yet a strong case must be made for inserting an additional step early in the process. Even a fast moving innovator can benefit from taking time to understand the root cause of the problem that is behind their User’s need (option #2 on the diagram). This insight helps inform good design decisions. Still, there are limits to this targeted look back. Focusing only on the specific problem behind a user’s need often leaves the original vision unchallenged. The innovator may do a slightly better job in design, but still rushes ahead with the same fundamental solution.

Innovation teams may justifiably feel that they are doing a good job when they use these first two strategies. Yet, these seemingly well tested practices still fall short.

The unrecognised challenge is that neither genuinely important problems nor truly impactful solutions are as simple as they appear in this rush to design. In real world systems, diverse individuals and organisations are tangled together, so that even simple activities are the result of dynamic collaborations involving varied skills, resources, and motivations.

Seeing Beyond the Keyhole

This fact requires a non-trivial addition to conventional fast moving innovation methodologies. Before rushing forward to solution design, there is a need to pause and intentionally look back at the messy systems that are at the heart of the problem. (#3 on the diagram)

Understanding these systems demands a fundamentally different way of thinking. While a User’s specific challenge may be quite real, it is just a fraction of a much bigger picture. When an innovator focuses only on a specific need, it is as if they stare at the world through a keyhole. What they see is true, but it is hardly a complete view of what is inside the room.

This small actionable view comes at a cost. The unobserved complexity and challenges that lie outside the User’s and the innovator’s immediate view become stumbling blocks. Unrecognised complexity undermines business cases, casts doubt among potential stakeholders and leaves innovators surprised and unprepared for barriers and setbacks.

Innovators fail when they assume the world is simpler than it is. Of course this isn’t always the case. If an idea is small enough, or already thoroughly understood, it is possible to confidently make a small tweak or addition based on a narrow view of a problem and solution.

Yet, when innovators ambitiously seek to drive more substantive and sustainable change, it is no longer possible to assume that important problems can be addressed with simple ideas. To be truly impactful, the solution must embrace the true complexity of the problem and be suited to the scale of the challenge.

The embrace of the real world’s messiness begins by letting go of the original idea. Instead of supporting a preordained path to addressing a challenge, the user’s need can be treated as a symptom of the challenges found in complex real world systems. This broad-based, systems perspective looks at the diverse actors involved and seeks to understand how the world works. In real world systems, if something good or bad happens it is because of the way these tangled webs of actors, interactions and incentives connect. Understanding the rich complexity of these systems opens the door to a far more sophisticated view of the challenges and possible solutions.

The Power of Embracing Hard Problems

Investing time and effort in building a big picture view of a problem requires significant investment. This can be difficult to embrace. Just at the moment when everyone is excited to drive forward with realising the solution, the journey seems to take an about-face. Sponsors and participants in the creative effort may worry that the project is becoming mired in “analysis paralysis”. Fortunately, this thinking does not have to be bogged down in a never ending swamp of details. Rather, the effort should look down from above, doing just enough big picture work to see the important patterns of the system and its actors. This big picture systems view is broad but not necessarily deep.

With a top down view of the systems behind the problem, it possible to leverage four powerful creative capabilities:

1. Claim Bigger Problems – A bigger picture of the challenge naturally encourages broader thinking about the nature of the challenge and the scope of the solution. A particular User may have identified a specific issue, but it is far more likely that making a substantial change that impacts the future will require addressing a more substantial version of the problem.

   Stretching the problem can help the innovator to strengthen their case for change. Smart organisational leaders naturally guide their investments to big urgent problems. Stepping back and understanding the full scope of the challenge allows the innovator to claim a bigger more compelling problem.

2. Design More Sophisticated Solutions – It’s easy for an Innovator to look naive when they propose a simple solution to genuinely hard problems. Seasoned experts in the field quickly identify shortcomings, challenge the idea, and withdraw their support, often taking others with them.

   While an individual User may see a particular aspect of a challenge, working with system’s view makes it possible to see the many interconnected elements that are in play. Understanding the complexity of the problem makes it possible to recognise dependencies, trade-offs, and barriers that are only apparent when the entire system is considered. The innovator can then propose a sophisticated solution that rises to those challenges.

3. Tap Complexity’s Bigger Toolkit – There are many moving parts and dynamic interactions in a real-world system. Understanding this complexity can be a challenge, but it also offers a creative gold mine of resources and capabilities that can be used to build solutions.

   Seeing a broad-systems view offers the use of a big toolkit that includes varied actors, capabilities, technologies, and existing resources. These resources can be reassembled in new and creative ways, building powerful solutions without starting from scratch. Shaping solutions with this holistic view also allows innovators to take advantage of synergies and emergent behaviours which are only visible at a systems level.

4. Enable Creative Agility – The final advantage of beginning with a systems view of the problem is tied to the actual development of the idea. As innovations become bigger and more ambitious, the more they face unknowns and uncertainty. It’s simply not possible to plan a large creative change in advance.

   Powerful solutions are not just about coding a piece of technology and releasing it. High impact innovations require a wide variety of people, institutions, and technologies to evolve together, progressively transforming the current real-world systems.

   At any point on this journey an unexpected barrier may rise up to derail the effort. The best way for innovators to respond is to pivot and adjust as they go. Rooting an innovation in a broad understanding of the problem, rather than a specific solution, gives the innovator the flexibility to nimbly adjust their vision. When necessary, they can take a significantly different approach the solution, because they can see alternative ways to solve the underlying problem.

A Worthwhile Creative Discipline

Because a systems understanding of the problem is so useful throughout the innovation lifecycle, it is important to begin thinking about it early in the creative effort. This is not a bit of busy work that delays the real job of the innovator. While rushing forward into detailed design and implementation may feel tangible and productive, it is in fact an indulgence that borders on creative negligence.

Taking the time to think deeply about the messiness and deeper challenges, when everyone is anxious to drive quickly forward, can be a hard sell. Nonetheless the creative payoff is substantial. Building an early understanding of the system behind the problem makes it far more likely that the idea will eventually be big enough to matter and will survive the winding journey to adoption.

About Dan and Outsight International

Dan McClure has spent over three decades working on the challenge of disruptive systems innovation. He has advised global commercial firms, public sector agencies, and international non-profits in support of their ambitious efforts to imagine and execute agile systems level innovation.

Outsight International is an organisation specialised in providing services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with Dan and the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.