Sensemaking: turning data and insights into patterns and themes.  In analysing what we found, we distinguished different dimensions of change - drivers, trends and signals - and how they interact to produce complex dynamic change.  Using Airtable software, we sorted over 1000 “signals” extracted in the scanning phase – including “weak signals” from our global network of Accelerator Labs – into STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental and political) categories.  We sorted by criteria of time and certainty (finding incidentally that signals of change beyond a 7 year horizon were scarce and that people tended to be more comfortable looking at the immediate future).  This sorting process confirmed the breadth of our research and helped us discern 11 trends that became the basis of our landscape analysis.

We paid equal attention to the expectations and ideas we found within UNDP as we did to professional futurists and established trend reports.  This was a deliberate choice; we were not looking to conjure visions of possible futures that were entirely neutral, but rather ones that reflected what our consultations told us would matter to us, UNDP, in the future.  We contemplated how our desk research and consultations chimed – or not – with UNDP’s practical experience.  The Midterm Review of the current Strategic Plan 2018-2021 and UNDP’s analyses of its Covid response were especially useful in showing where UNDP’s experience seemed to validate the trends we were identifying, as well as highlighting the global trends of most importance to our mission.  

We synthesized this material into a landscape analysis that sketched some of the parameters shaping our future: the geopolitical landscape, societal trends, ever-expanding technology, a warming planet and much more.   This gave us a thought-provoking launch pad into the next phase, challenging our presumptions and encouraging us to imagine UNDP afresh.     

From this shared knowledge base, we moved onto thinking about how UNDP was prepared for the future and how it would need to change for greater impact – in other words defining the strategic direction it should take.  Asking: what should the UNDP of 2025 look like?  If Covid has made the SDGs even more challenging, how do we scale up our ambition to reach them nonetheless?  How can we find and help those left even further behind?  How do we make UNDP a more agile and dynamic organization, capable of adapting and responding to an unpredictable future?  How can we help others thrive amid uncertainty?

Visioning alternative futures took centre stage here.  In a cross-UNDP workshop we discussed the landscape analysis and trends, unpacking the first and second level impacts of change and validating – or questioning - what we had found.  Flowing from that, five small teams with colleagues from different regions imagined and described five future scenarios where the trends played out – and hypothesized about their implications for UNDP.   

These five different scenarios, from climate catastrophe to AI supremacy to societal chaos, were the starting point for senior managers’ thinking at a Strategic Plan retreat.  There UNDP leaders assessed our current readiness to face these alternative futures, and on that basis, where we needed to advance, pivot or transform.  Narrowing down the areas where the Plan would focus, senior management:  

• Agreed on three strategic enablers that would help deliver results at speed and scale: strategic innovation, digitalization and development financing.
• Commissioned options papers on these enablers, on each of UNDP’s signature solutions (poverty and inequality; governance; resilience; environment; energy; gender equality) and on development settings.  These thought through where UNDP needed to advance or pivot, paying special attention to dependencies on other areas and to integration across different efforts.
• Identified possible areas of transformation, including our funding model, knowledge, risk management and systems approach.
• Considered how the business model could be made more agile and adaptable.

The retreat, and the follow-up work commissioned, provided a good deal of content for the Plan.  The options papers identified the areas of strategic change, prioritization, risks and opportunities.  But the Plan also had to convey the strategic choices UNDP would be making about where to invest or prioritise.  UNDP’s leadership decided that - given the nature and scale of the challenges we face - the Plan should aim high.  We therefore worked with thematic teams to quantify some headline goals that UNDP with its partners aims to reach in the next four years.  “Moonshots”, to be sure, but not impossibly lofty: 100 million people to escape multidimensional poverty, access to clean energy for 500 million people, 800 million people to participate in elections and $1 trillion of public expenditure and private capital invested in the SDGs.