Our world is changing so fast, the future looks increasingly complex and uncertain. The pace and scale of change reveal infinite possibilities – and choices - for our future. No-one can predict what lies ahead. The best we can do is to embrace uncertainty, imagine how the future may unfold, and try to prepare for it.
This piece describes how UNDP designed its Strategic Plan for the next four years using futures methods to design for complexity and uncertainty. We needed a strategy that could work with many different futures. A strategy that would not merely cope with the unexpected, but which defines ambitious goals and sets UNDP up to reach them - even as the unprecedented disrupts our assumptions and plans, as it surely will.
We needed a strategy that could work with many different futures.
When we began to think about the Strategic Plan in mid-2020, Covid was a new and shocking reality. For UNDP and its staff it was a massive professional challenge. For many, it was also a source of deep personal pain and loss. Because of this we thought it important, not just to design a plan for UNDP’s next four years, but in the process to get at something more profound: to understand people’s sense of belonging to UNDP, and bring the organization together around a shared understanding of its purpose and future legacy.
We started by trying to make sense of how we got here and the landscape ahead. Indeed, we spent longer on this stage than a strategic planning process usually might. This was where we imagined what the future might hold and people’s aspirations for that future, as well as UNDP’s role in it.
This initial phase, building shared knowledge, consisted of:
Scoping: defining the breadth and depth of the process. While the primary outcome was obviously the Strategic Plan itself, we believed an equally important product would be a stronger collective understanding among UNDP staff and partners of UNDP’s purpose and legacy. We wanted to explore and understand:
- Identity and culture: insights into collective identity and sense of belonging in UNDP
- The dynamics of change and uncertainty
- Emerging trends and how they might affect the development landscape and UNDP
- Visions of the future: strategic and collective insights about the future we want
- Barriers and success factors for how to get there
Sensing and scanning: looking for signals of the future. We read extensively in the “futures” literature: academic journals, reports, white papers, news, blogs, etc. We opened up consultations on UNDP’s own collaborative website, SparkBlue: one series within UNDP, one open to the public. We interviewed individually all UNDP’s top managers; the Administrator consulted heads of other UN agencies. UNDP teams spoke to private sector partners and held round table discussions with think tanks. The Administrator invited leaders from development, technology, the arts, science, business and different academic disciplines to join frank, Chatham House-type conversations about the future of development. We deliberately cast a wide net to avoid thinking inside an echo chamber of familiar ideas.
In some of these consultations we used the “7 questions” technique pioneered by Shell, an interview technique for gathering strategic insights about the future. We asked people to describe the changing world, different futures and UNDP’s place in them, visions of success, changes needed, learning from successes and failures, and priority actions.
We encouraged ourselves and our interlocutors to stretch their thoughts and expectations of the future and UNDP’s place in it. To look not just to the next four years, but the next 10 or 15. To think about what we were missing; what were the “known unknowns”; understanding the dynamics of change and disruption and how to design for uncertainty.
We encouraged ourselves and our interlocutors to stretch their thoughts and expectations of the future and UNDP’s place in it.
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.
Having agreed on the Plan’s strategic content, actually writing it was the shortest phase. Engagement with UNDP’s Executive Board (and with other UN agencies and partners) continued. We were committed to involving member states and seeking their feedback throughout the process – not to negotiate the Plan’s wording (it is not a negotiated document) but to understand their perspectives and interests, to draft a Plan that was broadly and sincerely supported. That the Plan was adopted by consensus was not novel, but member states’ praise for the transparency of the process was marked.
In conclusion, a couple of observations. In terms of methodologies, we didn’t start from a blank sheet. There is plenty of futures and strategic foresight experience out there (and indeed within UNDP, where teams have used strategic foresight for some time). But there are many different options, and choices to be made about which approaches to adopt. We researched and assessed various foresight methodologies[1], looking at academic studies as well as practical applications in various industries, to find those we thought would best suit us. We didn’t follow a single blueprint, but chose what seemed to make sense for UNDP and iterated along the way.
... strategic foresight as a dynamic capability and a cultural mindset, not just a set of tools and processes and business units.
The Strategic Plan envisages a more agile and anticipatory UNDP that embraces uncertainty, recognizing that we can’t control it. That means thinking of strategic foresight as a dynamic capability and a cultural mindset, not just a set of tools and processes and business units. Just as computer literacy became in the last few decades a “must-have” skill for all professionals, strategic foresight or “futuring” is equally crucial for the 21st century. Building this into UNDP’s culture and ways of working will be one of the big challenges of implementing our new Plan.
By: Strategy and Planning Team, Executive Office, UNDP
[1] One particularly useful resource was How to future: leading and sense-making in an age of hyperchange, Scott Smith with Madeline Ashby, 2020