O0YQ5

Insights on Innovation
14
For the Department for International Development (DFID), innovation is about
making a difference to millions of people’s lives through new and better
partnerships, creative design, and smarter solutions. We don’t see innovation
as being all about new technologies – although that’s part of it – but about
being free to adapt to context, learn from failures and create new solutions
for tackling poverty.
We know that the contexts in which DFID works are often uncertain, with complex
stakeholder environments and multiple dependencies where our objectives
and results are not always easy to measure. Success in these contexts needs
programmes that can navigate uncertainty: build knowledge, know-how and
political will. We need to create a perspective that challenges conventional, linear
approaches to project delivery.
We know that things won’t always work and we aspire to develop strong
partnerships where we can openly talk about what is not working and collaborate
to find solutions. In practical terms we refer to ‘well-managed failure’ where we
expect our staff and partners to identify where things are going wrong quickly and
escalate, taking action together to fix things.
" Failure is the
key to success;
each mistake
teaches us
something"
Morihei Ueshiba (founder
of the Japanese art of
Aikido)
I try to give front line staff space to use their judgement to design and deliver
programmes in the context in which they work. This means developing the
capabilities, processes and incentives to give staff and partners the freedom and
confidence to try out different approaches and use their knowledge and expertise
to determine what will work best.
In terms of processes, we have rewritten DFID’s programme management rulebook
to create the space for learning and iteration making sure we are explicit about the
need to adapt when the context changes. We have completely stripped back our
programme processes, replacing rules with principles, making our expectations of
adaptation and learning explicit. If failure happens, we want it to be fast and cheap,
so that we learn and build new approaches quickly.
But changing process only gets us so far; we need to build capability, confidence
and trust throughout the delivery chain. If partners don’t feel trusted to have frank
conversations with us, they won’t tell us if something isn’t working and will stick to
what they think we want to hear. We seek collaborative partnerships where we can
to talk about what’s really happening and find proactive solutions together.
There is still a lot to do; we need to expand the debate internally and externally,
understand the formal and informal barriers, learn from our successes, improve our
processes, integrate the latest thinking, provide strong leadership at every level,
and build a partnership culture that values learning.
Pete Vowles, Head of Programme Delivery, DFID