This fieldnote delves into the concept of visualizing experiment portfolios, discussing different ways to represent such portfolios effectively. It highlights the importance of diverse information needs, scaling up over time, and the various roles associated with managing portfolios. The document provides insights into tools for visualizing and managing experiment portfolios, such as Flourish Studio for data visualization, Trello for project management, and Dovetail for qualitative research. It also suggests hybrid platforms like Airtable and Notion as flexible tools to address multiple needs in managing and communicating experimentation portfolios.

The document discusses how to approach monitoring and evaluation (M&E) when working with complex problems. It highlights the importance of understanding the type of problem you are dealing with and designing the M&E framework accordingly. The document also emphasizes the need to regularly learn and adapt, capture system-level change, and track and report on intermediate progress. It provides guidance on how to build the “learn and adapt” function, measure system-level change, and track and report on progress. The document concludes by acknowledging the challenges of tracking progress in complex problems and suggests using a framework that enables self-checking, provides signals of progress, and ensures transparency with stakeholders.

Systemic investing is a new investment logic that seeks to work in complexity and foster systems change. It is a different way of framing and understanding the nature of change needed to tackle the most persistent and pressing challenges facing humanity. Systemic investing is grounded in a systems view of the world and requires a particular mindset and way of being. It involves multiple kinds of actors working together, often in combinations that have not occurred before, and includes frameworks for enabling cooperation, coordination, and coherence between multiple actors.

The document discusses the experience of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in rethinking monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in complex settings. The focus of the collaboration was on rethinking how to do M&E when working to affect change in complex systems and unpredictable environments, with a particular focus on food systems. The approach involved setting a strategic intent, designing learning questions, and establishing principles for the work. The process included regular sensemaking sessions, clustering and prioritization of insights, and adaptive management through six-monthly learning loops. The document also highlights key lessons learned, such as the importance of planning despite uncertainty, the value of sensemaking and reflection, the need to link learning to decision making and adaptation.

Systemic investing is a niche within sustainable finance that focuses on understanding how change happens in complex systems. It takes a different approach from traditional impact investing, which assumes that transformative change can come from single technologies or projects. Systemic investing recognizes that reality is made up of complex adaptive systems and that interventions are more likely to succeed when using systems thinking. The field is exploring how to measure and manage impact in complex systems and is looking to the evaluation profession for insights. There is a need to redefine impact and develop new measurement approaches that align with the principles of systemic investing.

There has been an increase in interest in portfolio approaches, with organizations like IIPP and the Danish Design Council pointing to portfolios as a way to implement missions. To explore this emerging practice, the authors created a framework to understand how organizations apply portfolio logic. They found that some organizations focus on coherence within their innovation portfolio, while others focus on coherence with complex, systemic issues. The common thread is that portfolios help organizations align their activities with an overarching intent. The authors also discussed the purposes of portfolios, what is included in them, and the governance structures around them. They shared two concrete experiences of portfolio implementation in the public sector and expressed interest in continuing to explore portfolio practice.

The UNDP and Chôra Foundation collaborated on establishing Portfolios of Development Options as features of Development Programs. The UNDP Uzbekistan Country Office recognized the need for Dynamic Portfolio Management capability and invited Chôra to work together. A workshop was conducted to induct Country Office staff into the concepts and process of Dynamic Portfolio Management. The visit also included engaging with policy-makers who were interested in collaborating on the transformation of social development in Uzbekistan. Dynamic Portfolio Management offers the CO the opportunity to become a policy orchestrator and deliver impact.

A couple of years ago, a team in UNDP embarked on a journey to shift from incremental innovations to strategic innovation, implementing new policies to raise ambition and tackle structural transformations. Their focus shifted from tools to creating organizational change and mindset shift, with a goal to build the organizational will and capacity to question the coherence of their interventions, elevate their ambition, signal the intent to seek new paradigms, and bring partners along on the journey. The team developed a structured journey that helps their country offices collectively craft a transformative “north star” that elevates their identity and role as a development player. The new approach succeeded in generating “small islands of coherence” in the country offices, signaling a change to a new business model for UNDP.

UNDP Innovation is trying to shift away from single point solutions and instead develop interventions that are more coherent with the nature of complex systemic challenges. They have been experimenting with different approaches, guided by frameworks such as Geoff Mulgan’s shared understanding of a system and Charlie Leadbeater and Jannie Winhall’s Green Paper on System Innovation. These approaches involve reframing the problem, developing a course of action, and interacting with the system through portfolios of interventions. These approaches are aimed at helping actors navigate complexity, or enabling wider ecosystems of stakeholders to jointly tackle a complex challenge. A key focus of these approaches is learning, adaptation, and monitoring and evaluation. UNDP Innovation is hoping this shift in mindset can help them better work with uncertainty and complexity.

In the context of international development, the concept of a portfolio is gaining momentum as an additional means of operating and implementing beyond standard project management. A portfolio is not simply a grouping of projects, but a set of interconnected options or interventions that are aimed at providing solutions as we go along. In contrast to traditional project management, a systems portfolio is a direction of travel, not a destination. Rather than monitoring the expected results, it focuses on learning from implementation to better contribute to positive change in people’s lives.

This panel discussion examined how monitoring, evaluation, and learning can be used to help development organizations design and implement projects. It discussed the importance of understanding complexity and engaging with stakeholders to create a portfolio of strategic options. The panel also highlighted the importance of articulating a learning agenda and building organizational systems to support the development process. A particular study was discussed, which used a qualitative process to explore project outcomes and identified a methodology that focused on learning and development outcomes. The study also highlighted the need to be able to quickly respond to insights to inform decision making.

UNDP is shifting towards using portfolio logics instead of single point solutions to tackle complex systemic challenges. The idea is to extend time horizons and ambitiously tackle underlying causes. The pandemic strengthened the case for the need for “demonstration” projects that showcase alternative ways of development. The UNDP is investing in “deep demonstrations” to showcase progress on the ground when it comes to system transformation.

The second part of the article “The ‘so what’ of complexity” discusses how to approach complex challenges. The author suggests taking a portfolio approach, which involves developing a coordinated set of actions or prototypes to explore different aspects of a challenge, operate at different levels of a system, or have different levels of risk associated with them. The author also emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adaptation to changing circumstances. Finally, the author argues that funding for social and environmental initiatives needs to enable portfolio-based approaches and adaptation based on learning.

Portfolios of Options is a proposed solution for Development that enhances and leverages system capabilities to induce resilience and transformation. The Portfolios are unique, context-relevant, embedded mechanisms for learning, sensemaking, and problem-solving for social systems to induce necessary transformations in themselves. The complex and uncertain nature of social systems requires pragmatic design principles for social innovation projects and transformation processes based on system dynamics and intervention principles. The portfolios focus on strategic innovation, strategic learning, and the design of options as constitutive elements of an organic and dynamically managed portfolio.

UNDP has released a sensemaking and acceleration protocol after eight months of testing. The protocol generates actionable intelligence from a portfolio of existing projects to increase the impact of development work. It asks necessary questions about the coherence and diversity of interventions and enables countries to navigate the complexities of shifting contexts. UNDP’s protocol implements a systematic approach to qualitative methods, providing orientation and relevance in a fast-changing context.