The future happens today: Futures thinking in action

Our commitment is to create a more sustainable future today, and one of our main challenges as an Accelerator Lab is to find creative and forward-thinking ways to reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals as fast as possible by engaging with unusual partners, trying out new methodologies and testing new grassroots solutions all over the world.

However, the Lab is also designed to provide time and space for our UNDP colleagues to reflect and discover what lies outside their daily activities, what might happen in the near future and learn new tools that can support their work beyond the Lab’s involvement. Other Accelerator Labs in the network do this as well, but our team decided to give a specific name and description to these moments for learning, non-judgement and empathy. We have called it our “OASIS” not only because we enjoy the idea of water and palm trees after a year in quarantine, but also because each letter represents an essential aspect of its dynamics:

The OASIS is not a standalone activity that lives in a bubble separate from operational needs and strategic planning. We bring it to life when we put together this mindset and specific tools to help us think about our daily work in a new light, and luckily we found the conditions to demonstrate the OASIS in a major planning process for the Country Office (CO): The new Country Programme Document (CPD).

The Accelerator Lab began its work as the current CPD for Peru was winding down, so the preparatory work for the new CPD seemed like a perfect chance for the Lab to design and test a scenario scanning process, while also supporting the Strategic Planning team’s work and finding data that could influence the Lab’s later projects. Additionally, the process for a new CPD presented an opportunity to strengthen the existing futures thinking capabilities within the team even when the CO has a strong focus on daily delivery to improve living conditions in Peru. In this blog post we will briefly outline the steps we undertook to plan and kickoff this process, and in a second post we will show our results and undertake a little bit of a complementary collective intelligence activity.

ABC of the CPD

In the world of UNDP acronyms, the CPD is the document which describes UNDP’s role within the UN System’s Cooperation Framework with the host country. While the Cooperation Framework is the way the UN Country Team (UNCT) can deliver as one despite the multitude of programmes and projects taking place in a single territory, the CPD it describes what UNDP is expecting to achieve, how it’s going to measure the results of its work, and what is the context in which its projects are taking place. However, writing the CPD has a catch: The document covers five years at a time (the current one began in 2017 and is ending in 2021), which is a challenge in itself when deciding what should be the focus of the work. Add a global pandemic which turned our world upside down and, in the case of Peru, a presidential election and change of administration in the middle of 2021, and it becomes an unprecedented planning exercise.

By mid-November the Accelerator Lab had just finished our induction bootcamp where we had reviewed futures thinking methodologies. Additionally, and even more important, we had done an internal and external overview of the CO to learn more about its opportunities and challenges. During this overview we met with the Strategic Planning team to understand the processes that support programming, and this was when the idea of using the Lab’s tools for the new CPD came to life. It had to be a fairly quick exercise that could be immediately related to the CO’s daily activities while drawing on country-wide expertise and the diversity of the UNDP team. An office-wide strategic foresight exercise through horizon scanning was just the ticket.

I saw the sign(al): What, how and when

It wasn’t much of a hard sell to the Strategic Planning team; they were on board after explaining what we could gain from this process. After all, the Strategic Planning Officer attended our onboarding bootcamp and her team is fully involved in Next Gen UNDP! We agreed that while the results from the horizon scanning exercise might not translate directly into the CPD, they would provide a compass of sorts for the organization’s work as well as an indicator of which capabilities should be strengthened within UNDP to make sure that future challenges can be addressed efficiently and effectively with a focus on human rights. Likewise, our Resident Representative was just as interested and excited about this collective intelligence experiment as we were, and she gave her full backing even before knowing that at the global level UNDP was performing this same kind of exercise for their 2022-2025 strategic planning process.

When it was time to plan, the Lab leaned into one of its most important strengths: The possibility of drawing from other Lab’s experience, particularly those in the first cohort of Labs (the Peru Lab is part of the second cohort). The Ecuador Accelerator Lab kindly responded to our call and shared the methodology they used to carry out a similar horizon scanning exercise in mid-2020 to find specific solutions for post-COVID socio-economic recovery (thanks Ana!). We adapted it to a broader focus in order to discover all possible signals and aggregate them in trends that could impact UNDP’s current and future work in the country.

As we can see in the graph below, which summarizes the timeline we proposed for this experiment, the whole process is built on signals. But what is a signal? A signal is an event, product, or behavior that shows a different future from what we know today. According to the Institute for the Future a signal of change is anything that is already happening today that could be a clue into the future. It makes you think “A ha! I haven’t seen that before.”

Some notes about this timeline:

●      Week 4, as well as week 7 onwards, is dedicated to systematizing the results from the workshops.

●      Signal collection: The Lab prepared and shared a Google form where colleagues could register the signals they saw, with the options of including links to websites or upload pictures if they saw the signals out in the streets.

●      Scheduling options: The Lab noticed that it was important to give several time/date options for Q&A sessions and workshops to ensure widest participation possible.

●      Scenario building workshop: Ideally this would take place on week 6, but due to other workshops and the Lab’s launch being scheduled during weeks 6-8, the scenario building workshop will take place on week 9.

Do you want to know which trends we found? And about the scenarios we built? Stay tuned for part two of this blog! If you’re currently using or desigining a futures thinking methodology and you’d like to share it with us, or if you’re a Labber and you’d like to exchange ideas about how to strengthen the CPD process within UNDP, please email us at acclab.pe@undp.org