Dark Matter Labs reposted this
About a week ago we published a little paper on portfolio practice, exploring portfolios as an emerging perspective on how to govern distributed transition processes in complex ecosystems. Writing this one has been a journey, and I'm very lucky to have teamed up on this with Eunsoo Lee and to have had the critical support from Indy Johar, Joost Beunderman, Dr. Martin Lorenz and many more at Dark Matter Labs. The paper draws upon our own experiences in designing portfolios - for instance from exploring options for addressing air quality in the city of Almaty together with the UNDP (Yerassyl Kalikhan, Steven Bland, Yaera Chung and more) earlier this year. It also draws upon many insightful explorations we've had with cities at NetZeroCitiesEU, like for instance with the team at the City of Lund (with a very sophisticated and particular understanding about transition portfolios and patterns - Mikael Edelstam, Juliet Leonette). And it is rooted in some more conceptual foundations ranging from systems design to decolonial theory. Most of all, however, it's a continuation of an ongoing exploration: How can we think and act about designing urgent transitions in the self-organising and hybrid systems that we're a part of ourselves? How to bridge the 'gap' between an ecosystem's complexity and the limited capacities of any one governing organisation? What to even learn from a past that is 'essentially unique' to apply for future action? I think that taking the promise of viewing portfolios as a form distributed governance to heart might get us ahead toward an answer. And this answer is different from a mere 'list of actions' or classic diversification practice (what we call 1st gen portfolios): 2nd gen portfolios are about building deep capabilities for an entire ecosystem to sense, hold, imagine and coordinate aligned and autonomous interventions in a context of vast plurality. They make for a system-wide pattern of governance that is genuinely distributed (eg. whole-of-city), genuinely open-ended (principles over goals), and genuinely conversational: in order to implement actions this practice demands radically distributed interfaces and mediation of resources as a recurring pattern among all actors within an ecosystem. By no means this is a definite answer. Hopefully though it's a contribution to an on-going conversation that might open up some new options (or questions). Already grateful for a week of comments and discussions from Giulio Quaggiotto, Titia Nijeboer, Mikael Edelstam and many more. Curious about all of them.
post cont. 2) Connected to the above, all of your issues and open questions are spot on but there is a higher order question that comes out of our experience that if tackled turns more of the questions you raise irrelevant - true alignment of organizations around the common intent. This means not just agreeing that the work is about economic rethinking but agreeing to cede some of institution's identity for the sake of better alignment with the intent. Demos guys have a great post on this that says we need to fix the 'form' of collaboration in 'transformation,' because as long as orgs collaborate within the constrains of individual entities no transformation can happen. 3) Lastly, on system capabilities you cite at the end - we have put together an emerging competency framework behind system & portfolio work that surfaces some of the issues i've flagged here: https://medium.com/@undp.innovation/building-capacity-for-strategic-innovation-an-emerging-competency-framework-for-portfolio-work-fadb768242be . We keep iterating on it as you'll see the organizational will to transform is one of the 3 critical areas that we have not managed to crack yet.
When one talks about root cause analysis it becomes clear the author does not understand systems concepts and ideas Root cause analysis is reductionist analytical thinking.
Nice - interesting work Simon. I’d love to connect work I’m doing on sustainable city reconstruction efforts in Mosul Iraq :) open for a call?
Very interesting Simon! Thanks for sharing.
Happy that you mention Lund. 😊 We look at portfolio management and impact follow up on ecosystem level, using a model developed in collaboration with OECD’s Observatory for Public Sector Innovation. We map and analyse climate projects in Lund 2019-2023, understand impact from those (data…) and also try to analyse business models in theprojects (hard…) in order to understand success factors for speeding and scaling the climate transition. This looks at “what has been done”, mainly with the municipality and municipal owned companies involved, identify potential “patterns” and learn from that. We also map the ecosystem the portfolios are created within, as the ecosystem conditions set boundaries for what actions/portfolios are currently possible to initiate. Then, we need to combine it with a forward-looking governance model where new and better portfolios can be built in collaboration with external stakeholders with their own perspectives and drivers, or even without the municipality involved as partner. A wonderful “mess” of ideas and hard work. A critical mass of engaged and diverse individuals, stakeholders and competencies is key to bring about a new culture of working that then start to enforce itself. Still some way to go!
Simon, fantastic piece of work (kudos to Indy Johar & co as well)! Thanks for referencing some of work as well! A few reflections from my end: 1) Pinpointing questions of governance as a critical issue in managing transitions via portfolio practice is spot on. From our work this comes out as well. Alignment of partners around a big reframe (moving from public sector transformation to unpacking dynamics of trust or shifting waste management & resource efficiency to rethinking economic models) goes smoothly as different entities recognize themselves in the reframe. Connecting and adapting existing work toward the new reframe (or intent) and potentially designing some joint intervention also goes fairly smoothly. Where issues start coming up is when the dynamic management process start surfacing interconnections that imply entities in the ecosystem need to work differently- change grinds at organizational boundaries.
Very interesting ! I really enjoyed reading and will try to embrace the approach for challenges that I aspire to tackle within Research, Science and Infrastructure
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Designing Public Systems
1wPaper also accessible here: https://bit.ly/dm-portfolio-making (gdoc)