System Builders are Carving a Path into Humanitarian Action’s Future

When things start going badly, it’s smart to ask a basic question. Do we stand by the status quo and try to make things work? Filling the gaps. Trying to keep the ship upright.

Or do we recognize the depth of the turmoil ahead and choose a different strategy? Do we get off the boat we’ve been riding for so long?

That’s the question that faces humanitarian crisis response today. It’s not hard to spot the turmoil. Funding cuts for humanitarian action are combined with growing challenges from natural disasters, environmental crisis, and conflict. It’s a long anticipated storm that’s kicking up furious waves.

The natural temptation is to find familiar handholds in existing strategies and grab on. That’s where a lot of effort is going today. But I find myself skeptical about the viability of that path.

I believe this moment is ripe for a shift in thinking. Instead of simply trying to rescue the status quo aid model, we can choose to focus investments and creative passions on the powerful strategies of innovative System Building. We can claim a chance to make the world work better … piece by piece.

Post World War II Humanitarian Action: 80 Years Filling Gaps

The 20th Century model of international aid is based on a fairly straightforward view of the humanitarian challenge. The strategy was originally developed to address the needs of a broken world following World War II. The underlying understanding was that one group of people had urgent needs, which they could not provide for themselves. However, these needs could be satisfied by another group of people who had the resources and capacity to act.

The basic structure of the well established Provider / Recipient aid strategy

This Provider-Recipient system for humanitarian action has lots of moving parts, but over the years the approach has become well defined, consistent, and replicable at scale. Using this highly structured strategy, aid responses have the potential to work as well oiled machines, optimized to quickly deliver goods and services across the world.

In humanitarian crises like natural disasters or sudden violent conflicts, this 80 year old system has repeatedly stepped into the gap and literally saved millions of lives.

A Well Intentioned Strategy Hits the Wall

However, simply saying a system is efficient and well managed is not the same as saying it delivers on all its aspirations. There is growing recognition that the Provider-Recipient approach to crisis response is poorly positioned to solve the array of hard challenges that define our exceptionally volatile moment of human history.

For example, the Provider-Recipient strategy has few tools for reducing long term needs, so funding demands are effectively unending. The delivery of products and services addresses the immediate crisis, but this only provides stop gap relief. When I think of this approach from a system design perspective, I imagine someone pouring water into a bucket with holes at the bottom.

As a result, the model has a voracious appetite for funding. The math is unforgiving. As the number of recipients and the number of crises grow, so must the funding.

However, money isn’t the only, or even the biggest problem for the Provider-Recipient strategy. There are deep structural limitations that constrain this system’s ability to approach humanitarian challenges in new and different ways.

For example, for over a decade there has been a growing awareness that crisis response needs to build in greater respect for the rights, preferences, and knowledge of recipient communities. When an aid delivery is a poor fit with people’s actual need, it is often resold to acquire more important goods and services, an inefficient process that distorts local markets.

Earnest efforts have been made to address this shortfall. Organizations like Ground Truth Solutions and the CDAC Network have developed approaches for engaging communities and providing more robust connections between providers and recipients. Other innovators have added services and protections to crisis response efforts to help address concerns like equity, gender based violence, and ecological impact.

Attempts to Improve the Long Term Provider Recipient Model Run into Structural Barriers

Yet, despite efforts to more consistently engage communities, the hard reality is that the Provider-Recipient strategy is fundamentally transactional. The system centralizes resources, planning, control, and actionable information with the Provider, a strategic segregation that allows the Provider’s operations to be standardized and quickly mobilized across the world. The design is practical, efficient and replicable, but it also creates deep structural barriers to more collaborative and adaptive responses.

Despite years of discussion across the sector, this remains a challenge. Shortly after the beginning of the Ukraine war, I had a chance to interview local social service providers in Poland, who were among the first points of support for many refugees fleeing the war. Local civil society and public sector professionals repeatedly complained about international aid teams that set up operations according to proven templates for rapid response, but with only limited efforts to weave in Poland’s substantial pre-existing capabilities.

A Powerful Alternative: Building Better Systems

Fortunately, there is a powerful alternative strategy. It’s System Building. Instead of trying to repair an 80 year old machine designed to deliver resources at a moment of crisis, System Builders work to develop new and better systems rooted in local, national, and regional contexts.

System Builders engage a wide range of participants, looking inside the relatively unexplored blue box on the right side of our Provider-Recipient model. Instead of approaching people, organizations, and resources as a destination for aid deliveries, they work to understand the complex systems for taking action that these communities already have in place (the left side of the diagram below).

“Inside the blue box” are capabilities, knowledge, and resources that can be the foundation for system building.

Then System Builders work with these partners to creatively reimagine how this part of the world could work. They design innovative sustainable systems that solve a problem by integrating people, information, and resources. Since communities facing a crisis are at risk of falling short of the challenges they face, these new systems often weave in new capabilities provided by others (the right side of the diagram above).

Three Powerful Drivers Behind System Building

This kind of capacity building work has been going on for many years. But it has often been seen primarily as the domain of ‘development’ programs, or as a supporting side strategy for the humanitarian aid deliveries made under the Provider-Recipient model.

It’s time for a shift in thinking. In the turmoil surrounding today’s humanitarian sector, there are three compelling reasons to step back and see System Building as core to crisis response.

1. So Many Untapped Opportunities — Across the world, there is a wealth of potential opportunities for System Building. While options for Provider-Recipient aid seem to be contracting every day, System Builders can point to a wide array of challenges where better systems could make a real difference when dealing with humanitarian crisis.

2. Exponentially Growing Creative Capabilities — System Building is an exceptionally powerful approach for addressing hard problems. But it’s not easy. Fortunately, over the last few years our capabilities to do this sophisticated work have grown substantially, and System Builders across the world are on track to rapidly develop their creative muscle even further in the future.

3. Unlocking Different Funding Options — Funding shortfalls are at the heart of the immediate turmoil in humanitarian action. When it comes to funding, System Building has a much different profile when compared to Provider-Recipient programs. Differences in the levels of funding and the types of sponsors that find System Building attractive can help untangle the seemingly impossible knots that surround aid funding today.

Let me lay out this case for System Building in a bit more detail.

The First Driver: So many opportunities to act

In the Provider-Recipient model, there is really just one way of responding to a crisis. Aid must be delivered in real time to those in need. In contrast, System Builders have multiple levers they can use to reduce the frequency and severity of crisis while also improving a community’s ability to rise to the challenge.

They can develop sustainable working systems of people, organizations, technology and resources that:

1. Reduce the drivers of a crisis — Make the size of the crisis smaller or less frequent

2. Develop resilience to crisis — Reduce the impact of the crisis when it does occur

3. Enable anticipatory action — Begin the response sooner, providing more time and more options.

4. Expand crisis response capacity — Increase the capacity of the community to respond to the crisis

5. Improve recovery — Recover more quickly from the crisis and with better long term prospects for the future

For example, instead of repeatedly providing food aid to rural farm families who are experiencing drought, System Builders are working with the farmers to create integrated systems that provide real time data for crop planning, support for alternative crop selection, and access to markets to optimize livelihoods.

System Builders have multiple levers for addressing the risk of crisis and improving the crisis response.

The range of System Building opportunities is exceptional, and they appear in diverse contexts throughout the world. Creative thinking abounds. Every week I talk with innovators who have big powerful ideas for developing better systems that provide sustainable impact.

The Second Driver: The power to do bigger things

I find the second reason for deeply embracing System Building exciting because it highlights a crucial shift in our ability to deliver sustained impact in a messy world.

System Building is hard, but our capability to create innovative high impact systems is greater than ever and is rapidly growing.

In the past, System Building was often (justifiably) seen as prohibitively difficult, an impossible uphill climb that sounds good on paper, but is impractical in practice. Yet today, a growing collection of system innovation tools, practices, and participants is changing that story.

Here is my list of four key capabilities that are enabling organizations and individuals to develop and expand their creative capacity as Systems Builders.

Capability 1: Embracing harder problems

System builders frequently confront a creative irony. Harder problems lead to more powerful solutions.

Embracing more complex challenges enables them to create more impactful solutions. So, instead of running away from complexity, effective system innovators intentionally embrace problems with multiple actors and interconnected relationships.

Seeing challenges in terms of these real world systems is a powerful shift in thinking. For example, when working to develop a new program that would anticipate and respond to flooding in Chad, Ground Truth Solutions working on a project supported by the H2H Network, mapped out the sources of information, channels for communication, and paths for action that were already woven into these communities.

An example of the rich systems for responding to crisis that can exist within communities — Ground Truth Solutions’ work with communities in Chad

They didn’t find a blank slate waiting for international aid to be dropped in. Instead, they captured a view of the community’s complex system for identifying risks and taking action. That’s exciting, because rich local systems like this, even when incomplete or imperfect, can provide a foundation for more sophisticated system building.

Capability 2: Designing complex powerful solutions

Fifteen years ago, a wave of new innovation programs based on Silicon Valley practices promised that a stream of low cost fast moving pilots would transform the aid sector’s struggling Provider-Recipient strategy. Despite lots of investment in simple ‘fail fast’ projects, this really didn’t work. A swarm of small innovations designed to address narrow problems consistently fell short of driving real change or scaling impact.

Fortunately, System Builders are now positioned to deliver innovations with the ability to do bigger things. They achieve this by embracing more complexity, and weaving together systems of people, organizations, technology, data, and resources.

Think of each contribution to a system as a LEGO block. Each new piece works with other building blocks to enable shared actions. Together they are powerful enough to tackle hard messy problems. Plus, the resulting system can be creatively tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of each context.

System Builders draw on a rapidly expanding ‘toolbox’ of people, organizations, technology and resources.

Today this creative power is growing. As many seven year olds could tell us, having more LEGO blocks means you can build more impressive things. System Building across the world is being empowered by a wide range of emerging new participants, tools, and resources. Our box of system building LEGOs is getting bigger every day.

Effective System Builders cast a wide net for collaborators and participants, contributors to the system’s potential LEGO blocks. This may include the expertise and resources from those who were Providers in the prior strategy (international agencies, INGO’s, etc.). However, potential collaborators aren’t limited to those traditional aid actors. Governments, civil society, academics, and commercial organizations can all be woven into sophisticated and impactful systems (diagram above).

For example, one system building effort in the Caribbean stretched the public sector’s response to hurricanes by integrating local business resources such as air freight services, commercial construction equipment, and vacant hotel rooms.

Spreading a wide net is a key first step to designing impactful systems. But this potential must also be paired with creative system design. The LEGO blocks must be brought together in a system where all the parts work together, barriers to action have been removed, and suitable rewards are provided to everyone who participates.

This is where complexity must be understood and creatively managed. Organizations doing System Building often rely on specialists who have a unique combination of skills in big picture thinking, generalist knowledge, adaptive problem solving, and persuasive storytelling.

In Do Bigger Things*, Jenny Wilde and I called this role the Innovation Choreographer. In my experience, effective System Building often depends on having a passionate and energized Innovation Choreographer available to help weave together the complex, multi-part solution.

Capability 3: Using tech to unlock new systems

Innovation is often seen as being synonymous with new technologies. I suspect this is one of the reasons why the lean innovation practices of Silicon Valley have gotten so much traction. This is a popular innovation practice that builds on silver bullet thinking that comes with each new wave of technology. The focus for these innovators is on the next mobile app … or block chain system … or AI model, that will somehow save the world.

Nope.

It’s true, technology products can solve a lot of specific problems. For example, a mobile app can help coordinate record keeping in a crisis response and a new water filter can improve the performance of water supplies to displaced people.

But the impact of these applications is limited to supporting the bigger system where they work. A mobile app that gathers data during a Provider-Recipient crisis response may improve the performance of the aid delivery, but it won’t address the causes of the crisis or transform the aid response system.

In contrast, System Builders can use technology to unlock entirely new systems. I talked about this exciting potential in a prior article on the system innovation opportunities with AI.

Technology’s big role in the future will be unlocking new systems that make the world work differently.

Ambitious new system designs often must find ways to remove a difficult barrier or create a strategic capability. When technology can fill these gaps, an entirely new system becomes possible.

For example, the fast expanding range of tele-medicine offerings connects patients in need with a disperse community of medical professionals. It’s a powerful system strategy that removes the constraint of geography from access to crucial medical care. This isn’t just a technical solution, but technology provides the key link that unlocks the broader patient and doctor system.

This approach to technology builds on a systems first mindset. Game changing System Builders begin by thinking in terms of the whole system they want to create, including people, organizations, and resources. Then they look for ways that today’s exponentially growing technology toolkit can enable and empower that bold system vision.

Capability 4: Mastering the craft of system building

As we can see, System Building is a powerful approach for addressing hard problems. But it’s also quite challenging for the innovation teams that are designing and implementing these ambitious new systems.

A lot of innovators aren’t prepared for the challenge. Over the last fifteen years the aid sector adopted a set of innovation practices that are poorly aligned with complex work of system building. Following the example of Silicon Valley, the sector adopted the simplified practices of lean product innovation, pursuing small, fast moving ‘minimum viable products’ and ‘failing fast’. That’s a viable innovation model, but its best suited to small, targeted innovations that focus on addressing a specific problem.

System Builders are in a very different business, taking on complex problems and creating multi-part solutions that build on the strengths and motivations of diverse participants. The practices and programs designed for lightweight pilot projects aren’t enough for this work.

To be successful, System Builders need a different kind of support. Here are four key shifts that help make system innovation work out in the real world.

1. Embrace Complex Challenges/Big Solutions — Set the bar at the right level. Don’t pretend that problems are simple, when they aren’t. Expect innovators working with systems to understand a difficult challenge and design systems solutions that build on the power of complexity.

2. Provide Innovators with Sustained Support — Support the System Building journey over time. Systems take time to design, develop and scale. Commit to enabling the long journey, not just during the early stages of work.

3. Offer Help with the Hard Parts — Real world systems are messy. Sponsors of innovation initiatives can help with the hard parts by providing coaching, special skills, resources, and influence that system builders need during the creative journey.

4. Teach the Craft of System Building — Today, broad based skill development is needed for System Builders. Just like any other professional field, concepts, practices, and roles that must be mastered for success and impact.

System Building is a challenging practice. Innovators need the right support to be successful.

The Third Driver: Breaking free of the funding spiral

Perhaps the strongest argument against System Building as a front and center strategy for humanitarian action is that as funds are cut, there are immediate urgent needs for aid deliveries that can’t be put off. The Provider-Recipient model can’t simply be shut down because there are people in desperate need of support today.

The flaw in this view is that support and funding for those most in need is not a fixed pie controlled by international donors. We don’t have to assume that humanitarian action operates in a zero sum game, where every dollar dedicated to System Building is a dollar less spent on immediate relief.

That being said, there is a fair amount of magical thinking around innovative funding in humanitarian aid. In the face of today’s state based funding cuts, the logical question seems to be “Who will step in and provide the substantial funding needed to keep the Provider-Recipient system working at its current level?”

The hard truth is that the Provider-Recipient strategy was designed to be fed by big public sector donors. Few other organizations have the motivations or the resources of large national governments to support international humanitarian budgets.

Fortunately, System Builders aren’t trying to solve that intractable problem. Instead, they seek to create new systems where each actor has a different motivation for collaborating. As a result, the size and type of rewards can be far more varied and come from many more places.

Consider the system innovation being developed by the UN Agency, IOM. They want to help families whose homes have been damaged in storms to rebuild, and to adopt engineering practices that will make their home more robust during future typhoons. They could have created a program that provided direct aid, paying for each new building project. That kind of ongoing Provider-Recipient support would be difficult to sustain.

However, System Builders find a different way to solve the challenge. IOM helped shape a system where diverse collection of actors worked by different rules. In this system a commercial microfinance firm provides building loans to families, which the families eventually pay back. However, because many low income families wouldn’t qualify for that kind of financing for damaged home repairs, the system adds a loan guarantee pool funded by members of the community’s diaspora living overseas. Then engineers are engaged to provide technical support in building design.

Note how the system involves varied actors, with each one investing effort and money based on their own interests and goals. This kind of creative system design steps away from simply trying to fill the funding gap of international aid donors.

This type of creative System Building can also help draw in new sources of creative capital needed to design and develop systems. Philanthropies, crowd funding, and commercial firms may find investing in a new system’s development far more attractive than being locked into a long term obligation for aid deliveries.

A System Builder’s ‘pitch’ is fundamentally different. Instead of seeking donations to fill urgent needs (which often continue well past the initial onset of the crisis), they offer opportunities to make targeted investments in a specific system. A sponsor can see how they are making the world work better and the potential for long term impact after their investment is over. It’s the kind of funding proposition that organizational leaders outside the aid community are used to hearing and resonate with.

We can Claim the Opportunity of System Building

Of course, even with meaningful investment in System Building, there will still be a need for emergency relief delivered through a Provider-Recipient model. The choice ahead is not to pick one single approach to crisis response. People will continue to need emergency access to food and shelter, which is the type of support that the Provider-Recipient model is designed to deliver.

However, there’s a danger that in today’s tumultuous and strained funding situation that all the attention (and funding) will shift to filling the aid delivery gap. And that’s a problem, because as we’ve seen, there are compelling reasons for putting System Building front and center of the long term humanitarian response strategy.

The first reason is brutally pragmatic. The long standing Provider-Recipient model increasingly looks like a broken down bus driving off the edge of a cliff. Funding is being cut. Crisis challenges are growing in number, scale, and complexity. And there is growing recognition that the model, even when it works, is often failing to do a good job on a crucially important aspects of the mission.

That’s all pretty depressing.

But I must confess that I’m still excited and optimistic. While much of the current narrative in aid is shot through with hopelessness, I find myself energized by the idea that so many opportunities are available for creative System Building.

System Builders are stepping up to intentionally take on a host of complex challenges. They are creating powerful solutions that integrate lots moving parts, draw on unique local capabilities, push boundaries, and tap the most hopeful goals and desires of those who become part of the new system.

Of course, there will be times when Provider-Recipient support will continue to be needed. But there are also many places where System Building can create the long term capacity to avoid or address crisis by weaving together the diverse capabilities of organizations, individuals, technology, and communities.

We can create a lot more buckets that don’t have holes at the bottom.

I’m not alone in seeing the potential for this path forward. IARAN and the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership just updated their vision for Humanitarian Action in 2040, and laid out a model for Aid on Many Paths as one of their possible futures. They describe the possibility of a world where:

“Diverse aid approaches and new forms of governance are accepted and effective. Aid aligns with the culture of the regional block and is built from the context of regional political and economic dynamics (e.g., Chinese, U.S., European, Islamic). Local actors take a leading role in response, while intermediary actors provide financing, technical support and advocacy. New funding streams and economic models emerge, blending religious networks, private foundations, income, and regional alliances.”

This is a System Builders view of the world, and isn’t beyond our reach. As organizations, leaders, and communities master this creative work, there will be the potential to leverage the power of System Building in a nearly unending array of new and unexpected places.

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*When Jenny Wilde and I wrote ***Do Bigger Things *— A practical guide to powerful innovation in a changing world, we very much had the aid sector’s growing challenges in mind. System building is a powerful tool which is being leveraged by commercial, public sector, and international aid organizations. But some of Do Bigger Thing’s most compelling stories of impact and opportunity come from the innovators who rose to the challenge of supporting those who face crises in a fast changing world.

If you want to read more about the concepts behind System Building and the practices of working system innovation choreographers, Do Bigger Things is designed to be your guide.