Creating the unknown: designing for experimentation

Last year, EIT Climate-KIC and Sida launched the Systems Innovation Learning Partnership to bring together organisations and people to collaborate, experiment, learn and share ideas that help to support innovation and transformation across whole systems.

We know that tackling big challenges, such as the climate crisis or growing inequalities, requires navigating and learning how to make an impact in complex systems. This is why we set up the Experimentation Fund; to finance and support early-stage systems interventions and to create learning opportunities of which interventions can bring us closer to transformation for a sustainable future.

As the team sat down to begin designing the fund, they recognized that the normal setup for a programmatic fund wouldn’t be enough to nurture the systems innovation ideas we were looking for. I caught up with Tom Pruunsild and Will Wade, programme designers for the Experimentation Fund, to discuss what it’s been like to design a grant funding mechanism in an experimental way and their hopes for how learnings from the fund can be taken further by others experimenting in systems innovation.

Different levels of learning

For both Tom and Will, the fund is attempting to achieve three different layers of goals. Firstly, it is looking to finance and support early-stage systems interventions working in the Global South on issues such as the climate crisis, human rights, gender inequalities or food insecurities. Secondly, the fund is hoping to generate a deeper understanding of what it takes to make transformative impact in these areas and hopes to do so by cultivating a community of practitioners who can learn from each other through facilitated learning and reflection sessions. And lastly, the fund itself is an experiment to see how we, as a partnership, could approach funding in a flexible and more adaptive way. In other words, can we join those already making ripples of change towards experimental and innovative funding approaches in support of systemic change?

“We want to go on a journey with our grantees so we can practice systems innovation with them”, said Will, highlighting that the programme is as much about developing the capabilities and mindsets of those we are funding as those working behind the scenes. For Tom, this meant shifting to work in an adaptive way, implementing learnings on the go, rather than at the end. It means shaking off the ‘illusion of control’ we often have about the outcomes of a programme at the start; “if it was linear process to solving world hunger or the climate crisis, we would’ve already done it. But we know this is not how systems interventions work. We need to get better at posing a question about an issue to learn from – rather than having the future already precalculated because it prevents new and surprising outcomes to develop and grow”.

Leaning into the discomfort

This loose, sometimes vague, definition of what we want and what we expect is an unusual and novel feeling to work in. “I had to shed layers of fears around bureaucracy and assurances that come with ensuring you are spending money well in these types of programmes” said Will, highlighting the tension between meeting the technical requirements of spending public money and wanting to attract ideas that are so early in their development, that we’re not sure whether they will work out. This is part of the reasoning behind having two stages to the fund call for ideas; any ideas that seem interesting and the fund wishes to take further will receive 2,000 EUR to test out their idea before applying for the full grant. It offers a ‘safe to fail’ experiment that organisations often don’t get – a small opportunity to explore an idea, with a small pot of money behind it, and if it doesn’t work out, they are not failing to meet a KPI that will fundamentally change their funding pattern or opportunity for the next few years.

The need for continuous learning is brought up time and time again in the work we do with the learning partnership. I ask the question many people may have been asking; when do you stop to take stock of learning if it’s continuous? Tom reflects on the need to tap into our gut feelings on these issues; “one of the things that I’ve encountered is that since we are talking about designs that are inspired by living systems, there is some innate gut feeling that people have and tap into. We should lean into that more and embrace that feeling in our work”. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be clear points to do learning and reflection built into the programme but that the Experimentation Fund is asking people to intentionally build this into everyday work. This is at the heart of what we are trying to achieve; tapping into new ways of learning and shifting mindsets from being completely focused on KPIs and outputs at the end of a programme to a more fluid and reflective practice.

Shifting the wider sector

So, what are the hopes for the fund? Will speaks firmly about the fund being another way for us at both EIT Climate-KIC and Sida to transform the way we approach programme work; “can we use the experimentation fund to come up with different language to design programmes, one that is more sensitive towards the learning journey, rather than the outcomes?”. There’s also an excitement to see how external stakeholders working across systems innovation and beyond take this and run with it. “What I want to ask our sector is what the risk appetite is for innovation and if that exists, are you willing to fund in a different way to achieve it?” said Will.

For Tom, there’s an interest in revealing the role funders play in these programmes and extracting learnings on how to best fund systems innovation. “What funders often don’t see is that we are part of the system we are trying to change – we take up space there and we also carry a huge influence. Being able to reveal ourselves to that system and understand the role we play – both positive and negative – can allow us to take those learnings onboard to fund in a more effective way in the future”.

If we are to transform systems, we must also transform our role as funders in this space. We can only do this by leaning into the discomfort and taking risks that match the challenges we are trying to tackle.

The call for ideas for the Experimentation Fund is open until Wednesday 7 December 2022. Find out more.