The objective of these leadership ‘laboratories’ was to develop and build the collaboration and innovation capabilities needed by the UN and their partners to improve humanitarian preparedness and response, and to accelerate progress towards the SDGs. The Labs used research and methodologies developed by the Presencing Institute to support systemic leadership practices, and they built on sixteen previous SDG Leadership Labs which focussed on the UN’s international development role.
The approach taken by the Labs was based on an acknowledgment within the UN that more of the same approaches won’t deliver the outcomes which the world needs. The Labs brought a highly participative action learning approach, designed to move beyond incremental improvement to realise transformational change. The 2022–23 Labs, commissioned by the UN Development Coordination Office and funded by USAID, supported senior UN leaders and their partners in Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, and Rwanda. The Labs were conducted in four languages: English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Discover more about how:
- impact on the ground was achieved through prototyping new approaches;
- Theory U and presencing methodologies helped strengthen UN leadership capabilities;
- the Labs are beginning to achieve “critical mass”, with a very wide potential systemic impact.
Continue reading the article here.
Read the Final Program Evaluation here.
Watch the videos, below:
Here is a showcase of short video clips, where Senior leaders from the UN country teams — of Liberia, Honduras, Madagascar, Cameroon, Ecuador and Kenya — share their Leadership Lab experience in a series of short (3–4 minute) videos.
