Kate Sutton - Experimentation at the United Nations

Episode 002 - Kate Sutton - Experimentation at the United Nations

Gavin Bryant Hello and welcome to the Experimentation Masters podcast. Today, we'd like to welcome Kate Sutton to the podcast. Kate is the Head of Regional Innovation Centre for the United Nations Development Programme. In this episode, we're going to explore how the United Nations uses experimentation to solve some of humanity's biggest and most challenging problems. Welcome to the podcast, Kate. 

 

Kate Sutton Thanks for having me, Gavin. It's great to be here. 

 

Gavin Bryant OK, so we might dive in straight away. So, I thought it might be really helpful to give our listeners a little bit of a background and an overview of your career leading up to your appointment at the UNDP.

 

Kate Sutton Yeah. Well, thanks for that. I'm from New Zealand. So, in New Zealand, you aren't generally a specialist. You are a generalist because there it's a small market, right? So, I started, and I did my first master's in Politics, but in international development, I then went through and worked in policy and then corporate.  My first foray into international development was working for a Pacific organisation working for Pacific people based in the Pacific, not in New Zealand, with the Foreign Affairs of Trade and basically supporting SME's to scale. And, in a variety of other things, I've done a whole lot of work on renewable energy. 

 

Kate Sutton I left New Zealand to do my second master's in business administration and after that I really dove into working and I've moved to Malawi and set up a business there, consulting on business growth and driving innovation there. And we set up a whole entrepreneurship network, a hub and a fund for impact. 

 

Kate Sutton Then there wasn't really, I didn't kind of formally get into innovation as a kind of practise until I worked for NESTA, which is the UK’s Innovation Foundation. Obviously had done work on innovation with my MBA and certainly a lot when I was on the African continent. But kind of the how do you do innovation? What's the kind of theories of innovation kind of really getting schooled on that happened from about when I when I started working at NESTA and worked there for a wee while on a variety of different things, which I'm sure we’ll touch on in this conversation, primarily within the private sector, on social change and then working on international development on social change. NESTA is just a really amazing organisation to kind of learn and kind of get exposed to, you know, 400 people, which was my colleagues working on innovation. There's something to learn every day and now going from a very innovative and innovation based organisation to one that doesn't have, that isn't known for innovation. It's known for its development work, but certainly in the development sector, known for being innovative is the United Nations Development Programme. And so it's been a really exciting journey to go from, I guess, working in innovation all the time to now working in innovation all the time, but within an organisation that that needs kind of innovation introduced to it. So, it's been quite interesting. 

 

Gavin Bryant Just to dive in for a moment on the experience in Malawi. What was some of the key learnings that you took away from working at grassroots with entrepreneurs in Malawi that have shaped your approach to innovation? 

 

Kate Sutton Oh yeah. I mean, I think what I had in New Zealand, we have this concept of tino rangatiratanga, which is self-determination. And that's always been really strong. And my kind of understanding of the world, you know, that people have the answers to their own challenges they need to be. They should be empowered which groups of people should be self-determined to build better lives for themselves, and that the system should sort of respect that and it shouldn't be kind of top-down. But, the change, that was always kind of quite strong in my upbringing and took that very much the way I can in Malawi. I think the entrepreneurs are just incredible. 

 

Kate Sutton You know, you want to know a hard place to be an entrepreneur in sub-Saharan Africa is definitely one of the hardest places. I mean, in terms of kind of it's not just about who you are as a character, what your idea is and your ability to execute that idea. It's the enabling environment that exists finance, legislative, environment, just having all the people around you. Watch entrepreneurs, you know, we're so in New Zealand and the UK now in Bangkok, where I'm living there been those ecosystems, a pretty vibrant but certainly there. They were great challenges to that. South Africa has a great entrepreneurial environment, certainly than Malawi was pretty challenged. So, I think I learnt that everybody had the answers. You know, everyone we worked with had the answers for themselves where they wanted to go, what their vision was. I guess what we focussed on was trying to kind of bring in new ideas or approaches or complementary ideas to kind of support that vision. So, I think that it's kind of pretty much, pretty much remained with me and that idea that innovation can kind of come from just the smart people in the lab, it comes from people on the ground, it comes from empowered people, really empowered groups of people. Trying to solve problems. But that has remained my kind of innovation thesis, so to now. 

 

Gavin Bryant Did you find that in sub-Saharan Africa, with the democratisation of information around innovation and entrepreneurship, it was less of a barrier for them to get going and was maybe more, as you mentioned, funding and things like infrastructure. 

 

Kate Sutton Sure. I mean, I think the the vision is there, right? Like, as soon as you have access to Facebook, you have access to Instagram. You can see what's going on with the rest of the world and get ideas. And so, yeah, I agree with you. 

 

Kate Sutton That definitely was quite important. And. Yeah, very much those barriers around. Just general infrastructure, what was possible, legislation, finance, you know, access to networks of people who could help you access to networks of people who can give you ideas will help you when you're stuck. 

 

Kate Sutton That's just a smaller market and that's really challenging, right? Entrepreneurs often use a reason why entrepreneurs get back together, and that's because they can share ideas and build off each other and build on sort of industries around each other, you know, service industries to successful businesses and things like that. And that wasn't the case in Malawi, and that was a real challenge. 

 

Kate Sutton But, you know, obviously some amazing stuff does happen. And still this day, many of the entrepreneurs that we worked with are still doing their thing and building successful businesses. So it's not all bad news. 

 

Gavin Bryant Moving along to the UNDP, could you give listeners a little bit of an overview, given the broad and expansive nature of it, the focus, the goals, the objectives and where your role fits into the puzzle? 

 

Kate Sutton Yes, well, the main goal is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and that's pretty clear. But we do focus down on a variety of several of those goals to be a bit more explicit. And we also, you know, look we have some strategic enablers to achieve those goals, which are innovation, digital and strategic financing. And those are what we really try to achieve ultimately, is structural transformation. And that is a big thing. You know, I think the way often the way that things are working now and whatever development context driven is not serving people the best, it's not really leaving people behind. We talk about leave no one behind. There’s definitely a vulnerability to disasters and shocks, so we trying to create environments where, you know, we put in place infrastructure - hard and soft, and to really ensure that no one is left behind and I'm sure that we can achieve sustainable development goals. 

 

Kate Sutton Okay. So that's massive. And then you've got 20000 people across the globe working on that. And the way that we our main kind of modality as we work for country offices. So, in my region, Asia-Pacific has got 35 countries, 25 country offices, and those country offices work closely with government to try to achieve that structural transformation. 

 

Kate Sutton So then you go, All right. Each of those countries is going to feel quite different in how they want to do that, especially if you're working with government and governments will have different priorities about what SDG’s they want to prioritise. So there's definitely no one size fits all in the UNDP. It's very devolved, very to decentralised organisation, which is great and a lot of fun to work for. And then we at a regional level provide advice, guidance, products, services to the country offices to provide to those governments and the special teams in my team which are innovation and digital. 

 

Gavin Bryant That was one of the things that really stuck out to me in looking at the Sustainable Development Goals is, the magnitude and the breadth of them. And I guess it's a bit reassuring to know that local governments are selecting or using a pick and mix approach rather than trying to solve all of them given some of the challenges. But I was thinking more personally with my experience as well that travelling from Samoa right through to the Middle East, that the geography, the political landscape, the economic landscape and culturally they're all so different so must be an interesting environment to work with in. 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah, I mean, certainly all governments have to report on their success towards all of these SDG’s. But I would say that, yeah, there are some, some governments prioritise. And certainly what they work with us on. So, there are other U.N. agencies, people will probably know, UNICEF or the World Health Organisation and other kind of multilateral organisations that work with governments on specific things. So, the World Food Programme etc. 

 

 Kate Sutton So the UNDP doesn't do everything. But I guess what is unique about the development programme is that we are a lot more broad than all of those organisations, I think. Yes. So, the Asia-Pacific region is from Samoa to Iran and certainly very diverse, you know, country offices with 600 people, to country offices of 30 people, countries with a billion people, a billion and a half, to countries with a few thousand people. So, for sure, you know how you serve those countries and how you serve those governments is going to differ. I think what remains the same is a lot of the challenges know, obviously the pandemic of the last couple of years, being more front of mind. More importantly, now I guess it's pandemic recovery. So, what does this mean for our economy and these sort of structural trends of transitions that have happened within our economies that wouldn't have happened without the pandemic. the climate crisis is obviously 

 

Kate Sutton The climate crisis is the main sort of big hairy one. VUCA. Wicked whatever you want to call it, challenge that's facing us. But absolutely 70 per cent of the world's natural disasters happen in our region, so there's a pretty big hairy stuff that kind of impacts all of them for a very select or greater extent. So there are some similarities as well as those differences, as you say, and kind of geography, population, culture to have a view of the world, etc.. 

 

Gavin Bryant OK, so the governments were more specifically engage with you and your team if there's a need around potential financing, digitisation or some sort of innovation requirement. 

 

Kate Sutton We focus on innovation and digital. There's another team within the office that work on financing. Otherwise, the portfolio would be pretty big. So we're working on, 

for example, Laos in Thailand, Sri Lanka and soon to be Indonesia on digital transformation with government and all that look slightly different. But ultimately, it's all about better public services, more efficiency and effectiveness. But more importantly, what impact and doing that with a leaving no one behind lens. So it focuses on inclusive digital transformation, not just the digital transformation of a few. And that's an example of kind of how and that work, as obviously there’s things that we learn from that work and there are things that we learn about obviously political economy, but also practical stuff. And we learn about, you know, next practise and we try to bring that to all the countries in the region. So that's that's generally the model is start with doing some experimentation for a few areas and a few countries and a few games and then develop better to something that's more scalable. Mm-Hmm. 

 

Gavin Bryant Now I know with my work in innovation and experimentation, sometimes it can be quite challenging and overwhelming. And even in a big organisation, trying to get a linear binary product to market can be moving heaven and earth. Some days you just sit back in your chair and go Kate, I’m a little bit overwhelmed today. 

 

Kate Sutton Oh, I. No, not really, not really. I think I think what's overwhelming is it's a big bureaucratic organisation. I think for me, that's probably the overwhelming part. I don't feel overwhelmed at all about this, about the scale of the challenges or the scale of what we're trying to achieve. So, I think that's just not something in my personality. I think I feel very overwhelmed by the bureaucracy and admin, whereas I know others in my organisation would feel the complete opposite. So be honest about that, I think. I think what's hard is if you work really hard on something for a period, you know, we don't believe it in terms of our innovation thesis and philosophy, we don't believe in kind of a single point. You know, quick win solutions, right? We believe and we're talking about systems transformation, structural transformation, structural change that's obviously going to take a long time. When you do something new, work on it over a period of years and you start to see change. You know, I've been talking about something, something it's a prime minister changing a focus of a country policy because ultimately policy changes is one of the most important levers in our systems change toolkit. Once you see that, it's really amazing. But then obviously there's times where that doesn't happen. 

 

Kate Sutton [And you could have a change of government be something completely different. You could have a complete change in sort of. What's happening in the country impacted by some kind of natural disaster or, you know, obviously the pandemic has changed what's happening in some countries? Or you could have a coup or some kind of war or in, you know that that really. Changes everything, and that work can feel pretty. Wasted or yeah, it just doesn't come off that can be dispriting for everybody involved. But no, I don't feel at all overwhelmed, but I think it's important. The reality is that more is more when it comes to tackling these challenges. We don't have enough smart people or smart solutions or smart or good, just enough people working on these problems. So definitely the more the merrier. And we need to feel positive about how we can change them otherwise, I guess. We'd all just give up. Pack up and do something a lot smaller, I imagine. 

 

Gavin Bryant OK, just getting back to your personal innovation thesis, which you are touching on previously, what are some of the guiding principles that you've formed given your global exposure and expertise in innovation? 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah, so everyone can be an innovator. I don't believe in this kind of real technocratic specialism thing. Yes, there are innovation specialists like myself who understand that kind of theory and practise a lot more. But at the end of the day, good ideas can come from anywhere. How you implement something, there's a very there's a variety of different ways that you can implement. There is not just one way. That's also important part of the thesis. It's really important to have a business model and a scaling plan in mind that can change. 

 

Kate Sutton But having a kind of hypothesis about what there might be is really important. Not every innovation needs to be scaled in the way that you might be thinking, so it doesn't have to become massive or multi-country, and that can be local and small, but there needs to be sustainability. So in terms of thinking about scaling in a variety of different ways. I think often now, unfortunately, the word scaling has been synonymous with this kind of hyper scaling of tech businesses. And that's not really how most scaling in and certainly in development or social innovation happens. I think. Definitely the kind of power of good processes, so having a hypothesis that and then having a process that supports the hypothesis and really taking the time to see some emergence, but also, I guess running at two speeds, it's taking time to have that emergence, but then also trying things and saying if they work or not is really important. So a lot of stuff around there being no right way. And I think often experts get really obsessed with the right ways. And I think strategy. Having a strategic objective is really important holding that kind of mission tightly, but the way to achieve that mission more loosley, I think, is really important. And then. Yeah, I think I think the right way thing, because that's where ego comes in and all of that junk, which we don't actually have time for when we're focussing on these big problems. 

 

Gavin Bryant Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree that when people become really set around the methodology and approach, it can come down to ego being defensive around their methodology and approach. But to your point, it's more about having a loose set of approaches, skills, capabilities, frameworks and tools that can be broadly applied to 

solve any problem, depending on the type of problem you're trying to solve. 

 

Kate Sutton I mean, I think I think I definitely think having a methodology and approach and trying to follow that is important. But what I would say is. Is so don’t be scattered 

about it, because often what you will see is people will go, oh, we just want to see what emerges? Well, the problem with that is that usually usually this bias that comes in and there's a whole lot of bias around where you come from in the world and your gender and your hierarchy. And you know, so you know, you’re not actually getting true emergence, which would be, you know, everybody being involved and stuff coming through. So I think we have to be really aware as practitioners of our kind of biases and kind of where we sit in the system, all that kind of stuff. So I definitely think having a method and approach that is followed is really important. But the point is that you have to learn as you go. You’ve got to iterate as you go, and you've got to purposely iterate not oh, this didn't work. Let's try something else because this didn’t work. Why did it not work? What's our new hypothesis? And I do get quite frustrated with people going, oh, we’ll just do an experiment without really thinking about what are the parameters of the experiment? Who might be impacted by this. What are the particular consequences of this? How can I hold this loosely enough? that it means that new things can emerge, but also tightly enough so that people don't feel lost and frustrated. So there's a lot of kind of skill to designing this work. Mm-Hmm. 

 

Gavin Bryant Let's talk a little bit more specifically about the top line innovation process. You have touched a few times on hypotheses so far. So, your process seems to be heavily anchored and hypotheses led. 

 

Kate Sutton No, I mean, this is the real world, so like this is what you say you do, but what you actually do, are two different things. But I'm being glib, I think there’s two ways that 

we do experimentation. The first one is very customer led. So I am a government or I'm in a country office, and this is what I think we need a programme around. You know, we've got issues around youth unemployment in our country. Okay, cool. So we could just design a concept note, a document around a youth unemployment pilot, which is we're going to do some quick assessment and we're going to decide that youth unemployment 

is primarily that there's not enough jobs for young people. So we're going to kind of try and create some jobs for young people and we're going to create 10000 jobs. And that's a traditional kind of development process. What we would do is we'd probably do some kind of ethnography using some mixed methods, maybe some sense making it what already exists within the country. What are some of the things that work, one of the things that don't work, what are the new areas of emergence that we didn't know about before? And we would plot a kind of series of a kind of a portfolio of experiments that such. And, in fact, kind of from policy through the behaviour, technology, infrastructure, which is both hard and soft, and we'd try and kind of simultaneously run some experimentation to say, well, what works together and what doesn't work together? That's not super hypothesis led until you get to the experimentation stage. So once you have your kind of portfolio your hypothesis might be that one of the issues in this youth unemployment space is that the government don't actually know what skills are required by the market, which is quite a normal problem. 

 

Kate Sutton So our hypothesis is that to change youth unemployment, you need to know what skills are required by the market. Ergo, we're going to create a, you know, a data repository for x y z that that's where you start to get more hypothesis driven, I think, at the beginning it's very much about how do we make sense of what already works, what is already happening in this space? What can we scan for the future horizon scanning and futures thinking? So to really plug some of the gaps because obviously things are changing rapidly. If you think about youth unemployment but change rapidly over the last two years.  Back then you then you've got your more mixed methods at the beginning there. So firstly, coming from that kind of customer demand and then secondly, more kind of theoretical, what's the future demand? So, my team have been doing a lot of work on circular economy over the last couple of years. That certainly wasn't a demand from governments three years ago. Now it is. So we have to use our kind of foresight and sensing, our kind of systems mapping. The energy to kind of work out, what are the issues that are going to be coming up for our clients and to the people that we're working with? And how can we kind of ensure that we've already done some preliminary work.

 

Gavin Bryant So it seems like, as you mentioned, that upfront, there's typically a research process identifying patterns, themes, key insights, which then feeds into your hypotheses and experiments to find that there's potentially this notion of going macro before micro. In breaking down how you would approach tackling key hypotheses, you identify a number of of micro experiments to run. Do you find that your partners in governments just want to jump towards macro, just building the solution? 

 

Kate Sutton And so I think this is quite a live kind of discussion and suddenly was a lot of debate when I worked at NESTA as well. I mean, I think the strategy that the team has employed so far has been, yeah, that micro. Let's try things. I think it still works if you have a business model and a scaling plan in mind because you and you can, you can be clear how you're going to drive towards the macro. I think it falls over if you stay stuck in the design phase. And this is one of the key criticisms of our profession is that it's very easy to get stuck in the design phase because it's actually quite fun. There's always new stuff that you can uncover, you're pretty clear that there's never a right answer. No one really wants to make a decision. And so you stay stuck in kind of confirming, you know, you got to get to 80/20, right? You kind of you get to that 80 percent, but you're still really interrogating the 20 percent. And actually, it was time that we needed to move. And obviously, we're working with governments in a political environment, but also people need to feel enthused. They need to feel like a movement is building and they need to feel like there's progress. Otherwise, they lose on trust. So, you know, I guess this is like all professions where you have like technical specialists and then generalists, as the technical specialists often like to spend a lot of time wading in the detail and the generals can you just get on with it? And the answer is both, you know, of course it's both. But you do need to build a movement. If you're really wanting to do systems change, you need to build a movement, you need to build a coalition of people wanting to create that social change, you need to be doing those. How do we do those macro things while you're doing the micro experimentation? 

 

Kate Sutton And actually, you can, you know, people who might be willing to scale the stuff could be part of that experimentation, can be part of that sense making, like it could be part of that, those futures exercises and that can be really powerful. Starting big. I don't know. I mean, there's definitely this kind of criticism, I guess, of the policy cycle, which is like, we've got this huge social issue. We want to change with coming up with some ideas, orders and consultation, and then the consultation will help us refine those original ideas. We’ll implement it, it will fail or succeed. And then we'll do an evaluation. And that's it. I mean, what we advocate for is like more learning loops and that. There's nothing wrong with just one big intervention, but you could also have a couple of small interventions on the side that you're testing. There are ways around this kind of political tension. I don't think it has to be one or the other, but certainly in the political cycle, if you say to someone, Oh, we're just going to spend the next three years doing a few little things and see what happens. Yeah, it does land politically. So, you've got to try and find ways that you can do things now. 

 

Gavin Bryant Yeah, a good point, too. Yeah, the mission and vision focussed and then be prepared to learn along the way and potentially proceed with a low level of confidence rather than stalling and doing nothing. 

 

Kate Sutton But also, it depends on your portfolio, right? Like you have a portfolio of more conservative things that are kind of this is what we're already doing and we're going to scale that and then more radical things, which as this is something we hadn't even thought about. But we say that this might be important in this new world. Okay, we're going to try that.

 

Gavin Bryant So with the experimentation that the team has done, as a leader, what do you see as the key benefits? 

 

Kate Sutton Well, we're really lucky, so there's a couple of different levels that experimentation gets done at the UNDP, so obviously my immediate team, but then we've got these accelerator labs which exist within each country. 

 

Kate Sutton We’ll most of the country offices, there's 91 labs across the world now and there's 18 in my region and they have a head of experimentation within that. So it's three staff members within each office. And what their job is to do is to try and bring in a culture of experimentation into the office now. And that's obviously with varying degrees of success. I mean, some. The funders are still very focussed on old school development, and so the majority of the office is kind of orientated to that. But what I have noted and certainly what's been noted through official evaluations on official and informal feedback, 

is that having these labs within country offices has really changed some of the way that leadership used innovation about how teams can say new methods being employed and the development of traditional programmes. 

 

Kate Sutton So I think that's the bit that I want to hit on, is that's all very well and good for a whole bunch of smart innovation people to do a whole lot of experiments to the side. But how do you actually get that to be employed as a centre and helping people who are running more business as usual traditional? Programmes, which obviously is super important you think about slightly different ways of maybe doing the initial research. So rather than just employing a consultant to do desk research then a few interviews, maybe you could use different forms of data. Maybe we could do some ethnography. Maybe we could do some storytelling. There's a variety of different methods that could be used to change the way that we do that research phase. 

 

Kate Sutton And that's really. Fine. You know, like and that some offices that has been employed for them, that's an experiment. Do we get a different result? From just doing the traditional thing of reading a few reports that people have already done and they've done perhaps some of our own original surveys. Mm-Hmm. Well, if you do well, then that's cool or if you do get a different insight, well, then that's brilliant. Because we have so much data now. You know, maybe there are different ways of interpreting that data to add in to our insights from the initial research phase. So I think but. You know, experimentation was employed in a variety of different ways across the organisation, and I would say to give the organisation some credit, it really is. People really open for it. 

 

Gavin Bryant Do you find as a leader, it helps you to make better decisions, to invest or resource better? What are the key benefits that you see? 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah. So I think there's still challenges of kind of like annual and four year cycles. So I'm very comfortable going, Okay, well, we kind of have a good feeling about this particular area. But we need to develop some products around those because we think governments are going to want them. 

 

Kate Sutton We have a pretty good feeling about it because there's some customer demand, there's definitely some futures thinking on this. It's come up quite a few times of conversation. It's part of kind of, you know, there's a lot of people now doing this kind of what's that? What's the emergence from how they're going to be? What's the post-COVID recovery going to look like? OK, so we have some pretty good data that tells us this is going to be a particular area. I'd like to explore in that space for six months or one year. Let's say what's possible. The organisation does give us space as an innovation team to do that, which I think is amazing. 

 

Kate Sutton However, let's be honest, we're still a political, bureaucratic development organisation. So, if you do too much of that and none of it comes off, which is obviously the best, you know, if you're a true innovation person, you'd be like, well, none of it, like we could do 10 things and nine and a half of them could be. A bust there is probably not that, you know, I think that's just not acceptable in the system that we're in. So, we have to build a portfolio of more radical and I said this before more radical and more conservative or more not conservative and a bad way, but just more sure thing kind of options. And I think can be frustrating for. Really creative, innovative people can maybe feel like a little bit sort of where's the innovation in that? But the reality is that innovation is new to you. It's not new to the world now. 

 

Kate Sutton Well, it doesn't have to be new to the world, so we can take ideas from somewhere else and we could take. You know, and just take it to a new context and modify it for new context, that is innovation. So. Yeah, you need to kind of take a step back and go, where are we in this kind of development trajectory? And. And what does that portfolio look like? And can we have? You know, a third of the things that might not work and a third that really will probably most likely work and a third that we just don't know. That would be the thinking about the reality. And you know, if you work in a corporation, that's probably the case too, right? 

 

Gavin Bryant Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. Often, it's less about using experimentation to ask what we should be doing, but it's using experimentation to understand how do you implement and develop the best version of the solution that you're going to implement? Yeah. 

 

Gavin Bryant So, you've touched on some of the key challenges. What are some of the pieces of advice that you would give to other organisations to implement and try to achieve a level of scale with experimentation? 

 

Kate Sutton Well, firstly, you have to decide you want to do experimentation. And that obviously sounds kind of. That probably sounds kind of obvious.

 

Gavin Bryant But, do you think that's the biggest hurdle for many organisations? Is being experimentation led the hardest decision? 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah. I mean, I think you need to make a decision, but you're willing to kind of have a part of your organisation that's going to take some risk of right? Yeah, absolutely. Mm-Hmm. And then once you've done that, then you go OK, how am I going to actually run? I'm going to set up a lab or pain. Am I going to try and make it part of the day to day work of someone or all of the leaders? Are we going to try and do that? Are they customer facing products or are we going to do that in our internal processes? What about the lawsuit? So yeah, there's some thinking that has to go on in that, and that's also a hurdle. And then you need to set up some kind of governance around that, I guess. And. I think this is also where there's a stumble as you go. Okay, we're going to do innovation at our. It's going to be efficiency innovation and we're going to do it in our, try to do it around 

retention. I mean, that's a tough gig, right until it was always really hard because people internally are pretty fixed in how they want things to be. But it might just be incremental innovation. 

 

Kate Sutton Some might be incremental. So you don't really need a business model could be focussed on efficiencies. But if you are an NGO and I think we need to kind of fundamentally rethink how we do our work because it needs to be fit for a new age or some of the problem that we've been focussing on has shifted. 

 

Kate Sutton You know, so now it might not be about access to food because we've been feeding people for a long time, but now it's actually about, you know, food supply chains and food deserts and. You know, there's also stuff around food, sustainable food production, all of it, right? Wow. Okay, that really changes what we actually have to do as an organisation doesn't it. 

 

Kate Sutton Hmm. So right, we could just wait for a massive hoo ha. The board, the CEO, lags the board, bring someone on. We run new strategy. Or we could decide, okay, we're going to experiment in a small way and see what we could do here. And I think that would be my advice. No one wants to wait for the CEO to be removed and the board to go, for the board to change, and all of that stuff which happens. All right, that's too dramatic. I mean, I think good forward focussed leaders will be looking at the signals from their consumers, but also signals from their staff. What I did five years ago has actually changed. Because the demand from the market has changed, so we can see these signals from the top. Or from, you know, the UN General Assembly or from government signals around policy or local government signals around policy or, you know where you're getting your signals from. And we need to try and do something a bit different. So okay, how are we going to do that? I mean, you need to have an organisation, the people that are empowered, right? Being empowered doesn't mean that they get to have their way. I think often what happens is people set up these teams, they're going to be the experimentation team, they're going to innovate. And then those people will try and do some stuff having that kind of happens, and then I get frustrated like, Oh, well, how come this hasn't been picked up by the organisation? 

 

Kate Sutton And so there's a misalignment, but just because you do, that experiment and it works it doesn't mean that it's going to be implemented, there's a whole load of other things going on. You’re not in a vacuum. So they need to have political acumen to work out how to lobby. They need to make sure that the boss that's responsible for that work understands what they're doing. They need to make sure that its part of budgetary process and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And that's really important. Those skills are really important in terms of being a public innovator.

 

Gavin Bryant I don't think we can underestimate communication influence in persuasion 

negotiation as a as an as an innovator, an experiment. It's great to get results and outcomes, but then there's a need to try and influence their uptake and drive them through the business. 

 

Kate Sutton And when I talk about the scaling side, if you talk, if you're thinking about scaling like, it's just how do we take Meta, whatever Facebook’s new name is. How do we take it from a 1,000 customers to 1,000,000 customers? That's different to what I'm talking about. You know, when I’m talking about scaling. It includes, yeah, business model of scaling. The scaling plan includes that stuff. Who do we need to convince here? 

 

Kate Sutton Actually, it's not ultimately the board that makes the decision it's going to be, you know, these GM’s probably the key people that we need to focus on? I just need to be informed of the process they need. Why? What are they incentivised by? They are incentivised by saving money, not necessarily delivering impacts like how can we show both? Well, that kind of stuff better the scaling plan or we're not even going to do this in our organisation. We're going to test this here. And then we think there are a variety of NGOs that we work with or a variety of suppliers that we work with. But who could actually deliver this innovation better than us? And how are we going to make that part of our plan? 

 

Gavin Bryant A quick three final closing questions. 

 

Gavin Bryant Do you remember an experiment that you've performed that redefined your worldview or your perspective? 

 

Kate Sutton I don't think there's been anything I think for me, it's much, much more incremental, but I think I did do an experiment with NESTA when we were in Delhi and we were looking at acute malnutrition and I was with a whole lot of different people who worked in Delhi on malnutrition. So we had, you know, social enterprises and we had universities and we had NGOs and we had government people and we formed teams to try and focus on the different parts of food systems and malnutrition and that particular part of Delhi. And I think. I was interested in the experiment at two levels, the first one was the actual things that they were trying to come up with. So the actual process of. Coming up with new ideas, melding together the different expertise, that was an experiment, you know, to get to the to the get to the outcomes. And then there was a more meta experiment going on, which was people who are so diverse, actually work together? Can they come up with something that's more than the sum of their parts? 

 

Kate Sutton And for me, I always try to work on those two levels, that kind of operational solutions, ideas, executable ideas level, and also that kind of systems processes, what's curious here? What are we learning about people and how people work together? What are we learning about this process? I think for me this is important. So I always try to have the idea that I'll always talk to my team about the team, the thing that we're working on. So, the subject domain and in the process and we need to be learning and experimenting on both. 

 

Gavin Bryant Gotcha. The key thing that stuck out to me there is curiosity. There needs to be a natural, innate curiosity to succeed with experimentation. 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah, I wonder if I've always been like that. What I'm told now is that I'm very curious. I'm just really nosey. I think it's nice. I'm just really interested in people and really interested in what makes them tick. And really interested in why they do the things that they do. I'm constantly surprised by people. I'm also really interested in how things emerge, how some things emerge and how others don't emerge within the same. Yes, sometimes the same thing works. And then it doesn't work, and you call it what was different about this? You know, I think you have to be careful. You have to be curious to be an innovation person. I think I think you'd be if you're not curious, I think find it another profession, you know, do something else. But it definitely helps to be pretty. Relentlessly focussed on what we can we learn. It's more than what can I learn just as a human and kind of what’s below it that is kind of interesting. And then what's the action and insights.

 

Gavin Bryant What’s the so what? 

 

Gavin Bryant So are there any resources, books, things that have helped you on your journey with innovation, experimentation that you'd like to pass on to listeners? 

 

Kate Sutton Yeah. So you let me know in advance about this question. What I have to say. That sort of stumped me because I don't really know, but I think I mean, obviously, I used to work for NESTA, and there's some really amazing content that NESTA put together. And in particular, they've got a experimenters inventory, which they did last year. It’s aimed at public sector experimentation, but it basically outlines what is behind what is a behavioural experiment. What is that? You know this a little bit about the scientific method versus other kinds of experiments that's really useful, and I think I would encourage people to use that.

 

Kate Sutton I've got two other books that really have stood out for me and helped me in my kind of innovation journey. One of them is called New Power. It's Jeremy Hyman's and Henry Timms. And I think that was, oh, a few years now, maybe 2015. And basically just talking about kind of. This theory in some of the stuff around, like the emergence of the 

sharing economy and movements and the thing that's interesting now thinking about it in the context of COVID and how actually old power, I guess, is taken back a lot of control. But when you're thinking about innovation, it's not. It's not. Who are the established experts and authorities that are going to really solve these problems? It's the stakeholders blending what those experts and authorities to solve these problems. I think for me that 

book new power was really not a particular thing at a time in my life where I was like, Yeah, I get this mega trend of, like movements Black Lives Matter and all that kind of stuff. But how does that actually manifest itself into processes to change systems.

 

Kate Sutton And then the third one is a book called Rebel Talent, which is by a woman called Francisca Gino, I think. And she talks about people who are people who are. Often seen as disrupters or. You know, when you're having a meeting and everyone kind of agrees with that person, that's just like so and they kind of like this person is driving me nuts. But actually, a lot of it is about like trying to understand the motivations of the person, what that person is bringing to the table, and that those people that are rebel talent can really drive innovation. And it certainly drives curiosity to drive innovation that can drive new ways of looking at things. And so I think for many, that book was really useful in terms of how to cultivate that rather than suppress that, you know? 

 

Gavin Bryant Final one. If people want to get in contact with you.

 

Kate Sutton What I'll. I think LinkedIn, my link, those pretty actor so people can link me. I don't know what you might want to put my money on and those in your when you published those. I'm also on Twitter. I'm not as active on Twitter, but you can definitely tweet me. Arlington's really good. I have lots of interesting games with pretty much 

everyday people sharing with me, their ideas and that kind of stuff. And then obviously, people can also email. My email exists and it's I've been don't email me before Christmas, I'll go show and this is going to come out, but it's on my way before Christmas because I'll just go up. But I'm always really happy to kind of hear from people and hear what they reflect on what I've said, whether they think there's a different, whether they want to suggest a different way to think about something that's always really, really amazing. 

 

Kate Sutton And I'm happy for you to share those. 

 

Gavin Bryant Excellent. Let's leave it there. That's a wrap. Thank you so much. Kate Sutton 

 

Kate Sutton Thanks Gavin.