Innovation fellowship itself is an innovative initiative of UNHCR. I always feel proud of being a member of the first class iFellowship programme for 2013-2014. The fellowship offers multidimensional skills to the iFellows such as human centered design and management skills. This indeed capacitates iFellows to come up with innovative ideas and viable solutions to the challenges facing the organization in its service of refugees in different locations.
As a part of the fellowship, I participated in a 5-day foundation workshop on the innovation process and design in Bangkok. From the Bangkok workshop, I gained a firsthand experience in design and innovation process which motivated me taking a lead role in exchanging ideas and sharing solutions to the operational challenges in eastern Sudan operation. The mid-year iFellow workshop in Narobi was a useful and effective event for the iFellows. Hands-on prototyping and testing, cross-learning opportunity on the project design, strategic communication, change management and influence strategy were the main component of the workshop. I found the workshop as an interesting event of gaining skills in prototyping and communication, learning and sharing experience with the colleagues in the Nairobi region hub office. The followings are the lessons learned and reflection on the workshop.
Prototyping and testing
Prototyping was a key agenda of the mid-year innovation workshop. During the workshop, iFellows shared the opportunities and challenges they experienced in the past 6 months. The session on prototyping was so interactive, reflective, in-depth and practical. Each iFellow had opportunity to develop a prototype of another iFellow’s project. This gave an opportunity to learn from and contribute to other iFellows’ project.
- Prototyping quickly generates more assumptions and questions around our projects that allows us to include others’ viable ideas and exclude our own bias.
- The more we test the assumptions, the more our design gains reliability for a viable solution
- Asking at least 5 times follow-up questions to the users with ‘WHY’ help uncover the underlying causes of the problem
- We should never perceive that people with different background are not relevant to improve our design and ideas. ‘Feedback capture grid’ is an effective tool to capture strength, positive criticism, missing issues and emerging ideas.
- Prototyping is a continuous process of building and testing ideas to reach a sustainable solution. From design to implementation phase, we can shape and reshape our projects to meet the demand of users.
- Prototyping may not necessarily be a structure of materials; we may layout our ideas on the papers.
- Prototyping is like a wave of change and adaption and we should be flexible to adopt changes during the design and implementation phases.
- Engaging all potential stakeholders in the design phase transform a user driven prototype, that lead to a sustainable innovation.
- Rapid prototyping allows us think fast and generate as many options as possible to meet the diverse demand, thereby, promoting viability of solutions to the problems.
Feedback on the iFellow’s Project
The workshop created an opportunity for all iFellows to seek feedback on their own projects and also to provide inputs to others’ projects. Particularly, the inputs from the iFellows ( Anicet, Valentina) to my project on the livelihoods monitoring tool will be useful to design as well as operationalize the tool. Particularly their inputs with respect to refugees’ participation in the data collection and applicability of the tool in other protracted operation deserve great appreciation. At the same way, I had also opportunity to offer inputs to one of iFellows project. This cross-feedback mechanism on iFellows project was a great initiative of the innovation team. Thank you so much innovation team for the great jobs you have done in the Nairobi workshop!!!!
Innovation cannot be sustainable without participation of the people from different backgrounds, sectors, and relevant stakeholders. Creating opportunities for the people from all sectors, partners, and the government in the innovation project promotes ownership of others in the project. Based on this lesson, I have sought technical feedback and support on one of my innovation projects (Vulnerability Assessment to Food Insecurity) from the regional hub in Narobi, livelihoods professional in Geneva office, WFP in Sudan, USAID M&E adviser-Washington, Academia in East Anglia University, UK. Inputs from the professionals in UNHCR and outside of the UNHCR created opportunities of learning technical issues during the design phase of my project.
Strategic Communication
Communicating with an impact is always a challenge for anyone in any context. Particularly, marketing any idea requires attractive persuading skills. Persuading skills depend on the communication and strategic skills. Nairobi workshop offered hands-on training to the iFellows to improve their presentation skills. Trainer’s pitch battle was an exemplary and motivational event for me to learn the techniques of presentation skills. I extremely enjoyed the ‘persuade me’ group exercise as it was a ‘one to one’ event to improve knowledge and skills around pitch.
RISE (relevance, issues, solutions and expertise) is an effective tool in making pitch. I found the tool so useful in preparing my pitch in the workshop. I learned from the workshop that the use of different media such as video clips, pictures and charts makes the communication effective between the presenter and audience.
Change management and Influence Strategies
The session on the change management was quite interesting to learn the organizational cultures and practices. Ability to adapt changes and influence others is a vital skill in personal and professional endeavors. The workshop organized a simulation session to offer clear understanding about the importance of influence strategy in workplace. The session was so interesting, and had a lot of fun to enjoy together. The power map is a simple tool to develop one’s strategy of influencing others. From the simulation and discussion, I learned different influence strategies such as empowering others, building interpersonal awareness, bargaining power, building relationship, organizational awareness, common vision, impact management and legitimizing. Combination of two-three strategies such as common vision, empowerment, organizational awareness and relationship building works well to influence the decision makers with regards to any project.
Narobi i-Hub, a venue of brdiging talents and innovation
The workshop also brought an opportunity for the iFellows to know about the Nairobi i-Hub. Narobi i-Hub is a place of innovation where creative people with diverse backgrounds get together to generate new products, and solutions to challenges around their society . The centre has broadened its horizon of innovation and met the demand of the people from different backgrounds. Building networks with like minded people and institutes, and sharing ideas with others will strengthen our on-going innovation efforts for the People of Concern (PoC) in different locations.
Lastly, the organizer of the workshop, the innovation team, deserves our gratitude for their creative facilitation, hard work and initiatives to ensure better learning environment throughout the workshop period. Congratulations to iTeam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read more about Aminul and his project here.
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