A less common approach to innovation and scaling
Building brains at Save the Children
Welcome to the third issue of the Evolving Impact newsletter, a weekly exploration of technology, culture, and complexity in global development and humanitarian aid.
Dear reader,
Up until last month I was an Innovation Lead at Save the Children, and today I’m going to offer a few initial reflections on what I consider to be one of the organisation’s most interesting initiatives: Common Approaches.
Common Approaches are codified interventions that represent Save the Children’s best understanding of what works to address certain problems, such as treatment for preventable illnesses, learning to read and write, and keeping children safe in and around school.1 A number of Common Approaches were developed with support from internal innovation facilities and have now scaled to 20+ countries.
The scaling of Common Approaches is powered by a team who facilitate adoption, provide guidance and training, help tailor the approaches to local contexts, and continue to monitor effectiveness and build the evidence base. In a sector where examples of interventions that have reached scale are often few and far between, the Common Approaches initiative has had repeat successes.
Building Brains is a great example. It began as an effort to synthesise learning and evidence across early childhood development interventions. Between 2013-2016 prototype programmes were launched in at least eight countries, covering a variety of contexts and themes. A growing evidence base, including at least two RCTs, was then distilled into a core model and guidance. Building Brains was finally endorsed as a Common Approach in 2018, and by the year end it was adopted in 21 countries.2
It is tempting to think that the story of innovation ends there, with a strong evidence base, a codified programme, and high levels of adoption. Indeed, such innovations are often considered a finished package, whereby the only onward possibility is further adoption, ideally with high levels of fidelity to the original design — a view that can be reinforced by the logic of impact evaluations. But, instead, Common Approaches have themselves become platforms for innovation.
In last week’s exploration of technology, I touched briefly on W. Brian Arthur’s conception of “purposed systems”, a category that includes both physical and social technologies. In Thinking In Systems, the environmental scientist Donella Meadows describes such systems as made up of three things:3
Components: The tangible and intangible building blocks in a system
Connections: The relationships between different building blocks
Purpose: The function that the related building blocks serve
When we think of systems, we often think of large-scale complex networks, but an important characteristic of systems is that they are nested inside each other, like Russian Dolls. Whether something is understood as ‘a component’ or ‘a system’ depends on perspective — a component of a larger system can be understood as a system itself at a smaller scale.
All technologies are nested systems, consisting of components that are connected together to serve a purpose, and wherein each component is, in turn, an “assembly” of sub-components. A typical technology consists of a main set of assemblies that execute its purpose, enhanced by an array of supporting assemblies.4 In software engineering, the same principle applied to the building of programs from discrete blocks of code is called “separation of concerns.”5
Technologies develop through a recursive process, whereby each assembly and each sub-assembly is improved, all the way down the chain. As Arthur says, “We need to think of a technology as an object—more an organism, really—that develops through its constituent parts and subparts improving simultaneously at all levels in its hierarchy.”6 Because technologies often share parts, a technology can also benefit from incorporating new parts developed elsewhere.
As a technology is exposed to new contexts and applications, it is “pushed” to deliver more, or deliver differently. Sometimes assemblies are replaced by ones that work better. Sometimes additional functionalities are introduced. Sometimes new assemblies are added to boost the performance of existing assemblies that have otherwise reached their limits. Thus, through a process of “structural deepening”, technologies become more complex. As Arthur summarises:7
To overcome limits, a technology will add subsystems or assemblies that (a) enhance its basic performance, (b) allow it to monitor and react to changed or exceptional circumstances, (c) adapt it to a wider range of tasks, and (d) enhance its safety and reliability.
To use an illustrative example from outside the sector: A plane is made up of a set of main assemblies that enables flight, including a fuselage, engine, wings, and tail. But over time, planes have become vastly more complex as they have benefited from both new technologies, such as navigation systems and jet engines, and from the process of structural deepening that has added additional parts, such as bypass airflow systems that allow jet engines to perform at higher temperatures.
Common Approaches are ‘technologies’ in the sense that I discussed last week. They are defined by their purpose, their assemblies and components are grounded in social and/or physical phenomena, and they have been codified in order to make them replicable. As technologies, they also have a recursive structure and are subject to the same ongoing processes of adaptation, improvement, and structural deepening. They are not finished products, preserved in a PDF. They are very much alive.
The main assemblies that constitute Building Brains are a group curriculum covering early stimulation, responsive care, caregiver wellbeing, and father’s engagement; a one-on-one curriculum for caregivers covering play, responsive care and positive parenting; and child development screening, referral and specialised programmes to ensure that children at risk reach their full potential.8
In 2020, only two years after Building Brains was endorsed as a Common Approach, the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world. In response, a significant number of new components were developed, utilising radio, television, mobile applications and text message campaigns to deliver the curricula, replacing previous components consisting of in-person group sessions and individual sessions. Components were also added to support babies with disabilities and their caregivers.9
Today, components developed during COVID-19 are still in use, enabling expanded coverage where access remains difficult. This work to develop new components that extend the functionality and improve the effectiveness of Common Approaches continues. Before I left Save the Children, the Digital Enablers team launched a great new initiative to support the integration of ‘micro-learning’, using platforms such as SMS messages and interactive voice response (IVR), across Common Approaches.10
What I hope to convey is that innovation isn’t limited to producing “the next Building Brains” and scaling it up. Innovation is understanding the complex ways that interventions like Building Brains co-evolve with their component parts — and with the larger platforms they are delivered through — and creating joined-up structures that enable these co-evolutionary processes to unfold without restricting our view by siloing different perspectives and labelling only one as ‘innovation’.
It seems to me that support and funding for innovation is often framed in a way that is implicitly oriented to the development of new kinds of direct interventions, rather than common components or larger systems. I believe this is, in part, a consequence Design Thinking becoming the de facto logic of innovation, at the expense of more systemic and complexity-aware viewpoints, combined with a strong argument that innovation efforts should start with the needs of target groups.
The example of Common Approaches provides a window to a slightly different view. Innovation models are often represented by two-dimensional processes or cycles, but the complex reality of innovation is multi-dimensional — and much more interesting.
What else?
♟️ The Asia Foundation, an early thought leader in adaptive management, recently launched The Strategy Testing Workbook, a useful guide to the “techniques and practices that development practitioners can use to adjust strategies in response to evolving conditions, ensuring greater impact and sustainability.”
💷 Ranil Dissanayake, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD) calls for a global anticipatory cash transfer ‘superfund’, and outlines how it could work through a single ‘risk-to-livelihoods’ threshold and the extension of existing national cash transfer schemes.
📚 Free book! Scaling Impact: Innovation for the Public Good introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Written by Robert McLean, IDRC, and John Gargani, a past-president of the American Evaluation Association, it is free to download in PDF, ePub, and HTML5 formats.
🌳 WFP’s Climate Adaptation Innovation Accelerator Programme seeks game-changing innovations to enhance resilience and tackle climate change in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, or those that can be scaled in any of these three countries. The application deadline has been extended to 13 August 2024.
And finally: This newsletter is pretty niche. If you know anyone else interested in digging beneath the jargon and buzzwords to explore the nature of innovation and what it means for development and humanitarian impact, please share it with them.
I write as way to reflect, learn, and make sense of things, so everything is typed by hand without any inputs from AI. I sometimes use ChatGPT and Perplexity for brainstorming, research, and relating concepts, but all sources are cross-checked, reviewed, and referenced.
Save the Children International (2023) A Catalogue of Common Approaches. Save the Children International. Available at: https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/catalogue-common-approaches-delivering-our-best-work-children/.
de Castro, F. (2023) Ten Years of Building Brains: An evidence synthesis of uptake and impact to date. Evidence Brief. London: Save the Children International. Available at: https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/ten-years-of-building-brains-an-evidence-synthesis-of-uptake-and-impact-to-date.
Meadows, D.H. (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Pub. Available at: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/thinking-in-systems.
Arthur, W.B. (2011) The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Free Press. Available at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Nature-of-Technology/W-Brian-Arthur/9781416544067.
Wikipedia (n.d.) ‘Separation of concerns’. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns
Arthur, W.B. (2011) The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Free Press. Available at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Nature-of-Technology/W-Brian-Arthur/9781416544067.
Arthur, W.B. (2011) The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Free Press. Available at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Nature-of-Technology/W-Brian-Arthur/9781416544067.
de Castro, F. (2023) Ten Years of Building Brains: An evidence synthesis of uptake and impact to date. Evidence Brief. London: Save the Children International. Available at: https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/ten-years-of-building-brains-an-evidence-synthesis-of-uptake-and-impact-to-date.
de Castro, F. (2023) Ten Years of Building Brains: An evidence synthesis of uptake and impact to date. Evidence Brief. London: Save the Children International. Available at: https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/ten-years-of-building-brains-an-evidence-synthesis-of-uptake-and-impact-to-date.
I wrote about this here: McClelland, I. (2024) ‘Serving up bite-size mobile learning in Sponsorship programs’, Save the Children’s Resource Centre. Available at: https://resource-centre.savethechildren.nethttps://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/article/serving-up-bite-size-mobile-learning-what-you-need-to-know/.