United Nations Transformation
Transformative work is already happening in corners of the UN system, but these leaders are not supported institutionally for their approach nor do they know that they are part of something that's happening in places across the system. Let's connect, share learnings and see what emerges.
KEY QUESTIONS:
To be even more effective as a multi-lateral system with inter-governmental processes:
- How can the work and culture of the UN better support its convenor role – bringing governments, civil society, and business together to facilitate results-oriented collaborative relationships, innovation, and systemic change?
- How can generative conversations and methodologies be utilised to achieve measurable, transformational results?
- How can we model transformational leadership and lift individual and institutional culture, and behaviours so the UN is an even stronger catalyst for positive change?
Internal and external change leaders connecting, networking, sharing knowledge, and supporting each other.
A UN leadership development programme already exists that has created hundreds of initiatives to address issues like climate change adaptation, supporting children, and eliminating HIV/AIDS in 60 countries over the past ten years. The programme helps participants explore inner strengths, collaborative teamwork, social innovation, and systemic shifts necessary to have a transformative impact on a complex issue. This body of knowledge could be a basis for increasing effectiveness, encouraging a culture of high-performance, and modeling transformational change within the UN system.
- A one-day generative, knowledge-sharing and learning event that brings together the many transformational initiatives and leaders across the UN system in May 2012 (virtually and in person) in conjunction with the annual UN Social Innovation Summit.
- A network and movement of internal change agents in the United Nations system that generates knowledge and supports each other in using transformational frameworks and leading from a systems perspective to improve outcomes, increase effectiveness, and inspire collaboration & innovation.
- A series of projects that strategically position the UN in a country or region by developing concrete strategies to realign UN programmatic and operational resources around a clear set of transformative results that lead to systemic change, resilience, and sustained results in key issue areas.
- In 3-5 years, at least five areas of the UN system (e.g. conflict prevention, development, peacebuilding, democratic governance, regional UN impact, alliance-building and advocacy, etc.) have honed, experimented with, learned from, and instituted transformational, generative approaches that were just emerging in 2011.
- Generative conversations and methodologies are commonly used to discover insights, engender effective action, and achieve measurable results.
- Multi-stakeholder dialogue is a common tool for social innovation, whether it be in democratic governance, conflict prevention, increasing UN's value add, inclusion & coherence -- or within the UN in intra-group processes, internal programme & strategy development.
- Transformational leadership, generative conversations, collaborative partnership-building (and others) are named as internal competencies and are developed and supported formally in the UN system.
- Identifying projects and change agents inside the UN system utilising transformational leadership and multi-stakeholder approaches with transformational results - to build the network and movement.
- Finding ‘entry points’ and opportunities to shape, experiment with, and refine transformational approaches in the work of the UN system - to build the practice.
- Hearing success stories - to understand what works.
- Your ideas on how to improve or enhance this project. What's missing? What do you like best?
Please email us with your comments: UN.transformation@earthlink.net
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Imagine how much more powerful the work of the United Nations system would be if transformational approaches were used in peacebuilding, human rights, sustainability, and development.
Imagine if attention to presencing, systems thinking, and multi-stakeholder social innovation were commonplace!
