CHALLENGE

World Bank climate-tech projects were failing because they weren’t designed in an iterative way that took local needs into account.

OUTCOME

A cohort-based incubator program that provides mid-level managers with both the opportunity to apply user-centered methodologies and structured coaching to help them do so.

OVERVIEW

The development sector has historically struggled to implement agile, user-focused projects that are customized to local contexts, and the World Bank is no exception in this regard. This challenge is made more difficult by the Bank’s size and decentralized structure, which makes the implementation of even general best practices extremely difficult to do in a consistent way.

As part of the Bank’s Climate Technology Program team, my colleagues and I addressed this through the development of a project incubator, the Green Technology Launchpad, that was designed to empower those staff with the most direct influence on project design to utilize human-centered and iterative approaches in their work. In my role on the team, I led a variety of user research efforts focused on the question of what makes an initiative like this “sticky” for participants - in other words, what helps participants adopt and incorporate lessons from their participation into their work. Given the failure of innovation efforts from other Bank teams in the past, my work also focused on understanding the stakeholder dynamics that would lead to sustainability for this type of initiative. Finally, I led the design of the overall participant experience, looking at questions that ranged from the large (“How might we promote knowledge-sharing among participants?”) to the small (“What type of food will keep participants working at the venue during this event?”).

The program that came out of our effort was successful far beyond the team’s expectations. We targeted Task Team Leaders (a type of mid-level manager), working closely with their divisional leadership to ensure that participation in the program was seen as prestigious for the whole organization, and the total number of applicants was triple our target goal. Launchpad ultimately hosted three different cohorts and lasted for several years beyond its debut, providing support to a number of new projects that exist to this day. Due to reorganizations within the Bank, the division that sponsored Launchpad no longer exists, a factor that ultimately closed the program. However, the model has since been adopted and replicated in other divisions across the Bank.