We’re back in Fiji with Victor Ladele, Head of Exploration of the Accelerator Lab for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). We speak with Victor while he is on lockdown about how he is managing working from home, efficiently and innovatively, while managing 15 countries and territories in the Pacific.
Victor Ladele is no stranger to global health crises, from serving as an army surgeon to being on the frontline of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Victor offers his perspective on why, in a world where social distancing has radically changed our daily workflows and lives, we should embrace digital communication as our new normal. For Victor, this new digital reality is an opportunity to invest more deeply in our digital networks, reframe our communications approach, and tap into our collective intelligence. Victor demonstrates how in the age of Covid, embracing a digital transformation at UNDP is more relevant than ever.
Elyse:
Welcome to episode six of Humans of UNDP: a podcast where we to get to know fellow colleagues and where we explore how we connect and communicate in the digital age. Today co-producer, Oscar Durand, and I are back in paradise with Victor Ladele, Head of Exploration of the Accelerator Lab in Fiji….
And given that we are in the midst of this worldwide pandemic, unfortunately we are not on the beach drinking pina coladas as scheduled.
Just kidding. But we are especially lucky to be speaking with Victor today because he’s been responding to crises, particularly global health crises, ever since he was a child. From being on the frontlines of the Ebola outbreak to his current job of managing 15 countries and territories in the Pacific and thinking through the challenges that they face -- geographic isolation, ecological fragility, limited resources, a narrow economic base and climate change. It’s a lot. So we thought we would check in with Victor to see how he’s doing.
Victor:
I'm good. I mean, I can't complain. My friends always ask me, like, you know, so you're stuck in Fiji. And I tell them, like, you know, hey, you could be stuck in a lot worse places than this. Right? So I'm working, but working from home so I can afford to only wear pants when necessary.
Elyse:
True. Life without pants can be liberating. And now that we’ve gotten to know Victor a bit, I was not surprised by his optimistic response. No matter what he is facing, he is strikingly calm, determined, focused.
Victor:
Well, I mean, I love to work. So it's all right. In the end I just miss my family. This is the longest stretch I haven’t traveled to see them. it's been a bit lonely because I've been here by myself. My family isn’t here and we're all stuck at home...social distancing and all that. But other than that, it's been interesting for me because of having to change the way we work and things like that. But other than that, everything is solid. Great times. I like the fact that UNDP is acting with great ambition during this time. You know, colleagues are stepping up to the plate, organizing online, organizing across the geographical like... It's a very exciting time to be alive, actually, professionally.
Elyse:
As expressed, Victor has a lot of experience navigating communication, adaptation, and innovation in times of crisis. And due to the challenges Covid presents, he needs to apply that knowledge given how much island hopping his job entails.
Victor:
Travel is not an option right now, even for the islands that are close to us. As soon as the rest of the world started to experience Covid, the smaller islands shut down borders completely. And that has contributed to many of these small islands having zero cases. So it has protected them. But how does it affect us is that we can't travel for work. But what is significant to mention is that we're gradually evolving ways of working that don't involve as much travel.
Elyse:
And truth be told, all of the travel between islands that Victor’s job required took a lot of time and energy. So, in many ways working from home has actually improved Victor’s efficiency.
Victor:
I think this is a golden age for digital communications. I’ve collaborated, I've been able to draw on resources that would not have been available to me before Covid. And these resources are made available because we can collaborate online. And we are not bound by the constraints of timing or geography or time zones or anything like that.
Elyse:
So although, working from home and being so far from his family can be lonely, Victor is keeping his spirits up by seeing this moment as an opportunity to have conversations that were not happening before.
Victor:
For example, later on today, I'm going to be on a call with colleagues from Vanuatu. They were able to hold successful elections in Vanuatu regardless of Covid. So we're trying to collaborate on making that story known to the world. So even though we haven't been able to travel, it hasn't stopped our work from going on. Maybe it has slowed some things down with that also enabled some things.
Elyse:
And one of those things is building a broader network of digital collaborators.
Victor:
We are collaborating more across borders. Right now, my counterparts in Barbados, Timor Leste, Cabo Vert, which are spread across many different regions of the world in the accelerator labs, we are collaborating on projects because we are part of the small island developing states network, which is a group of countries that share similar problems, similar challenges. So it's clear that if we act in concert, we'll be stronger together. So even though we can't travel, we're collaborating online. And it's been really quite efficient to discover new ways to brainstorm online and co-create, despite not being able to be physically present.
Elyse:
And expanding that network gives Victor hope because it improves his effectiveness at sharing his expertise to tackle complex problems with complementary, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary teams.
Victor:
I had a meeting with someone from Algeria a couple of days ago where they were trying to replicate what we did with the rural farmers here. But being that they believe they have less broadband penetration. They are going to fashion a platform that’s SMS based. So achieving the same objectives, but using different platforms, I think is just about how creative you are, having your end objective in sight, how creative you are to use what tools are available. I will be taken up by the people you serve to deliver the solutions. Basically, is that attitude of going for the solution and not focusing on the obstacles.
Elyse:
For Victor, building frameworks that blend local and expert knowledge is essential for innovation because he can harness local expertise and draw on collective intelligence.
Victor:
One of the areas that the accelerator lab we have interest in is food security. And we had planned a project along those lines that had to do with enabling farmers, small-scale, farmers like backyard farmers, micro farmers to be more efficient, and to propagate that practice in a place where we know the state was needed but wasn't being done. So we had typically planned to do some capacity building to encourage some new forms of innovative farming, like hydroponic farming and all that. But being that we can't travel and because of social distancing and all the constraints...like you mentioned, constraints breed innovation of this present period, made that route impossible to go down again. And it suddenly occurred to us “hey it seems there's an opportunity to draw on the collective intelligence of the crowd”. And I think our inspiration comes from many of the solutions that have been developed around the world in the sense that collective intelligence is gaining primacy. Meaning that being able to draw from many more sources of intelligence that was previously the case. Like before, the limitations were often based on the kinds of people in the room. Meaning that if you manage to get even a number of beneficiaries in the room, they're always going to be a small sample size relative to the total population of beneficiaries. Same things for experts and same things for development workers. But what collective intelligence does is that your sample size increases vastly, meaning that you can reach almost everyone in that population.
Elyse:
And to get the most out of this collective intelligence, Victor realized that in order for the conversations to be inclusive, that they had to change their approach, such as using less technical language.
Victor:
You have to reframe the kind of information you want to gather so they can be turned into meaningful intelligence. So what we did in our meeting was instead of focusing on implementation and capacity building and all that like we had planned, we're now switching and making a pivot to building more on the existing intelligence, the tacit knowledge held by the people actually in the population, the people that are actually doing micro-farming and making a success of it. Those that have tried it before and they didn't succeed and those that are not even doing it at all. If it's so apparent what the benefits are, we want to know the barriers to them adopting it. So we have switched our, well, business model, for lack of a better word, and it looks like we may have a stronger outcome because now we have more detailed and actionable intelligence when eventually these barriers to actual implementation are lifted.
Elyse:
So strangely enough, in some ways, despite social distancing, we are now more connected than ever. There’s a saying Victor references, that “in times of crisis the first casualty is truth”, but Victor tweeks it slightly and says, well actually, in times of crisis the first casualty is trust. And given how trust is the essential element to good communication, how trust opens up our world, it’s quite incredible how our new digital reality is creating conditions for deepening trust and inclusion.
Victor:
We're acting more in unison. And we are able to act faster because of technology, digital ways of communicating across barriers of time and space and the opportunities that computer power, machine learning to share intelligence have afforded us to gain insights deeper. And also the willingness of people to be more open minded and realize that solutions will come from anywhere, not necessarily from the ivory towers or from the boardrooms, but also from the farthest reaches of the field, from the farms, from the villages, from the communities, from the workshops around the world. So it's really very interesting to see.
Elyse:
And at UNDP, part of that trust building comes with deepening our relationship with technology. Because digital communication is the new normal.
Victor:
One of the few historical correlates I can think about is about the time, last two centuries or so when motor cars started to threaten the livelihoods of the stagecoach drivers and there was pushback against this new technology, but eventually there was no net loss of opportunity, rather new opportunities were created. It's just a question of taking that first step in open mindedness to realize that, look, this thing is starting to work for me. It’s not going to work against me if I'm not used to interacting with technology iIn this way. Technology was created to help us solve problems all through history depended on how we use it. So we have to determine what we want to get out of it and use it in that way. So they serve us, not the other way around. So embracing it and trying it out and realizing that there is almost no doubt that everyone can find something that works for them.
Elyse:
So although we are in a time where we are facing uncertainty and loss, we are also in a moment where there is potential for a more inclusive world, where digital communication can create the conditions for a deeper interconnectedness and for fostering trust -- the critical element.
This episode of Humans of UNDP is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, additional music by Chris Zabriskie. Sound design by myself. Special thanks to Victor Ladele for sharing his time, story, and sounds with us. To listen and subscribe, go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow dot UNDP dot org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.