Approach
Agile, lean and systems thinking for grassroots change
Peace Through Prosperity teaches micro-entrepreneurs and young community leaders the same methods large organisations use to cope with complexity: systems thinking, design thinking and the principles of agile. They are taught through practical exercises rather than lectures, in cohorts of no more than twenty-five, and wherever possible in the participant’s own language. More than 4,000 people have been through them since 2012.
Our story
Why we exist
As an organisationWe want to seed and nurture an adaptive mindset in peopleSo that society gets better at responding to complexity and change.
How it works
Systems thinking, applied on a pavement
Our approach is rooted in systems thinking. We take what we know, and continue to learn, about transforming complex systems such as large enterprises, and cross-pollinate it to transforming the far more complex system that is society.
Our programmes use design thinking and the core principles and values of agility to enable micro-entrepreneurs to create value and solve problems in any setting: their micro-enterprise, their home, their community. That better equips them to respond to change and complexity at several levels at once, which is an urgent need in disrupted times.
We consider ourselves an innovation lab for low-cost, immediate-impact social transformation programmes. Once a programme is validated it is open sourced so that others can use it to alleviate poverty and improve livelihood security.
Further reading from our co-founder: Taking design thinking and agility to the masses and What societal agility looks like.
The toolkit
What we actually teach
On Numu these tools are taught by name over two days, then practised for twelve weeks on a real project. On the mini-MBA the same thinking is taught through the running of a business rather than as theory.
Systems thinking and causal loops
Seeing the system you are standing inside: what feeds what, where a change will be absorbed and where it will travel. Causal loop diagrams are drawn on a wall so that a group can argue about cause and effect in front of the evidence rather than from memory.
Agile principles and iterative delivery
Do the smallest useful thing, look honestly at what happened, then go again. Plan-do-check-act gives people a way to improve a business or a community project without a budget, a consultant or anybody’s permission.
Design thinking and empathy mapping
Starting from the customer rather than the product. An empathy map built with a street trader about their own buyers tends to change what they sell, how they price it and who they sell it to, before anything else is taught.
Deciding when things are unclear
Stacey’s Matrix to judge how much is known about what to do and how to do it, and the Johari Window to work on what a person can see about themselves and what only others can see. Both are used to choose an approach rather than to label people.
How it is taught
Practical, short, and in the room
Nothing here is delivered as a lecture. The mini-MBA runs for four consecutive days, two hours a day, with cohorts capped at twenty-five, and is followed by three months of one-to-one coaching. Graduates keep meeting each month in group workshops that cut across cohorts, which is where most of the crowd-sourced problem solving happens. Numu is a two-day bootcamp followed by twelve weeks of coaching while participants run a change project in their own community.
The mini-MBA is delivered free to participants. Numu field editions run on sponsorship rather than pro bono, because they are too costly to give away at present. Neither is grant-funded: the work is paid for by founders, friends, the team and a few corporate sponsors.
What participants take away is set out on the learning outcomes page, and what it has produced so far is on the impact page. Every edition since 2011, by place and date, is listed under past programmes.
See it
The approach in the field
The work started in the street in 2011. Seven years later the argument reached a stage at Microsoft. Today it is taught to university students in Türkiye and Pakistan.
And in the room
Two mini-MBA cohorts in Karachi, filmed as they happened.
Published
Read the long version
Pathway to Prosperity: Using Mobius to Grow Micro-Entrepreneurship — Gabrielle Benefield and Kubair Shirazee, in the Cutter Business Technology Journal.
If you want to run something like this yourself, our co-founder Kubair Shirazee’s Grassroots Playbook, produced in partnership with Peace Through Prosperity, sets out seventeen validated community projects for teams of three to five people with no budget. It is free in six languages. More of our material is on Steal Our Stuff. If you coach teams for a living, you can volunteer your Agile skills and mentor a team through a project of its own. Empathy mapping on the street, rather than in a workshop, is described in this account from Ibrahim Hyderi in Karachi.
