LocationsSix Years Inside a Development R&D Lab: What It Rewired in Me
December 29, 2025
The global UNDP Accelerator Lab project may be ending this year, but what it did to me isn’t ending with it. For me, the Lab was never “just a job”; it rewired the way I think about problems and people, and how I deal with messiness. Coming from the private sector, I arrived with a strong instinct for business logic, but what I didn’t expect was how the Lab would teach me to hold business logic and human reality in the same frame: evidence and empathy, outcomes and lived experience. These tools work in both worlds, and they don’t just improve delivery; they change what you notice, what you question, and what you dare to try. I’m writing this as I leave the Lab with a different mind; one I’ll carry into whatever comes next.
What the Accelerator Lab is?
The Accelerator Lab is UNDP’s attempt to build a globally distributed, open R&D function for development, spanning 91 Labs in 115 countries, built around learning and being fast and curious, to close the gap between traditional practice and accelerated change. The way of working is cyclical: sensing, exploring, mapping, experimenting, and scaling what works. This became my way of operating both at work and in life: learning as a mindset, agility as a habit, and staying fast and curious without losing accountability. That’s why this story naturally unfolds through four threads: what I learned, how I practiced it through portfolios and local solutions, how the network amplified it, and how all of it reshaped me.
Learning: what we learned, and who we learned it from:
For the Accelerator Lab, learning wasn’t a side benefit; it was the engine. The network invested in the right people: people with what I call brain flexibility, the ability to learn fast, unlearn comfortably, and stay curious without needing certainty first. It also designed learning to move intentionally, but also organically, through a global R&D network that UNDP built, nurtured, and used far beyond any one country. The Lab’s work cycles, namely sensing and exploring, experimenting, and developing local solutions, created a disciplined way to work with messiness without being consumed by it.
For me, the biggest learning gift was access, space, and permission to practice methodologies that work in real contexts. That access came from a connected ecosystem. I learned through the Accelerator Lab network, our own Country Office and colleagues on the ground. I learned through the UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit (SIU) and the Deep Demonstrations ecosystem. Regionally, I learned through the RBAS Regional Innovation Team, and globally through Blockchain Academy, and the UNDP Strategy and Futures Team, which installed the foundations of foresight in me. And I learned from partners beyond UNDP, including the Behavioural Insights Team, CHÔRA Foundation, Institute for the Future (IFTF), the University of Houston Futures Team, and many others that shaped our thinking and practice. That ecosystem also lives on through our published outputs on the Accelerator Lab platform, a shared legacy we helped build and leave behind.
From that ecosystem, a set of methodologies became my toolkit, and each one changed something in me. Design Thinking made empathy a disciplined practice and trained me to start with people and root causes. Behavioural insights grounded my work in how people decide and act, pushing me to design around real barriers and incentives. Systems thinking and issue mapping gave me the holistic lens to see interconnectedness, feedback loops, and leverage points. Digital transformation grounded my work in data, platforms, and faster feedback loops, helping me turn learning into something shareable and scalable. Foresight stretched my time horizon and gave me practical tools to engage the future with intention. And the portfolio approach brought it all together, shifting me from “delivering projects” to designing pathways of systemic change through multiple interventions and experiments. And the most important part: these methods didn’t just add skills; they changed my default setting: from needing certainty to building clarity through learning.
Doing: how learning turned into practice
Once the methodologies stopped being “tools” and became muscle memory, my brain-flexibility finally switched on in practice. Over six years, I designed, implemented, and delivered results across multiple portfolios; the four main ones are highlighted below. What made this possible was not only the learning, but the Lab network’s latitude and trust; we were not trapped in predefined plans, we were grounded and allowed to follow what the country was signaling.
Before I get into the portfolios, one shift matters most. “Doing” in the Lab wasn’t just implementing projects; it was learning how to hold portfolios inside UNDP Iraq and steer work through uncertainty with discipline. Through the Deep Demonstrations initiative, I was the focal point for the structuring of UNDP Iraq’s Social Contract Portfolio, which strengthened that muscle by treating complexity as something to navigate through systems thinking, continuous learning, and a portfolio of interventions. This approach shaped my mentality and anchored me in evidence-informed, adaptive pathways built with people. Here’s how that translated into practice through the Accelerator Lab in Iraq.
I felt the urgency early in our sensing and exploration for the employment and the education-to-jobs portfolio. Unemployment in Iraq was not only about “missing jobs,” but about a skills mismatch between graduates and private-sector needs. That insight pushed us toward education reform. The UNDP-AccLab in Iraq launched the Blended Learning Initiative to strengthen employability through digitalization, co-created the Business Development Manual to build business and innovation capability, and strengthened the data layer through the Education Sector Dashboard. The result was a more evidence-driven approach that connects learning pathways to Iraq’s labour market realities.
Economic development and entrepreneurship portfolio: This one was deeply personal for me; it connected directly to my private-sector background and kept showing up in signals and partner conversations. The UNDP-AccLab in Iraq supported economic diversification. We designed and implemented the SME Recovery Course; supported women entrepreneurs through Raa’idat, and skills pathways such as the Women Programming Bootcamp; and strengthened data and visibility around entrepreneurship through the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Dashboard. The landmark outcome was establishing the first public innovation hub in the South, the Souq Al-Shyoukh Community and Climate Hub, as a public hub to support SMEs and economic development. The result was a practical engine for diversification: stronger SMEs, more inclusive opportunities, and a public innovation hub anchored in the South.
Climate action portfolio: This portfolio grew from an early insight; climate change in Iraq was visible and accelerating, but climate action still wasn’t “seen” or “owned” by people. The UNDP-AccLab in Iraq created The Future of Climate in Iraq Exhibition to surface how Iraqis imagine climate futures; used Step4Climate Intative to shift the focus to behaviour and understand daily practices and the ecosystem shaping them; and acted through establishing smart-farm and renewable energy models in the South of Iraq. The result was climate work that moved beyond messaging into interventions communities could see, test, and adopt.
UNDP AccLab in Iraq Climate Change Learning Cycle
Across these portfolios, the toolkit became an operating system; it produced results, and I leveraged it to produce knowledge products, including blogs.
Evolving: What the Lab rewired in me
By the end of six years, the biggest impact wasn’t a portfolio; it was the person I became while learning and doing the work. The Lab’s learning trained me to listen differently, take uncertainty seriously, and treat people not as “beneficiaries” but as co-owners of insight. The Lab’s work through signals, experiments, local solutions, and portfolios didn’t just produce results; it built my brain flexibility and made messiness feel workable. The added value that amplified all of this was the global network, which expanded my horizon and consistently challenged my default assumptions.
That personal shift showed up professionally. I moved from project thinking to portfolio thinking—especially in economic development—connecting policy, markets, incentives, skills, and behaviour as one system of levers. My identity moved from doer to designer; I now structure interventions as pathways of change rather than standalone activities. Within projects, I shifted from “safe delivery” to sensing, exploring, and experimenting as a disciplined way to build evidence before scaling action. I stopped seeing partnerships as coordination work and started treating stakeholder complexity as part of the system we are trying to change.
It’s hard to summarize the Accelerator Lab experience in one blog, because it was never a single role; it was a journey we took together, and its impact is there to stay. Very few jobs give you permission to embrace uncertainty, work directly with messiness, and still provide the tools and guidance to navigate it with discipline. We had Gina Lucarelli, Bas Leurs and great AccLab team holding the frame, we had fellow Labs learning alongside us, we had innovation teams across UNDP feeding the ecosystem, and we had Iraq’s senior management believing in our work. I’m leaving the Lab knowing this mindset travels everywhere.