Following the Istanbul Innovation Days held in March 2025, we are releasing a series of articles capturing key insights, bold ideas and solutions that emerged from the conversations on institutional innovation. From reimagining partnerships to leveraging frontier technologies, these stories showcase opportunities to rethink and transform institutional paradigms.
Urban governance is undergoing a quiet revolution. Faced with the mounting complexity of climate change, social inequality, and technological disruption, cities are realizing that traditional, siloed models of governance – neatly divided into sectors and departments – are no longer fit for purpose.
At the Istanbul Innovation Days earlier this year, organized by UNDP, experts and practitioners who have been working with urban systems gathered to reimagine urban governance models. The session From Silos to Systems explored how portfolio-based approaches and mission-driven governance can unlock more adaptive, inclusive, and systemic responses to today’s challenges.
As Simon Höher from Dark Matter Laboratories emphasized, classical project-based approaches – often modeled on Silicon Valley’s “silver bullet” solutions – fall short in the messy reality of urban life. Solving complex urban problems demands equally complex solutions. Single solutions, while often efficient in the short term, are bound to be selective and eventually inadequate to capture the often rich and multi-layered scale of challenges at hand. In this light, a constellation of interconnected actions seems more promising: a portfolio.
However, portfolios are not mere lists of projects. They are dynamic networks of interdependent actions, actors, and assets (resources enabling conditions). True transformation means moving beyond financing isolated projects toward stewarding systemic portfolios that embrace radical diversification and governance models capable of self-steering complex urban change.
“Condition design is better than intervention design,” Höher noted. Instead of trying to control outcomes, cities should focus on creating enabling conditions – from regulatory spaces to accessible data to infrastructure – that allow new solutions to emerge organically, by leveraging the distributed capacity of the entire urban ecosystem.
Leadership surfaced as another crucial lever for change. Lars Thuesen, founder of the Welfare Improvement Network, underscored the need for adaptive leadership that fosters stronger collaboration, experimentation, and resilience – where leadership is viewed and practiced not as a position in a hierarchy, but as a joint practice empowering practical collaborative approaches
His team works with marginalized communities in Romania, Moldova, Serbia, and others. Kyrgyzstan and North Macedonia demonstrated that positive deviance – identifying and amplifying what already works within a community – can lead to powerful, sustainable change. True leadership, he suggested, means giving up control to stay in charge: enabling others to lead, define challenges, discover solutions, fostering trust, and being willing to navigate uncertainty.
Leadership coaching and distributed decision-making are critical to sustaining pilots and experiments beyond electoral cycles, allowing innovations to become embedded into institutional DNA.
Martin Vavrek, former Deputy City Manager of Bratislava, shared candid insights on the operational realities of innovation. Under his leadership, Bratislava appointed a Chief Innovation Officer, redirected resources internally, and developed digital public services that went beyond the city’s initial mandate, eventually inspiring national models.
Yet innovation is not a one-time disruption; it must transition into everyday operations. This requires in-house capabilities, standardized processes, and, above all, space for experimentation – even in the face of tight budgets and bureaucratic inertia.
As Vavrek highlighted, silos themselves are not the enemy – they allow for focused work. The real opportunity lies in creating “windows into silos”: spaces where collaboration across departments becomes not an exception but a norm.
The session also challenged participants to rethink how success is measured. Traditional KPIs often miss what truly matters in complex systems. Instead, proxy indicators – like the number of girls biking to school or citizens opting out of car ownership – can tell richer stories about societal shifts.
Furthermore, co-benefits framing – such as linking urban greening projects not just to carbon reduction but also to mental health, equity, and public safety – provides a compelling strategy to sustain missions through political and institutional transitions. In the EU Commission’s NetZeroCities Mission, this concept is being employed.
The underlying theme of the conversation was clear: transformation requires humility. To serve requires us as leaders, consultants, and advisors to humble ourselves to understand the needs. Cities must let go of outdated ideas of linear, top-down control and instead foster ecosystems of healthy self-coordination, where citizens, institutions, and communities collectively shape their futures.
This is not an easy shift in mindsets. Current institutions often resist change because they derive value from the status quo. Genuine transformation demands surfacing the “hidden gains”, benefits of the status quo that sustain problems, and designing new forms of co-stewardship that integrate these benefits into more sustainable solutions to offer both stability and new value creation.
In short, moving from silos to systems is not about erasing existing structures but about weaving them into living, evolving ecosystems of innovation, collaboration, and adaptive governance.
The future of urban transformation lies not in commanding complexity, but in learning how to dance with it.
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