UNDP teams continue to publish interesting blog posts about their attempts to move to a system approach which includes managing portfolio of projects and experiments. Here is an interesting post written by Alex Oprunenco on Medium.
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” says the famous saying, and I would add that if all you have is a project, everything looks like a magic bullet. It is reductionist and does not allow people and teams to see interdependencies between project and thus the nature of issues more holistically. Another way of putting this: we tend to project our organizational building block (aka projects) onto the world, thereby limiting our understanding of issues (particularly when it comes to non-linear dynamics) rather than working backwards from the nature of the problem we are addressing.\”