Zeroth Labs

Understanding the ecosystem and behaviours around access to sanitation in Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia

 

About Zeroth Labs

We are a mission-driven research and innovation lab that works on complex adaptive systems. We tackle “wicked problems” by supporting countries and cities at varying stages of development to make sense of the messy underlying dynamics that make their complex policy challenges the way they are.

We believe that the messiness and magnitude of these challenges require us to better understand a system before we intervene in it. We also believe that the difficulty of these issues warrants methods that meet them. For this reason, we use (and continue to be lifelong students of) multiple disciplines and approaches: anthropology, behavioural science, system dynamics, statistics, network theory and other forms of computational and applied mathematical approaches that help us get at the nature — of nature — and to bring clarity to complexity.

Our backstory: We are a spin-off from a youth development NGO in Singapore to enable young people for greater social impact. That mission led us to discover the interconnections across multiple social issues, and a realisation we now cannot unsee — systems is everything (everywhere, all at once).

Since then, we have brought this lens of complexity science and complex adaptive systems into everything we do: with multilaterals, federal governments, city municipalities, and future-oriented companies to tackle challenges in healthcare, rapid urbanisation, youth unemployment, and others.

 
 

What We Do

 
 

Field interviews in context of rapid urbanisation in Dhaka Division, Bangladesh

Systems Research

The wicked problem you are facing is likely to have underlying forces that manifest in the rates of unemployment/corruption/healthcare access/etc which you are trying to address. We use qualitative methods from social anthropology, quantitative methods from statistics, computational methods from agent-based modelling, network science, and other interdisciplinary sensibilities from complex systems science to provide sense-making of these underlying dynamics so as to inform where in the system to intervene.

Past clients/funders include UNDP.

Summer 2022 run of Complexity & Systems Thinking (CAST) at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS, Singapore

Teaching

We developed a summer elective on complexity science and systems thinking for research-track medical undergraduates. Previously we also taught graduate students for a Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration, a programme for sustainability professionals in government, civil society and business.

We like to use models to show live demos of complexity properties in interactive workshop format, and can tailor this for non-technical audiences as well. We also like to link these concepts (which can be abstract) to the real-life situations our participants face, which makes it more relatable and real.

Past clients/funders include YLLSOM and LKYSPP at NUS; SOSS at SMU.

Material from strategic foresight engagement on corruption and geopolitical futures in context of Georgia

Strategic Foresight

There is limited runway to plan the strategy for your organisation (or country) if your outlook is 3-5 years. We help you prepare for a greater range of possible futures by looking 10-20 years ahead, using the method of scenario planning. We combine the generative aspects of scenario generation with the analytical rigour of systems thinking, to think with you about an uncertain and ambiguous tomorrow so you can make decisions that prepare for and shape it today.

Past clients/funders include USAID.