Guest blog by Marcia Matsubayashi
If I could summarize this course experience in one word it is “inspiring”. I am sure all my colleagues who attended this course were inspired by the faculty to mobilize for action, since we feel more empowered (and knowledgeable) to make the impact in our societies.
This course changed my view on how to support my country in its economic growth, mainly because of new concepts (Problem definition and deconstruction, Monkeys, Hippos, sense of us) and rich cases (Brazil, Cost Rica, Albania, others) that we were exposed to in this course as well as the pragmatical approach to solving problems (PDIA). Moreover, it was fascinating to understand that most of the problems should be solved at local level, no miraculous recipes, since my country Brazil was submitted by IMF orders several times before and this intervention was not enough to build sustainable growth. It means that we need more and more local leaders that understand these concepts/tools and want to make this change.
Another important takeaway was the association of economic growth with inclusion. This is another theme we need to address in the emerging countries, since we still have a large population without proper education and not included in the formal economy.
I am privileged to attend this course while I am supporting the Brazilian Government in a specific growth problem. It was fantastic experience learning each lesson of the course and the same time discussing the concepts/tools with my consulting team and the Brazilian Government officers. I have already used the fishbone analysis, Atlas of Economic Complexity, PDIA, Triple A´’s, Positive Deviance and team building concepts in my project. I have also recommended them to enroll in the next Harvard LEG course.
I will conduct a workshop with the BR Government in January to use these tools to discuss further problems, propose ideas and prioritize them. My idea is to open the session with 2 pictures below to inspire the team:
Finally, I want to thank all faculty team and the group for rich discussions and inspiration!!
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 61 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2021. These are their learning journey stories.