Guest blog by Stephanie Zamora, MPA
Taking on large organizational or societal challenges requires a degree of creativity, risk-taking, and discomfort in addressing them properly. While we can certainly continue to rely on traditional methods of policy implementation, we may find ourselves missing the mark, not delivering on promises, and depleting the most scare resource: time. So what can we do to ensure we are eliminating challenges to create public good when plan-and-control is no longer working?
As an early-career professional, I placed a high level of expectation on myself to deliver on the original ask of expanding internship opportunities at the city. I was down on myself for not having fully accomplished that task by the end of my service-learning year with the city. Plan-and-control tends to do that to passionate people who care about executing.
Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation affords us the ability to reach larger visions in a more manageable way. When I first entered the course, I was determined to create more internship opportunities for the youth of Scottsdale. This is a noble cause, and we continue to look for service-learning work opportunities to offer—but when I spent more time with the challenge, it was clear that it was more complex than just creating internships. Through PDIA and asking myself why? about 70 times in one lesson, I understood our problem to be not only more complex, but more expansive than just hiring young people at the City of Scottsdale.
Young people are disconnected from participating in public service because the sector is relying on impersonal and outdated recruitment strategies; the sector does not build meaningful relationships with educational instructions early on; the sector does not continuously inform end users that these opportunities exist; and the sector has yet to confront that its lack of diversity makes young millennials and Gen Z run away. Spending time with the problem allowed me the ability to find entry points to tackle some of these causes. But I still don’t have a program.
So if no program was launched, what did we gain in the last 6 months? Here is a list with the cause it helps eliminate:
- Built a team of dedicated employees with professional experience in creating internship programs from scratch to build knowledge about what works in recruiting the target demographic.
- Relied on that team to teach me about institutional processes that can be amended through iterations. (2).
- Built relationships with educational institutions who trust in our ability to provide meaningful professional-development opportunities to their youth. This includes working with affinity groups to ensure we are capturing a diverse audience. (1 &4)
- Expanded acceptance and excitement for interns across the organization through projection and narrative-building. (2)
- Engaged with multiple internal agents to brainstorm effective iterations. (3)
- Heard from end-users that have been through the hiring system. (2) (Pictured below is a lunch organized by the Service-Learning Team with the city manager present).
- Built visibility of program by taking risks to engage in non-traditional ways and by delegating to willing participants to take on high school interns.
- Leveraged relationships with the university by presenting, taking on mentorship roles, and offering my personal assistance to students. (2)
Before IPP, I would not have counted these as wins. I would have been solely focused on the fact that there was no “grand opening” of a shiny new program. I would have discounted how much emotional labor this list required like the restless nights trying to come up with iterations or the anxiety-producing act of delegating to people with much more tenure. But all of what we did accomplish serves as evidence for a need to invest in connecting emerging professionals to our profession. We can make it exciting, we can make it accessible, and on the way, we are actually chipping away at a sector-wide challenge of hiring talent and securing successors.
I will still ask for funding for 6 paid intern positions during the current budget cycle cognizant that this is very plan-and-control oriented but needed to scale. We accomplished so much just within our 40-hour weeks—and we proved there is motivation, need, and excitement to engage emerging professionals in public service.
Of all the learning acquired in this course, the triple-A approach has been the most moving because it is one of the most challenging aspects to conquer. We learned about the importance of building authority, acceptance, and ability to accomplish our iterations an eventually our overall vision of success in our challenges. While this approach is certainly key in tackling the challenges, we entered the course with, I have found it powerful to share this with colleagues as well.
During this course, we have been challenged to build ability, acceptance, and authority. Wherever possible, I encourage you all to build that for others at your organizations as well. Giving to others is so fulfilling in our work—especially those that contribute to our causes. Remember, none of us do this alone.
My colleague Sheila Williams works in the Human Services department and focuses on professional development and job placement for adolescents in the city. She has been a critical part of the Service-Learning Team I constructed as part of the PDIA process given her direct interactions with potential end-users of the employment and learning opportunities we are building as a city.
Sheila is our Sherpa. She has over a decade’s worth of experience with the end-users we want to connect with as an organization. She also understands the importance of intersectionality in our work as public servants. This is so invaluable to our mission of engaging a diverse, passionate workforce to make public goods. So, I decided to amplify her work before over 110 leaders in the city at a Leadership Forum.
I’ll also note that this behavior was modeled by my incredible mentors/supervisors in the city manager’s office who have put me before council, community partners, and executives to build acceptance and authority to conduct my work. My authorizers trust in my ideas and abilities and I am happy to share in that spirit with my colleagues as well.
This 3-minute announcement has led to a renewed motivation and excitement to iterate on the job fairs Sheila organizes with private companies and city departments. Now, we are planning to host two fairs in the coming year open to all city departments looking to hire—but with some twists! These include hosting the events after school hours to encourage participation from our target end-users: high school students but also their parents.
This helps chip away at two of the five root causes identified in the fishbone diagram which including doing away with passive recruitment strategies and expanding access to knowledge about city employment opportunities. And it is a two-for-one: we’ll be working toward connecting youth to public service and my colleague will expand her capacity and her connections.
What this course has taught me overall is that we should always be leveraging our positions to also build other’s abilities, capacities, and reach. PDIA is about bringing together various strengths, capabilities, connections, intelligence, and passions to move the collective forward. Let’s continue to build a more just, equitable, and beautiful world together!
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participants successfully completed this 6-month online learning course in December 2022. These are their learning journey stories.
