Guest blog by Cecilia Ávila, Celina Fernández, Alejandra Hyver, Ana Luna, Gabriela Muñoz, Cordelia Portilla, José Francisco Salas, Rocío Salazar
When Mayor Colosio came close with the Districts of Care in Bogota, he called me right on the spot to tell me “stop everything you’re doing, we need to focus on caregivers and the economy of care.” Of course, he immediately said “well… don’t stop everything you’re doing but we really need to do this”.
The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative program began right after that and the Mayor saw it as an opportunity for us to learn how to tackle the care crisis in our context with our resources. From the beginning we realized that we needed to bring the state government on board if we wanted -whatever the solution was- to work.
We felt forced to avoid thinking of solutions, and to narrow down our problem, because “crisis of care” was still too big and vague. After listening to the group of 40 relevant actors at our launch meeting in Monterrey, and having a couple virtual sessions as a team of 8, we got to work on the first version of our fishbone. We didn’t know then that we would have more versions of it than we could count. It turned out looking like this:
Then, came the New York sessions. There, we were able to fully focus on where to begin. We worked with our triple A analysis and selected two entry points where we appeared to have more room for change. The realignment of services in the San Bernabe community, as well as a communication campaign that strategically got residents and opinion leaders talking about care and start recognizing it as work and paramount to our economy.
Another thing that happened during the NY week is that we embraced the rush. We all agreed that the more time we spent overthinking about the solutions, the less time we had to implement them. That is why when we came back home and met with the mayor, we started discussing dates to launch the “Monterrey me cuida” initiative.
First, we met with the group of 40 relevant actors to present to them the work that we had been doing as a reduced team of 8 during the past months. After that, the meeting focused on hearing what they thought our next steps should be, or which entry points we should tackle next.
The team of DIF Monterrey conducted a series of focus groups with caregivers from the San Bernabe area, which provided relevant information for the project. As a team, and supported by the Director of Substantive Equality, we started meeting with several areas of city government to get them on board and to explain to them what the initiative was about. To get them to think about how their departments could add up to our goals.
We formalized the collaboration by signing an agreement with one of our most relevant partners: UN women. City council approved an initial budget of 600,000USD for the first months of work and activities. We announced this partnership, as well as our participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative in a launch event on March 22nd.
We have learned a lot from this program. One of our takeaways is to trust the process. We were definitely not used to this way of thinking about a problem. But in the end, the iterative nature of the process brings a lot of peace. We know that we will make mistakes, but it will not be the end of the world. Not even the end of the project. We know that we need to fail fast and learn from
The PDIA will help us rethink several collaborative projects that are not working as we would like them to. Perhaps because the traditional way to approach a problem and design a solution is not working for some of the wicked problems we face. We learned the value of taking – or making – the time to think about how we might do better. How we might collaborate more effectively, and communicate better to achieve public value.
If you, who are reading this, are facing a wicked problem related to city government: you are not alone. It is very likely that some other city has faced similar difficulties, and it is also likely that a team of consultants or scholars has already come up with tools you can use to find your own, custom made, tailored solution.
This is part of a blog series written by city leaders who participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative cross-boundary collaboration track during 2023.