Guest blog by Oana Toiu
Why are there high chairs and heavy mahogany bookcases and tall ceilings and actual silk flags and the most serious of fountain pen in the office of key decision makers in policy? It looked like a weird travel machine to the XIX century for me, when I started my State Secretary term in the Labour Ministry and opened the heavy door with golden embellished letters to my office.
For the thousands of people in the national authorities and directions put abruptly under my leadership by our technocrat prime minister it might have seemed the opposite: that the 30-year-old social entrepreneur with no political experience they were introduced to as their new boss traveled from Mars with little to no understanding of the habits, culture, rhythm and huge scale of government decisions. But I had two advantages working for me: I had the ministerial rank and with it the fountain pen (the first fountain pen in the world was invented in Romania, by the way) that signed off on the policies and the budget proposals to be adopted by the Ministry and the Government and a decade of social innovation work in the field, work that taught me to ask the right questions (most of the time) to the right people.
”Have we tested this?,” ”Can we have an MVP (minimum viable version of the policy) in one county or with one target group and improve it from what we find from that before we allocate the budget to scale it nationally?” ”Let’s take a counselor on the field and go through the application process for benefits so we can properly map the process from the client side”, ”How have other countries tackled this issue before, how are they currently approaching it now?”. Everyone nodded their head and did nothing in that direction, the replies were thousands of printed pages in neatly arranged folders with stamps and registration numbers – research, white papers, old legislation and budgets available and authorization procedures that were meant to be read as ”this is why it cannot be done as fast as you want or at all”, ”we do not try..,we are the government and deploy to all the citizens not just to some in pilot test, citizens are not guinea pigs of policy”
And that is how I understood fast and hard what the flags and the leather cushioned chairs were all about, not time travel but time freeze: symbols of authority, status, stability, reliability, standing the test of time and passing governments and remaining largely unchanged. I do not necessarily agree that is the best in our fast paced world but I understood it and I respected where it came from as citizens do need to trust the decisions taken on their behalf, the steadiness and stability of it all.
So I started taking it slower: arranging busses to take the bureaucrats to social enterprises themselves before we were setting in stone the first social enterprise authorization procedures in the country, starting the first video conference calls with social care practitioners on the field all over the country, as a feedback loop on the new rules we were about to impose on them, created a simulation on cutting the paperwork needed for access to help. And it worked as, I know realized after PDIA, was instinctively creating alliances around the policies put forward, feedback loops, iterations, but the problem was that whenever time pressure increased, which was often in our Government, as I had no procedures or formal frame or common language for it to do it constantly as a team, we were moving fast back into the default mode of me demanding we do it that way and them pushing back. There is only so much you can get done because you hold the fountain pen and some of the work I was proudest of, such as an accessible interactive map of all social services across the country with all available places, feedback stars and visible gaps of service in underserved region, created fully with tech volunteers and put also as an open source available for all to build on and share, was taken down one week after my term ended.
The national program of baby kits for new vulnerable mothers that I started was tabled for four years after even if it had a dedicated EU funds budget secured and we needed to come back to government to restart it. It was really cool when the World Economic Forum invited me as a speaker to Davos afterwords, I was perceived as a highly successful young policy maker by all measures except the one that actually mattered the most: the ability of those policies to reach consistently, year after year, the beneficiaries that needed them, and the resilience of those policies after my term was over. Blaming the others for cutting back policies was the first reaction but the correct and hard one was to admit I was simply not good enough. Yet. And the Implementing Public Policy Executive Program at Harvard Kennedy School seemed the best solution to fix me in a year.
IPP has taught me so much in the 14 modules in the year, and especially the policy discussions with Matt and Salimah, the negotiation classes with Rob Wilkinson and the spectacular community of international fellows. Having a common language with my team, a dynamic system in which I can get stakeholders involved with both low engagement and core allies, a space for creativity and innovation but with a disciplined approach to it that does not seem frail and unsteady, a set of simple and visually attractive instruments but more than that a working philosophy, a set of respectful invitations to all to join in their rhythm, bureaucrats or beneficiaries, together or separately, but to none to allowed to stop the process of change. My local councilors or fellow MPs heard me use often this year what Matt said: When you are stopped go smaller, you can always act and move at a smaller scale so the know how, the lessons, the policy and the community around it grows and than go big again when momentum is right.
It has also taught me humbleness. When I applied for the class my chosen challenge was to solve the labor shortage crisis we now face in Romania, a country with an economy that grew in a rhythm that outpaced EU after the 2008 crisis and after the Covid one but that simply does not have the available qualified labor force anymore and my approach to that was to make sure vulnerable groups that do not have access to jobs have the support policies in place to fill in the labor gap. The first Ishikawa diagram and the gentle feedback of my working group and TA has made me realize we need to work on just one bone and than go even at a smaller scale, and focused on access to quality employment for vulnerable young mothers. One assignment in particular, the triple A framework (Authority, Acceptance, Ability), led me include more bureaucrats in the design work to raise acceptance within the public institutions mandated to help.
As my nomination as Labour & Family Minister last year had only a minority support in Parliament (ouch!) I had to come to the harsh realization that, even if I am still in the top leadership team of my political party, as an opposition MP will have small or no chance to get the authorization needed from the current Government and had to find it somewhere else and as building alliances was key in the class that was the path of the policy challenge as well for one of the problem identified. One of the fishbones iterations identified as a problem that victims of domestic violence only had temporary housing support so not enough stability to find and keep a new job away from the aggressor. I drafted together with the victims, a vice mayor (Mihaela) and social housing local bureaucrats legislation to give them access across the country to social housing and as almost impossible as it is to pass a law from the vocal opposition, a network of female parliamentarians from other parties made that possible this year. I was not wise enough for this approach before IPP and the PDIA instruments became a toolkit we will use in following up on the law implementation and feedback loops for further improvement.
The reading materials that emphasized ”stay with the problem” triggered more detailed analysis on the work we do for insuring that part-time work survives and realized that women are over represented among those that lost their job when the government imposed a double taxation on part time work and now focus our arguments to fight the overtaxation on that knowledge and the impact it has on both labor market and families.
The work did not stop and nor did the lessons or the need for support and the amazing part I was unaware of when applying is that IPP is not just an executive program but a community of peers. The girls & women focused policy package that became the priority of my term includes legislation for underage mothers, anti-trafficking, free sanitary pads in schools, easier set up entrepreneurial ventures and youth employment lower taxation and child friendly cities but all are uphill battles and for that we just launched a coalition of NGOs and monthly breakfast of all women MPs in the Chamber under the umbrella ”together for girls” and the next step is a coalition of local council members that monitor and improve local policies for them and we hope to use the PDIA methodology (great thing is that it has a big amount of free resources including the book)
As a final note, have to say Keisha, the program director, and Najwa, my TA, were key in keeping me on track with assignments whenever it seemed impossible finding the balance between firmness and flexibility. In PDIA you never feel alone in your struggles.
The lesson is not done, the learning is daily, but what is achieved is the change of paradigm, the approach, and the toolkit. A long way ahead to get better at policy work but with this community and this toolkit and approach I might just find the endurance and the small successes needed to keep at it in the decades to come.
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.