Guest blog by Agustín I. Filippo
For you all considering or going through the IPP course, be ready for a transformational experience. If you’re like most of the people I met here, troubled, and somewhat frustrated with current practice in your development practice, you’ll get an amazing lot from joining. The closer you are from reaching your desperation point (professional, personal, etc.) the more you’ll get out of IPP. Perhaps my biggest learning from IPP came from its holistic approach; it teaches how to keep mind and soul, as well as health and professional or family circles, functioning in harmony.
IPP is indeed modeled from real life and not forcing a model upon life. IPP’s methodology consists of iteration cycles in which a team in charge of implementing a project tries to make progress towards a policy goal. I learned about the importance of reading into problems correctly, guiding teams into the iterative process and relying on influence and trust rather than authority and monetary incentives. I also learned about the need to resort to intrinsic motivation -everyone works at their best when their own values are aligned with the policy goals, with teams that grow bigger and become more committed and motivated along the way.
During my course, I helped different teams tackle challenges of underdeveloped parts of Mexico. Mexico’s southern states are desperately poor and suffer from enormous inequality. They concentrate most of the country’s cultural diversity which has not been properly assimilated and have created a modern world with unfamiliar (to western standards) rules. This context provides little in terms of the required institutional setting that drives (traditional) economic growth and explains in part why this corner of Mexico is lagging the rest of the country (growth not only has been stagnant, but it has also advanced at a lower pace than richer northern states).
Throughout the year, I helped teams of practitioners from government agencies and other organizations (think-tanks, bilateral agencies, etc.) navigate through problem definition, policy goals and entry points for policy actions. We learned a lot about the challenges of southern Mexico, about how to prioritize actions, who can do what, and in general about the richness of the context which implies that problems arise with different characteristics and require different solutions depending on where they are (and even for localities in near proximity, the context can be dramatically different).
The teams used the tools that are offered in IPP to better identify their policy problem and to test solutions that could remedy what was causing it. We managed to find, for example, that lack of entrepreneurship had a hope of being countered by increasing the potential pool of entrepreneurs. An action path was set to implement such a change, with actions over the whole spectrum of knowledge generation and we started making alliances to push for that change. Also, we identified certain government services that were lacking and hence blocking entrepreneurship activity and found ways to providing them with adequate training and focus. Interestingly, perhaps the most salient progress was understanding what the government was doing and how it was doing it, including how much agency government officials directly in charge of these areas had.
We found that very often, government units devote a significant part of their resources to activities that are not related to their main objectives. And sometimes they get stuck on a superficial approach to their work, which robs them of meaning and hence of motivation. They are not used to thinking they are the heroes of development, as they should. Besides being distracted with other matters, they too often rely on solutions brought from outside despite knowing they can do no good long term but come with the benefit of checking sufficient boxes to keep everyone happy (up and down the responsibility chain). Migration was another very important issue in the region, and we managed to make new insights into the problem, profiling Guatemalan migrants crossing the border with Mexico.
The course had a great impact on how I do my job (which, in essence, consists in helping in the design and implementation of public policy from a multilateral organization that provides financing and technical assistance to governments in Latin America). I am aware of international best practices to issues in my field of work. However, I had very little training on the importance of having public officials and other key actors, which are the real agents of change, create their own paths and own the process, and hence building true capabilities in the public sector. The other side of the coin of this lack of capabilities are the weak results obtained from public policy and of the projects multilateral organizations put forth to support them. I will soon engage with other likeminded people in my organization to improve project design.
This course changed my mind about team building and leadership. IPP places enormous attention to the teams that are responsible for policy implementation, how they are formed and what it takes to formulate problems and goals. It implies harder work for government agents, as they can’t outsource the work. In turn, this brings back their ability to request from development organizations and consultants to do it for them exactly what they require, and not off-the-shelf solutions, which is empowering and liberating. However, it does use up some of their bandwidth (that was not wide enough to begin with), so it is required for those agents understand the ways in which to expand their reach and hence achieve their goals. It is a matter of setting up small incremental steps towards managing a hard challenge, understanding the constraints, and creating a broad team that can tackle different parts of the problem.
But how to do that? In the end, I am just and outsider trying to help, why would they even listen to me? The course will show that modern sophisticated organizations, public or private, grow large by dividing up tasks and responsibilities. They use carrots and sticks, but of different kind. Market carrots and sticks are annual bonus payments or the threat of losing your job; intrinsic motivation carrots are about knowing that your work is important to you and to the world. These and other discoveries about how organizations work, and how people in different parts of them exercise leadership are now part of my basic toolkit that I use regularly in the context of public policy implementation.
To the next generation of IPPers: the topics and lectures in this course are well curated and going through them carefully will be extremely rewarding. Be open to change your mind as you discover new things about yourself, what you care for, and about your job. It helped me find new ways of gratification at work, and how to take better care of myself (the 5 dimensions of self-care are incredibly helpful). You will find a very tangible connection between values, emotions, and your material surroundings, and a more solid alignment between your personal life and your professional career, that could come close to being life changing.
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.