Guest blog by Amy Quick, LEG ’23
I had the unique privilege of being able to engage in the PDIA process and problem identification prior to beginning this fall’s Leading Economic Growth course, allowing me to bring some real-world experience to the classroom and intellectual component. The State of Wyoming has been working with the Harvard Growth Lab for about a year and the majority of the Wyoming Business Council team as well as several external partners have preceded me in this learning and application.
While I had some familiarity with the concepts, I was amazed at how much deeper we were able to go into them through the lectures and live sessions and how much my understanding and willingness to put them into practice has grown throughout 10 weeks of the course. Walking through the steps of problem identification and identifying supporting data was very informative, especially the physical act of doing it since I am an experiential learner. As was applying my growth challenge to a fishbone diagram. That exercise was so beneficial and I’m confident I will continue to use it when I work with other groups or in my own strategic communications focus. Some other ideas that resonated with me are the importance of inclusion and the concepts of multi-agent leadership and the “sense of us”. Throughout my professional life, I have done a lot of community development work and facilitation and have placed a high priority on these concepts but I’m not sure that I was applying them to the work I am specifically doing currently in communicating with external audiences. It was a good reminder/refresher and look forward to being more aware of them going forward. I also really appreciated the information on “crawling the design space.” It has spurred a lot of reflection and I hope to examine those ideas further when it comes to my specific growth challenge and future problem identification/solving.
My growth challenge started out focusing on a general lack of collaboration and communication across the state due to our large, rural, and remote geographic situation as well as a strong sense of competition among businesses, communities, and organizations. While I still feel that this is a major problem and it is certainly complex, it proved to be too broad for me to focus on any sort of concrete work or to find supporting data.
Eventually, my growth challenge evolved into focusing on the lack of engagement and diversity in public offices and community issues.
Data shows a low percentage of women and minorities involved in or willing to engage in elected positions throughout the state which affects the diversity of ideas, viewpoints, and priorities that our elected officials focus on and thus our ability to bring diverse solutions to the table to address our economic diversification challenge. This, in my opinion, has led to polarization and in many ways an unwillingness to collaborate. I still have a long way to go to understand this problem and to develop effective ways to address it, but it was really helpful to reflect on who should be engaged around the issue as well as what some of the current practices, external best practices, latent practices, and most definitely the positive deviants are that we could explore and employ. I’m not sure if this will become another workstream focus for our organization, but I do believe it can provide context and an important lens to all of the workstreams and problems we are currently working to address.
I have already been working to develop messaging and a communications strategy around the PDIA approach (what we call Pathways to Prosperity and the “economic growth flywheel”) that we are utilizing in our work at the Business Council and across Wyoming. These efforts have been focused on taking the big and somewhat academic concepts down to a simpler level and helping them fit Wyoming’s context so that they are more relatable and transferable to our audiences. I believe that this is just the beginning and I can’t honestly predict where I will go from here except that I am excited to continue to learn and explore these ideas and to put them into practice in my direct work in strategic communications as well as working with others to address my growth challenge, the other problems already identified, and those yet to be uncovered.
I would love to explore the “Sense of Us” deeper and wish it wasn’t presented at the very end of the course when we don’t have much time to dig into it with the professors, our peer groups, and others. This is something that I think we need to understand better in Wyoming because it is very complex. While we are generally very independent and individualistic by nature (which leads to our unwillingness at times to collaborate), we are also very proud of our state and very hard working, not afraid to roll up our sleeves and get things done. To get more people involved in addressing our growth challenge, we need to understand those cultural factors that may limit people and communities from understanding the importance of growth so we can bring them along to work with us and be successful in reaching our shared goals of a high quality of life for all.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 58 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2023. These are their learning journey stories.