Guest blog by Phengphaivanh (Susan) Sitpraxay, IPP ’24
I attended the IPP course during one of the toughest periods over 14 years of my work life as a policy maker in the central bank of Laos-the Bank of the Lao PDR. This is my first course at Harvard University, a place I have long aspired to study. I came to the course with a lot of passions and strong belief that the course will improve my skills and support my contribution to address the economic and financial difficulties that my country has been facing. After 7 months of learning journey, it has confirmed that I made right decision and I should have joined the course earlier than this.
The IPP course has guided me to find the causes and solutions of some prolonged obstacles that I have faced in designing and implementing policies. The Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) is a meaningful and powerful tool for crucial issues that I have been dealing with not only in terms of work life but also personal life, and will definitely continue to be a precious tool along my future pathways. I have acknowledged that tackling complex challenges without understanding their root causes can exacerbate issues and create new obstacles. Using PDIA on the issues that I would like to address, has assisted me in organizing my understanding on what I really want to achieve and what I need to do to get there, and even indicated what and why I have failed during the process. By iteratively refining my fishbone diagram, I have currently moved to the 9th version of my fishbone diagram which is much cleaner and more concise compared to the messy confused 1st version of that. The better version of my fishbone diagram has improved problem finding, creating solution logically-systematically-steadily and expanding supporting networks. Nevertheless, I believe the current version that I have is not yet the last, my journey is still going on.
Rome was not built in a day, neither by one man. Dealing with a complex problem requires sufficient resources and supports. The course made me realize that my problem requires the involvement of a lot of different types of stakeholders than my initial understanding and provided useful techniques to strengthen engagement with all involved stakeholders. Since everything has limitations, anyone cannot and should not do everything alone, a strong team is inevitable to make thing work, and the team will never work without unified perception, trust and psychological safety. Dealing with people is the most important part, though it can be tough and needs the best handle along the whole policy implementing process. Herewith, Rob’s 4P (Perception, Process, People, Projection) model for strategic leadership is vital to support effective delegation. To gather more supports/more followers, to build trust, I appreciate the suggestion from the course of having Enthusiasm, Kindness, Focus, Calmness and Openness, especially when we have to deal with our own emotions and the emotions of others in various environments. Furthermore, to support building trust, having and expressing prudent and wise authenticity, empathy and logic is also worth to aiming for. A good leader requires a good balance of Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Intelligence. To make team work, besides forming the team’s perception-goal, creating psychological safety environment in a team is another essential task for effective leader. To lead, to gain trust and support from people, it can be like “Give Love to Get Love”, we need to pay sufficient attention to people by showing our “appreciation” toward them, giving comfortable “autonomy”- avoiding being a micromanager or neglectful – giving meaningful guidelines, allowing appropriate “affiliation”- showing their meaning for team, giving respect to their “status”, and assigning the appropriate role for each – right man right job. Nevertheless, we also have to accept the fact that not everything will always be as we wish. In the world of policy design, delivery, and implementation, there are always opponents/non-supporters and dealing with potential vulnerable support risks is necessary but has never been easy. Herewith, I have found that taking a step back to reconsider/to learn about the real causes of low supports through creating open-discussion friendly environments to listen to those vulnerable stakeholders more for their worries, obstacles and needs, as well as seeking support from other supportive stakeholders who can have influence/power to convince those targeted stakeholders, are helpful.
Moreover, beside taking care of other’s emotions, our own emotions also need a good care, through having regular internal emotional audit-assessment in various scenarios and practicing appropriate ways to handle and interact after emotions arise, to stay healthy, happy and helpful.
While time limitation is always challenging for policy makers, many times we have been required to solve the critical prolonged complicated/complex problems in a short time. Thus, good time management is another important concept for successful policy implementation. I found that several suggested tips and tactics from the course are essential. For instance, creating a time audit, setting a time limit for each task, eliminating half-work, turning off social media app alerts, boosting inspiration when feeling lackluster, trying to use time in more efficient way by concentrating on single task that can have multiple results rather than dealing with multiple tasks. Better time management can help us have more balance in particular mental and physical health, work life and family life, individual and organization-country benefit; which is another key for growing.
Policy Implementation is an ongoing tough and prolonged journey. Through this rough pathway, success does not always have to be an epic, elegant thing. By creating and recognizing each small footprint that we have made can be a powerful tool to support getting through hard times and moving forward. Taking a step backward sometimes does not mean we are weak or losing but may support having more firm steps forward. Taking some steps backward can support sharpening my problem-solving skills, through exploring things in different and wider dimensions, having more clarification on issues when I go slower but deeper, resetting something to start a new better thing.
The IPP course helped me to improve myself not only as a policy maker but as a person, and gave a lot of encouragement to get through stormy days along my career journey. It also provided opportunities to expand my network with course mates in various fields around the world, allowed us to share, to learn, to support among each other; confirmed that we are not fighting for good alone-we still have course members, and what we have been trying to address can be useful for not only ourself, our institution, our community but may also be meaningful for some people in some place in long distance; and built confidence that we can make a difference.
Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Executive Education Department at Harvard Kennedy School for providing this meaningful course; to all remarkable lecturers, especially Matt Andrews, Salimah Samji; to wonderful program director and coordinators Jessie DeLano, Alison Thompson, Chrissy Stamoulis Blathras; to kind TAs Catalina Reyes, Mannat Singh.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 42 Participants successfully completed this 6-month hybrid program in November 2024. These are their learning journey stories.