Guest Blog by Mabely Diaz Soriano, IPP ’25
My journey with the IPP program began with a lot of expectations. The process of waiting for the program to open. After the first time, I contacted the IPP team to request more information on the application. It just added more to my increasing questions about how to implement public policies successfully.
I should stop here and say that my first lesson was on what success is and what it looks like. The first time I heard that success is not one thing, that it can be many things, I honestly felt lost. How can I go after something when I don’t know what it looks like. But soon I learned it is not about having a fixed picture of success, it is about knowing that this picture might change over time, and that is a construction. We can build more success as we go up to what professor Matt Andrews calls the stairway to heaven. We can go up, step by step, firmly over the base of building more functionality and legitimacy. And we can even fail in the process, because failure is an opportunity to learn.
The other big lesson that followed was about the type of challenges we can face and the methods and tools more appropriate to address them. I remember being at my office and finally understanding this in practice. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the unknown, the more we need to learn to be able to apply what we have learned as we advance on testing the solutions. And PDIA is all about that!
After I could clearly identify, using the PDIA tools, if I am facing a complex problem, new routes towards ideas opened. And most importantly constructing and deconstructing the problem with others, and asking questions, helped us move from what has been always done in the past to other types of conversations that focused on understanding the problem correctly so a greater impact can be achieved.
In my country, we have prioritized goals and KPIs that monitor changes in different variables or dimensions of people’s quality of life. We talk a lot about people and how the center of the policies are the people, the citizens. But somehow, in practice, from the design of policies to the delivery of services, some things other than people take the center stage.
Probably one of the most important lessons from the IPP program was that the implementation is all about people. Who will benefit from the policy, who will be affected by the policy, who are we going to engage, how are we going to mobilize the people we need, how are we going to communicate our lessons, who are the people that are going to implement the ideas, how can we connect people to work together, how are we going to build new relationships and maintain them…
This was particularly challenging for me since, until the IPP program, I focused on delivering products, not on talking to people or building relationships. I felt personally challenged. There were days with ups and downs, and until today I still feel insecure sometimes. But I remember what we’ve learned in the program and look at my diary about the progress and the small wins along this journey, and I get the motivation to go again.
Something that can be considered a funny story is that I got into the IPP program with a name for the policy challenge: The STEM Accelerator. When I chose the name, I didn’t know how I was going to address the problem, how I was going to provide solutions and didn’t have an implementation method.
During the IPP program, I was committed to materializing the STEM Accelerator with the objective of increasing the participation of young adults in STEM careers in my country. Some key learnings that led to milestones are:
- The comprehension of the problem: At the beginning, the more I discussed the problem with different people, the bigger it became, the fishbone grew, and this made me feel overwhelmed. But as the fishbone grew, there were more people with a clearer understanding of the problem and more people engaged in finding ideas and solutions.
Another anecdote is that when I first showed the fishbone in my country, it represented a translation of the first version I made which was written in English. But as we started discussing things in Spanish, not just the diagram, but the problem statement and the causes changed. It is very valuable to have the PDIA tools in Spanish and other languages and being able to share all the knowledge and experiences in our countries regardless of the language we speak.
- There is always something that we can do: There were weeks that I just waited, there were other weeks in which we made amazing progress towards the implementation of the first ideas within the Accelerator framework. But every week, even if it was something small, I asked what my team and I could do and try to motivate us to keep doing something more, engage with someone new, and learn something new about our problem.
- Small wins and progress matter to people more than I thought: I have seen how communicating constantly the progress and small wins to my team and my authorizers has resulted in more motivation, more engagement , and more commitment. At the beginning, when I talked about lessons and leads in the implementation process of the STEM Accelerator, I felt like people were looking at me like an alien. But now everyone looks forward to knowing about this and reporting on the progress they have made.
- We can build capabilities in the process: As soon as we returned from the week at Harvard in Phase II of the program, I made a team meeting with the purpose of getting to know more about us as a team. We decided to make an integration work retreat. There I mentioned PDIA and the policy challenge and we scheduled a team meeting to talk about the problem and deconstruct it together.
Through empowering other members and delegating, we could reach out to more people and realized that there are other teams addressing the same problem, even though they have been using different methods. We could start building a network. And suddenly, we became just more than the four members of the Dominican Republic at the IPP program. To the four of us, the ideas and feedback of 7 more people were added, the ideas and commitment of the Vice Minister of Monitoring and Government Coordination and the authorizers, stakeholders and teams that all of us talked to and engaged with.
We were impressed to find that everyone we engaged was motivated to contribute to the solution to the problem, but also that they wanted to learn more about PDIA and how to address complex challenges.
The IPP program and learning about PDIA changed the way I will tackle problems in the future. What began with the STEM Accelerator has now moved beyond to the solution of other problems that have arisen in my role as Director of the Public Policy Laboratory in the Ministry of the Presidency in the Dominican Republic.
Now I have new learnings and tools to address complex problems knowing that even though it might seem impossible to solve them, we can go step by step, working with more people along the way, invading this complexity.
As a message to my fellow PDIA practitioners around the world, I want to say that the public policy path is hard and difficult, but there’s no greater satisfaction than contributing with the solution to a public problem. I’m writing this message with the conviction that, even though our problems seem greater and more complex as time goes by, the opportunities to make change and progress are greater if we iterate, learn and adapt. I am sure we are not alone wherever we are. But if you feel like you look beside you and don’t see anyone walking with you, there’s a PDIA community that doesn’t give up and is always there for you.
This path is challenging, because it begins with changing ourselves first. It is humbling because we are always facing something that is bigger than us. But it is worth it. And at the end we will have grown and, more importantly, others will have grown alongside us. For today, let’s take another small step that will take us up the stairway to heaven.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 36 Participants successfully completed this 5-month hybrid program in September 2025. These are their learning journey stories.