Introducing the PDIA Toolkit

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Hello and welcome to Building State Capability at Harvard University’s podcast series. In this podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program, and Tim McNaught Building State Capability Fellow, have a conversation about the recently launched PDIAToolkit.

Salimah Samji Welcome to the podcast on the PDIAToolkit. We launched our toolkit earlier this week and we’ve been getting a lot of comments and questions and we thought, how do we answer these questions? And rather than do a video, we thought we have podcasts, why not do a podcast? With me today? I have Tim McNaught, a BSC fellow.

Tim McNaught Yeah. So you’re not going to be interviewing me today, right?

Salimah Samji No, our format is going to be different.

Tim McNaught Okay, sounds good. So, Salimah, I’m just curious, you’ve been at the Building State Capability program since the beginning, so how did this tool kit come about? And how does it fit in with what BSC’s been doing over the years?

Salimah Samji Sure. We started to think about a tool kit a year and a half ago when we had the book that had already been released and we’d run three versions of the course and we thought, Wouldn’t it be great to also have a toolkit? Because not everyone can take our online course, which is 15 weeks long and put a team together, etc. And we thought, wouldn’t it be great to create another way of sharing this content? Except we started on that process last year and then there was no place to release it and we got busy and forgot about it and so it ended. Then this year we had this potential of doing a workshop in Brazil, as you remember, Tim, and we said, oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have the toolkit because now we had a place to release this toolkit? And so we said, let’s start again and get this toolkit done. The workshop didn’t happen, but the toolkit did. And now we’re really excited that we finally had the time and got this done.

Tim McNaught Definitely. And I see you have a copy of the tool kit printed out in front of you. If you’re listening at home, maybe you should hit pause and go download a copy for yourself. It is now available on our website. The Building State Capability website, bsc.cid.harvard.edu You’ll see Toolkit at the top. You can download it and share it with your friends, but maybe you can take us through the different sections, Salimah.

Salimah Samji Great. Thanks, Tim. So I want to start by saying this toolkit we have released under a Creative Commons license, which means it’s open for you to download and to use. You just can’t charge money for it. We have eight sections in this toolkit and I’m going to walk you through each of the sections. The first section is how PDIA always starts. For those of you who know, PDIA stands for Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation, and we always start with the problem. The first phase is constructing your problem, which is the title of section one. Now what does that mean? Oftentimes when you have a problem, you don’t really create a narrative, right? So you want to really start by asking yourself, what is the problem? Why does it matter? To whom does it matter who needs to care about it? And like, who are the stakeholders that really need to care about this? Because the narrative you create will differ by the different stakeholder that really cares about the problem, because everyone might see the same problem but in different ways. And then you also want to know what does the problem look like solved? So you have a goal towards okay, that’s how do I know I’ve actually achieved where I want to get to? Tim you’ve been working in the field a lot in Albania, Sri Lanka and some of the African countries that we’ve worked in. How do you do this when we are in the field?

Tim McNaught Actually, I was using this exact tool kit last week in helping a group of government officials in constructing their problems. We had six or seven big problems, and one of the key activities that we found was how useful this was is that helps you form it in a way as to why does this problem matter? Because we see sometimes that problems are formed as an absence of solution, or they’re formed in a way where it doesn’t really draw people’s attention. And I feel like this first part of the toolkit was really useful because you keep asking, why does it matter? Why does it matter? And till you get to a point that we really need to solve this problem right away and you need to get the attention of the right people. So we found that it’s a really instructive way, helpful way to frame it so that you’re able to go to your authorizer and really get their support for the problem. And I think that’s always the place where you want to start. You want to start  somewhere where you can motivate people because doing PDIA is hard and you need to be able to inspire a group of people to come around that problem and actually be willing to spend so much time to be working on it.

Salimah Samji So after you do the construction of the problem, you move to section two, which is titled Deconstructing the Problem. And this is where you do a root cause analysis. We use the Ishikawa or Fishbone diagram to do this. And in this case, you ask yourself, what are the causes of your problem? And then you ask a series of why does this happen? Why does this happen? Why does this happen? We say five whys, but you can ask why, until you have no more answers left, and that basically becomes the bones of your fishbone. Generally, when people do this in our online course, these are messy little diagrams. Some people do hand-drawn ones. Some people have links between the causes. What does this look like in a workshop that we’ve done?

Tim McNaught Yeah, I mean, you see all different shapes and sizes of fishbone. I remember I had one student who had his fishbone was so big that they called it the whale bone. Yeah, we see them all different shapes and sizes. And I would say this tool is kind of one of the ones that sticks with people the most when we ask surveys of people and which tool did you find the most useful? A lot of people say that the Fishbone diagram, and I think it’s because it allows you to really visualize the problem and put it into the different root causes, because doing PDIA requires working together in a team and doing a Fishbone activity is a team activity. And sometimes in our workshops, we’ll take, you know, 20 minutes for everyone to take some Post-it notes and just write down all the different causes to the problem that you see. And then we’ll have the team work together to collect those different causes and start organizing them so that you can start seeing the fishbone coming together before your eyes. And it’s a really powerful tool for teams to really come together and see that they’re all on the same page for understanding the problem.

Salimah Samji Great. So after you do the Fishbone diagram, what we find is people say, Oh my God, this is really messy. This isn’t helping me. Because, my problem looks much worse and it’s super complex. How do I know what to do? What do I do? Where do I do it? Etc.. And so section three introduces you to sequencing or our AAA change space analysis.

Tim McNaught And for everyone at home, what are the three A’s?

Salimah Samji So sure, the three A’s are authority, acceptance and ability. So you look at each of your fishponds and you say, How much authority do I have to actually engage? How much acceptance do I have to be able to do anything in this space? How much ability do we have to do anything in this space? And if you have a match of all three, run with your reform. If you don’t have any of the three, then perhaps you want to do something smaller, take smaller steps and build one of them, whether it’s building ability, whether it’s building authority or it’s building acceptance in our online course, Tim, what we found is that most people find the AAA change space analysis a game changer for them because they’ve seen these complex problems and what they realize is they then get stuck and they do nothing. They’re like, okay, since it’s so complex and we don’t even know where to start, we’re just going to do nothing. And what the AAA change space analysis helps them do is, no, you don’t have to do nothing. You can do smaller things and you can first start by building one of the things that you don’t have, whether it’s ability, authority or acceptance. And once you’ve built them, you can take bigger steps to be able to get to your reform that you really want to undertake. How does this play out in a workshop environment?

Tim McNaught Yeah, coming to mind is this one team I was working with from a West African country and their problem was on the lack of infrastructure investment in the country and they had mapped out the one of the key problems was revenue problem, and that was largely driven by the low price of oil. And obviously this was not an area where they would be able to affect they weren’t able to control oil prices in the world. But there were other areas where they said, okay, another part of our fishbone is the budget is getting passed, you know, a few months late every single year, which means that the infrastructure projects are starting later and they’re not being able to get finished during the budget year. And that was an area where they said, you know what, this is something actually we’re working on. This is where we have authority and this is where we can actually start taking action. And that was kind of the way to break down the problem and start working on it. And they had the support from their minister and that was actually the area that they started working. So we had this huge discussion about infrastructure, but in the end it actually came all the way down to there is an area where we can actually make change.

Salimah Samji Great concrete steps of what we can do. That brings us to the next section, which is section four, and it’s titled Crawling the Design Space for Possible Solutions. So once you’ve done that, they change space, announce and you figure out, okay, I can move here, I can do small steps here, the question is, what are you going to do and where do you find what you’re going to do? And that’s what this section is all about. Oftentimes people think that the only place you can find solutions is best practice, and there is a lot of other places, best practices, one of several places that you can find solutions. There is existing practice, right? What’s happening in your country or in your contexts that you can learn from, whether it’s failure, whether it’s success, what does existing practice look like? The second is latent practice. Latent practice, he usually describes it as an orange that the juice is inside and you’re going to get it out of the juice. And the way I like to explain latent practice is there’s people in a system who actually have a solution to the problem, but they, one, don’t have the authority to tell anyone or two even if they voice it, no one is listening to them. And that’s a way of the potential for the solution exists. People have thought about this, but they just haven’t had any authority or ability to be able to do anything about it. And if you tap the idea, it’s kind of wisdom of the crowds, but within your organization who’ve thought about the problem. Is that a helpful explanation?

Tim McNaught Thank you very much.

Salimah Samji Great. The third is called positive deviance. And positive deviance is are they people in your context who’ve already solved this problem? And if they are, learn from what they’ve done because they’ve, in your context, have solved this problem and it may look very different than best practice. And then, of course, the fourth is best practice, right? External best practice. And that’s where you can look for solutions. The next section is section five, and it’s titled Building and Maintaining Authorization. Authorization is something that we find over and over again is people really misunderstand. Oftentimes you might think that authority is really where it’s not. Where does power really sit? It’s not in the title. It might be in Advisor is it might exist in a lot of other places. So trying to understand one, what do you really need to be able to do what you want to do, your time, your effort, other people, other resources? What sort of decision making do you actually need? And then who is your authorizer for each of those things and who else needs to provide authorization and how are you going to get them to support you in this task? Tim when we work in the field, what have we learned about authorization?

Tim McNaught Well, we always try to start somewhere where we believe we have authorization just to get the work started. But often our idea of who has the authority, it changes over time. We realize once we start engaging with the teams that actually it’s this adviser or this minister who actually has the real power and we have to really involve them as well. And you bring up a great point about how it’s not just about having the president or the prime minister’s support. It’s about working with the authorities that you have and having your team start, make some small steps, make some progress, and then start sharing that progress with a wide range of stakeholders. And you kind of have this snowflake model of engaging with more and more people. And by engaging with more and more people, you start gaining a bit more legitimacy and a bit more authority to allow you to start making that next big step. And I think that that’s what we’ve realized is by engaging with more and more people, you start building this coalition that allows you to take next big steps.

Salimah Samji Great. So section six, then, is really the heart of PDIA. It’s designing your first iteration and note it’s first because it’s first of many. What you do is you’ve done your fishbone diagram, you’ve done your Triple-A change space analysis and figured out where you want to move. You’ve looked at the design space to find solutions. You’ve looked at your authorization environment and figured out whose authorization you need to do what. And then you come up with concrete steps that you’re going to take in the next one week or the next two weeks. Our iterations are always short. Sometimes we call them action push periods, and it is because the time period is short. You want something concrete that you’re going to do. What does this look like in the field? Tim We’ve done this 100 times.

Tim McNaught We usually have these two day workshops where you kind of go through all the steps we’ve done so far, but really it’s about identifying what is this team, what are you guys going to do next week? What are you going to do when you get back to work? And and then setting a few mid-term goals about, you know, maybe what you want to achieve in the next month and what would your problem look like when it’s solved and what do you want to achieve in six months? And that kind of gives you some aspirational goals. So it’s all about bringing the team together and having them decide who’s going to be doing what. What are you going to be doing next week? When is this going to be finished? And kind of looking at what are some of the assumptions that you’re making?

Salimah Samji And the assumptions are really important because oftentimes your assumptions are things you think, you don’t know for sure. And so through this process of acting, you’re also testing your assumptions. And as you come back to them, you can then iterate and adapt your assumptions as well. Oh no, actually that assumption was wrong or that assumption was right and you can learn more.

Tim McNaught And the heart of PDIA, it’s really about that learning process is you taking action and then you’re stopping. And learning from your iterations, which is section seven of the toolkit.

Salimah Samji Exactly. Section seven of the toolkit is on learning from your iterations, which essentially is the iteration check in tool. Now, the iteration checking tool is really simple. There are four questions that we usually ask after every iteration. What did we do? What did we learn? What are we struggling with? And what’s next? This is a tool that helps you reflect on what it is that you did. What you’re learning. Testing your assumptions and then adapting and coming up with new action steps. Coming back to check in new action steps until you’ve solved a problem or one area of your fishbone and you can move on to another fishbone area. Tim, do you want to add something about the check in tool and what that looks like in practice with teams?

Tim McNaught Yeah, it’s really about kind of establishing this routine. There’s this time every week or every two weeks where your team comes together and you’re able to reflect on, you know, what did we do? What did we learn? What are we struggling with and what’s next? And the idea is that you’re always working on the problem. And, you know, there will be some weeks where you will say, What do we do? Well, not much. And the reason is because we’re really busy with the budget process that’s happening right now. And and so that’s what you’re struggling with. You’re struggling to get together, but what are you going to do about it? So maybe we’re going to have to find a different time to meet or we’re going to have to assign tasks. Someone’s going to have to cover you for that time period. So to make sure that the team’s work doesn’t stall. But essentially, that’s what it’s all about. It’s kind of keeping momentum with the team and not letting things slip. And the only way you’re going to make progress is by breaking it down to these small, actionable steps and constantly checking in with each other to make sure that things actually keep moving forward.

Salimah Samji Right. And I think one of the things that strikes me about the iteration check ins is the low stakes of failure. Right? Because you’re doing these action steps in a very short time period and you’re actually learning, you’re changing things, you’re adapting things. It’s not that you’ve come up with an action item for one year. At the end of the one year you haven’t done it, then that looks a lot like failure or something that you didn’t achieve. But if it’s one week and you said you were going to do this and it didn’t happen, but you now know why it didn’t happen and you change it so it’s much more low stakes and becomes much more about the learning. The focus is much more about learning and then using that learning in what you’re going to do. It feeds directly into the action items.

Tim McNaught And the idea is, look, you don’t know what the solution is from the beginning. And it’s not about saying this is the solution and this is what we have to do in a month, in the second month, the third month, it’s not just checking boxes. It’s about finding your own solution. And it’s through this emergence of coming together and bringing people together is the way that you’re kind of finding your way in the darkness. And so that’s exactly what we’re trying to do through these questions.

Salimah Samji Absolutely. And we find time and time again whether it might be in the online course or with the teams we work, is that over time, the capability of the team emerges. Answers emerge. Ideas emerge just through the process of following these routines. Our final section, Section eight, is titled Onward.

Tim McNaught And the first sentence of that section is doing PDIA is hard. Why? So what do you think about that?

Salimah Samji I think that’s absolutely true, and that’s why we put that as the first sentence in the final section of this toolkit. We even have a video that is titled PDIA Hard but Worthwhile. PDIA takes a lot of grit. It takes a lot of dedication. There is motivation that is up and is down. There are times and moments you want to hit your head against the wall. But that is all part of PDIA. You just have to keep moving and emergence happens.

Tim McNaught Yeah, exactly. This toolkit is a group of very simple tools, simple but powerful tools. But the only way they become powerful is by really putting in a lot of time and effort and coming together as a team to really work on these problems. And we understand that this is really hard and we’re really proud to have worked with so many amazing colleagues all over the world. And we’ve we’ve heard from other people through PDIA courses, everything they’ve achieved. And what we really hope is that there are more of you out there that are interested in tackling a complex problem and that this toolkit can maybe, you know, help you with that problem. And we’d love to hear from you and let us know how how your your journey of solving your problem goes.

Salimah Samji I think one of the last things that I want to say in this podcast is that the toolkit had to be done in a linear manner with section one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. But PDIA is not linear. It’s a cyclical process. All the tools in here are dynamic. None of them are static. The Fishbone diagram, all of the worksheets, your triple-A change, space analysis, everything changes over time. And we hope that while it is structured linearly, you use it in a cyclical pattern and you keep going back, making edits, changing things as you need. And most of all, we really hope that this is helpful for you and gives you ways a how-to kit essentially, on solving your complex problems. And we really hope that you share what you’re learning, how you’re using it back with us, because I think we’d really love to hear your stories.

Tim McNaught Exactly. So if this sounds like something you’re interested in, you can download the PDIAToolkit at our website, The Building State Capability website at bsc.cid.harvard.edu You’ll see toolkit at the top of the page. So download it, share it with your friends and keep in touch.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette To learn more about the building state capability programs PDA Toolkit, visit bsc.cid.harvard.edu/PDIAtoolkit