We are offering Leading Economic Growth online again from October 4 – December 10th 2021. Application deadline is September 13th, 2021. Stimulating growth is the top economic priority for many countries and localities around the world. Yet many are trapped, lacking the productive capability to solve problems and expand to new industries to drive development. New…Continue Reading Apply for our Leading Economic Growth Program Now!
written by Salimah Samji Solving public problems is a hard and thankless job. One that is undertaken with a shortage of time as well as resources, and often under pressure to deliver results. A common approach used to solve public problems is to develop a plan, sometimes with experts, and then to assume that implementation…Continue Reading Building a Movement of Public Problem Solvers
written by Salimah Samji 2020 was a challenging year. The Covid-19 pandemic and other crises highlighted the failures of governance and the large economic disparities that exist around the globe. The need to build public sector capability to meet these increasingly complex challenges has never been greater. Our response to these challenges included convening and training policymakers, as well as practitioners, around critical issues of leading through crises, implementing public policies, inclusive growth, and…Continue Reading BSC 2020: The Year in Review
written by Salimah Samji In March 2020, Harvard University decided to move all classes to online-only, in an effort to de-densify our campus and to slow the spread of COVID-19. It soon became clear that remote learning was going to be our new normal. At the time, Leading Economic Growth, a longstanding 5-day residential executive education…Continue Reading Leading Economic Growth 2020: Moving Executive Education Online during a Pandemic
Governments across the world are facing a major budgeting crisis in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis raises important questions: All of these questions, and more, need to be addressed in the few months governments have left to develop their 2021 budgets. However, many of the processes and approaches to budgeting do not…Continue Reading New Online Program: Budgeting in a Time of Crisis
written by Salimah Samji Reflection is a key part of the PDIA iteration process and as I have done in previous years (2017 & 2018) here’s a look back at what we @HarvardBSC achieved in 2019. Some highlights of the year include: training and engaging with 740 practitioners around the globe (incl. degree programs, executive education,…Continue Reading BSC 2019: The Year in Review
written by Salimah Samji One of the core values of the Building State Capability (BSC) program is to make our tools and approach publicly available for use by development practitioners who are in the weeds of implementing public policies and programs. In the same vein, we have: Enabled an open access title of our Building…Continue Reading Introducing our new Practice of PDIA Podcast Series
At Building State Capability, we are excited to see the PDIA methodology being tested and adapted in many countries around the world. In order to make our videos and materials more accessible, we have started translating them into other languages, most recently in Spanish. In January this year, we were approached by a former HKS student,…Continue Reading PDIAtoolkit now available in Spanish!
written by Salimah Samji It’s February and 2018 feels like a long time ago! Last year, I wrote my first annual stock taking blog and I’ve been meaning to write a follow up since early January, but 2019 has been off to an incredibly busy start. As you may know, we are small team of…Continue Reading 10 new things we did in 2018
written by Salimah Samji In 2009, we began to explore how to do PDIA in the real world. Our early engagements helped us learn, develop and refine our tools – some of our key ideas (problem construction, problem driven convening, problem deconstruction, sequencing, action pushes etc.) emerged from this process. In 2012, the Building State…Continue Reading Introducing the PDIA Toolkit
