How Do You Mobilize Political Elites and Citizens

Salimah Samji Thanks, Peter. So we, as we, our faculty Lant, Matt, and Michael Woolcock have been traveling the world and they’ve been doing this for the last four years talking about PDIA. The amount of demand that they’ve generated has just been tremendous. And they do a lot of executive education courses for public leaders at the Kennedy School at Harvard. And at the end of almost every single course they teach, government officials, people come to them and say, Can you come to my country tomorrow? We need you, like, we need PDIA. Can you teach us this? And you can understand that we just don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do all of these things. And so as we try to experiment with high touch, medium touch, low touch engagements, we’ve always had this idea at the back of our head is, could we teach this as an online course? Could it even work? And given that we really do believe in PDIA, we thought about PDIAing a PDIA course and let’s do it, let’s try it and let’s see what happens. And so we offered our first PDIA online course for free on November 8th last year. And the way the process we went around doing that is we had a series of 60 short videos, 3 to 5 minutes that has either Matt Lant or Michael talking and explaining different aspects of PDIA and how they all fit together. So we developed modules where each module would have videos, so there would be a video lecture. This is an asynchronous course, so there was weekly homework that was due. Natalia took the course. She was one of the one of our experimenter who completed. And so you had to do weekly homework. And as long as you got that done by Saturday night, it didn’t matter when you did it. So you would have the video modules and then you would have reading assignments and then we’d have two assignments. We had an assignment that would actually test whether you got what we were trying to teach you. And then there was the second assignment, which we called a reflection exercise, because we thought it’s one thing to test whether you’re actually learning what we’re trying to teach you. But we we’d like to see how you can apply what we’re teaching in your own life. And so you’d have to write a reflection exercise about how you saw whether it was isomorphic mimicry that we talked about, whatever concept we talked about, how do you see it playing out in your own life? And that was a reflection exercise which we then had peer reviewed. So each student would actually read somebody else’s reflection and comment on. Now, when we designed even the assignments, we had a lot of advice from Harvard X and all of these guys who do MOOCs who are saying multiple choice is the only way because you can’t grade text answers. And Lant, Matt and I felt very strongly that that was not what we wanted, because in multiple choice, you don’t understand. If we were going to teach PDIA, we needed to know that they understood the concept, otherwise it was pointless. And multiple choice doesn’t get to the nuances that you understand. And so we took a chance, and I remember the conversation that we had and we said, success to us is 50 people signing up for this course. That would really be great. When we when we signed it, when we had like registration open, 700 people registered for the course, 500 logged into the website. There’s always attrition with MOOCs. And out of the 500, 293 finished the first week’s homework. That’s 5 to 8 hours of effort that they put in the first week doing our homework. From 293, six weeks later, 240, which is an unbelievable retention rate for an online course completed the course. They did not pay a penny for their certificate, but they stayed engaged because clearly they found some value in what it is that we were teaching. Our question was, can we, so we had several questions when we did this, can we teach something like this? Can they learn and what can we learn from this process and what would we change? So we did the first thing. Conventional wisdom for MOOCs told us that you can’t have a long course. We wanted to do a 12 week course, and so we split it into two parts and we said, okay, fine. If that’s the conventional wisdom, we’ll split into two parts and have one part of six weeks and another one of eight weeks or six weeks. And what we found is you lose momentum. And I will tell you that we ended the course December 19th. So 240 people from around the world through like Christmas vacation, etc., did all of their homework. I remember Matt coming to me saying, how many people have done their homework? How many people submitted their homework? And we continued to be just shocked. Like what? Like don’t they have jobs? Like, why are they doing this? But it was it was just tremendous for us to see. And so what we realized is when you split courses into parts, you lose momentum, you lose people. And we lost people from our 244, the part two of the course. The other thing that we learned is. Our course is split between, like the books, the PDIA book, which comes out in January. The course was structured very much around the book, which has a conceptual part, and then it has a practical part of how you actually do PDIA. So our expectation was you bring your problem to the table and we will give you our tools. And through the course you will work through your problem using our tools. And that was the practical part. And Matt’s question was always like, How can we coexist conceptual and practical? Do we have enough people who can do both? And it was a good testing ground for us. And what we found is from our first pilot is the types of people who sit at the headquarters and the donor types, etc., really struggled with the practical part because they had no understanding of authorization environment. They couldn’t do the homework on working through the problem and deconstructing it and looking for change space. We have like we have this our fishbone diagram, which we then deconstruct and then we have a tool called the change space analysis, which we use to identify. Okay, so here’s my, here’s my problem broken down. How do I know where I should actually enter from? And how do I find my entry point? And we found that they really struggled. And we found out later on that some of them actually did the whole problem statement on a retrospective problem, and some of them actually just made up a problem. However, the people who are in the field who had real problems did tremendous exercises. We looked at some of those fishbone diagrams and we were blown away. There was this one student in Kenya who wrote to me, so problems we did in four modules because that’s how important breaking down and understanding your problem is. We spent four out of 12 weeks on just breaking down problems and there was this one student in Kenya who sent me an email and said, Hey, you know, it’s week three and I just understood that this is so valuable. Can I change the problem I’ve been working on? Because I’m really working on how we dispose urban waste in Kenya. And I would love to do this. And I said, sure, just redo your homework for the past two weeks. And he was totally willing. He’s like, Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for letting me continue this. And I’m thinking, Really, don’t you have other job? But they clearly saw tons of value in being able to do this. We had other students coming back to us and saying, Oh, I want to do can I use the videos to do a training in my office? And we’re like, Sure, they’re out as Creative Commons. They have a Creative Commons license. Do with it what you want. If you find it useful, do it. And some of our exercises, especially with breaking down the fishbone, their assignment was to ask someone else that they work with to do the same exercise, and they could compare and contrast fishbone diagrams. And the learnings they had in terms of everybody has a different perspective and that you you learn so much more from teams and understanding teams. So it was really we learn a lot from that. So our learning in terms of there’s two types of audiences like the donor type and then the implementer type led to our second iteration, which we started in March of this year. We offer two courses. We offered a short eight week course and a 12 week course. The 12 week course was for implementers, and we market it as if you have a problem that you really want to work on and you’re in the field and you can do something about it. You take the 12 week course if you just want to understand what PDIA is, etc., then you take the eight week course. And that kind of helped us in terms of breaking out our audiences. But what we what we also learned is that PDIA is really effective when you have a group of people doing it together, which is kind of how we work in-country. And so our next iteration, which will likely be in in next year, early next year, we haven’t set dates yet are entry. They’re free, our courses are always free and we’ve decided that that is always what we would like to do. We would like to offer our PDIA courses for free, but our enrollment will be you need to be a group and you need to tell us the problem that you’re going to work on. Because some of the problems that people we’re working on, like I said, they made up others were, you know, you’d have some priest working on some other random problem and we thought this would be much more effective and we don’t really care to work with hundreds of people, even if we have smaller groups of people. But people who are actually working on a problem that’s real, we could probably have more change. So in the end, in all of the three versions of the courses that we have, two parts for the first pilot, which Natalia took and then two other versions of principles course and a practice course. We had 356 graduates from 56 countries. That’s 34 weeks of instruction, and everyone spent an average of 5 to 8 hours of per week on doing this. And we’re really excited. And what was tremendous for us is seeing the aha moments and we haven’t met many of those students and being able to be from foreign looking at their homework and what. Seeing them struggle. We have this great video that Lant has done. You can’t juggle without the struggle. And it was amazing to see them struggling through the problem until they got to the change space analysis and say, oh, my God, I thought I could never, ever do this. This was so intractable. But there is something I can do. I can actually increase authority, I can increase ability, I can increase acceptance. And it was just really it was really incredible for all of us sitting so far back, but watching the students learn and joining their we were literally on their learning journey because we have like we’ve PDIAed the course. That’s about it.

Jonida Pone Hello, I’m Jonida Pone and currently working at the Ministry of Urban Development in Albania. One of the priorities of the Albanian government in the field of social housing is a promotion of public private partnerships in order to ensure affordable and yet better quality of housing. In this regard, an important initiative taken by the Ministry of Urban Development is to provide low cost housing for vulnerable groups while using BPP schemes, an initiative which has not been implemented before in Albania. The ministry is working on different approaches to create and find out new and creative models that lead to find a sustainable long term solution for social housing by revitalizing internal surfaces, reduction of construction costs, ensuring energy efficiency and conservation. While it is beyond any doubt that the ideas of sustainable and livable housing requires an integrated decision making framework and a fundamental shift from traditional approaches. The current situation has deep roots and is strongly correlated with the past. As Albania moved in 1992 to the market economy for the first time after having closed economy for quite 45 years, inheriting so many problems, especially problems relating with land property issues. Other problems were territorial division, informality, spatial disparities, legislation, incompatibility, lack of know how, and engaging with foreign investors. Therefore, the past has strongly, strongly affected and influenced foreign investors. Climate and thorough analysis and research is necessary to clear that out. What are the weaknesses and threats for investors engagement nowadays? In this aspect, there was a need to change the focus from corrective measures towards measures based on dissipation and prevention. Housing is one of the strategic priorities of the government of Albania. It is also a basic need of an individual as it affects the physical and psychological well-being of an individual in the public health, in the implementation of the employment policies, maintaining public order and security, and therefore is essential in creating sustainable communities. Housing is also a sector that affects the economic development and increase of the investments. With respect to housing, the main challenges are the need to ensure that a large proportion of the Albanian population has access to affordable housing and do not suffer from housing exclusion due to vulnerability factors. So what have we done in this aspect? About a year ago, a team from Minister of Urban Development joined the Harvard Launchpad PDIA program, along with other entities across the government to address and find a plot a plausible solution for this important initiative. When we started out, the aim of the project was to construct 550 residential buildings in Tirana at an area called [unknown] in Albania, which is located in the most northern eastern part of the Albanian territory and has a surface area of 16,470 meter squares. And we want to offer optimal housing conditions while being affordable for citizens with low and middle income. That’s all we knew when the project started and we wanted to build this using the PPP schemes. During the coursework because our group work with Harvard launchpad program, we gained ownership of land. The land was transferred from the Ministry of Urban Development, from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Urban Development in order to create and define plausible solution for social housing buildings. So during the coursework, several site visits were conducted to the site by the group for a visual evaluation of the area’s physical and social conditions. A survey by the group was also conducted to evaluate the social fabric of the neighborhood and including here the provision of certain basic services area that has to offer. After the site visit and gaining framework by which the project this project should be guided, a set of principles were then identified by the group and these principles were always correlated and in collaboration with the Harvard team, such as priority to energy efficiency, social inclusion, public participation, and environmental friendliness. This, in turn, gave the group a direction in identifying the stakeholders that have been taken into consideration in order for this project to be successful. So during the first part of the group, during the six months course work that we did with the Harvard team, we were able the group was able to design and cost the project. This gave us a better idea of how this going to look like. Between the cooperation among the two institutions turned out to be very fruitful because during the first phase of this project, we tackled many issues such as legislation gaps, which in Albania is a very, very important thing because the legislation itself has a lot of gaps. I’m sure other countries does too, but and it leaves a lot of room for interpretation and some parts don’t even have legislation. So because Albania is developing right now, so we’re trying to figure out different ways of of making this project work. We also did on team building of all of us, work together to get this project going and get this started. We cooperated with Adeline Ministries because Adeline ministers, because this is a project that affects not only the Ministry of Urban Development, affects the municipalities as well. It affects other ministries, other line ministries that can help with or with funding or the PPP schemes. We analyzed data from our survey that we gather information as far as social or physical in analyzing of the data. We dabbed a lot on the lid on marketing and finding investors. So during the first part of this project, the first six months, we work with a Harvard team. We now we’re proud owners of the land or Ministry of Urban Development is proud owners of 16,470 meters squares where we want to build social housing using PPP schemes. What are we doing next? We haven’t left it to that. We’re following through with the Harvard team going through and engaging, looking more into marketing and how to engage investors, potential investors. Investor engagement is very important process. It’s all about a total interaction with foreign investors in understanding what they’re interested and what they don’t like. Why they should invest with. Will investment be feasible and profitable at all? What are the risks and how to mitigate those risks? How to make the investor decide to come. But also keeping at the same time all the standards are non-negotiable, such as environmental quality, spatial conditions and citizens right to proper housing standards. So evaluating or tackling problems such as marketing and how to engage while still looking at PPP schemes. This is our next steps into with along with the Harvard team and hopefully we’ll have the construction operation phases of this project further on down the line. And we hope the project going to be implemented. Actual housing and obviously there’s this other services that are needed for the neighborhood and to have a better neighborhood for the Albanian citizen population. Thank you.