Implementation Doesn’t Happen by Edict

Amber Thacher Thank you for joining today’s session: Implementation Doesn’t Happen by Edict, conversation with program alumni. We’re going to start off by introducing everybody who is joining us today. I want to thank everybody, all of our panelists especially, for joining us from around the world as well. This webinar is presented by Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education and the Building State Capability Program at the Harvard Center for International Development. All right, to start us off, I’m going to introduce myself. I’m Amber Thacher. I’m the Senior Director in Executive Education. I have worked in executive education for nine years and was the program director. Of implementing public policy when we launched this program in 2019. I worked very closely with Matt and Salimah and both of our teams to get this incredible program off the ground and have been thrilled to watch it flourish and see the community it’s built over the years. Salimah Samji is the Director of Harvard’s Building State Capability Program at the Center for International Development. Salimah works very closely with Matt Andrews, who is the faculty chair of both the Building State Capability Program and the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program. Their research at BSC is centered around strategies and tactics to build the capability of public organizations to implement policies and programs. Salimah will talk later in the session about the impetus for the executive education. Next up, I’d like to introduce our alumni panelists. Agustin Filippo is a lead economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. Since 2019, he lives and works in Mexico with responsibilities in economic risk analysis, applied research in real and monetary economics, and policy dialogue. He worked with other LAC countries prior to this assignment and lived in Argentina, Brazil, France, Uruguay, and the USA. He studied in Paris and in Buenos Aires and holds a doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires. He completed the IPP program in 2022. Jori Zeneli has 15 years experience working for international and domestic organizations on the design and delivery of public services. Originally from Albania and based in Australia, her experience spans across different portfolios in federal and state agencies, specializing in investment, social determinants of health. Governance, risk management, fraud and corruption, and monitoring and evaluation. She is the co-founder and CEO of the BeWell Hub, a startup company that supports employee wellbeing. She completed the IPP program in the inaugural year of 2019. Shanequa Moore is a thought leader, speaker, and nonprofit expert. Who has committed her career to transform the lives of vulnerable children and families through reshaping and restructuring governmental systems and education and child welfare. As CEO and founder of the New York City-based community organization, I’RAISE Girls & Boys International, her work has impacted more than 30,000 vulnerable children in New York city and beyond. In an effort to address the New York State School mental health crisis in 2014, Ms. Moore designed the School Mental Health Program, which has become a model during the COVID-19 pandemic in reshaping mental health services in New York City schools. She completed the IPP program in 2022. Again, I’d like to really thank our panelists for being here with us today. As I mentioned, they are from around the globe. And as you heard in their bios have very diverse experiences and have very diverse experiences in attending the Implementing Public Policy program. So we really appreciate you all being with us and sharing your experience with our attendees today. So I want to start off by just hearing from you all about your experience in the program, implementing public policy as you’ll hear later. In our session was designed for a very specific reason and is really applicable to people in various sectors and various areas of importance for implementing public policy or just implementation challenges that people are facing around the world. So I want to hear from you all about why you chose this program. And a couple highlights from your experience. So I’m gonna start by turning it over to Agustin if you could share your thoughts with us.

Agustin Filippo Thank you, Amber. Hello, everyone. So I work in international development, and I participate in policy design and implementation in different roles. And I came to this course for the reveal, right, how to implement public policy or how to do it better than what we are currently doing, right? There was a sense that… We can do better, policy makers can do better. So I came for the ideas and on this course. And I have to say I found quite a few. So if I have to choose, then a couple highlights about the course and share with the people here, I would say, okay, first, there are plenty of technical, very concrete and practical tips and strategies as to how to go about designing and implementing public policy in ways that is probably not the ways, are not the ways that international organizations or even governments are using. I mean, it’s designing in a slightly different way. So that’s a very important part of, and I think an important highlight of this program, Right, you get out of it with concrete guidelines as to how to go about designing and implementing public policy. But that’s not it. And it’s not all of it, actually. And equally important, I would say, to my surprise, are all the, is all the knowledge, the information, and again, the practical experience shared with us in the course about how to understand and navigate people and organizations, right? Depending on where you are in your own organization, you may deal with technical issues or you may be more involved in leadership roles. So here you have a blend of both, but I was positively surprised by the information and experience I got from how to navigate people in an organization. So those will be my two highlights.

Amber Thacher Would help if I unmuted myself. Jori, thank you, Agustin, for sharing. Jori what are your thoughts on this?

Jorida Zeneli Hi, everyone. I welcome and thank you, Amber and Salimah and everyone else for joining this. I would love the opportunity to support potential candidates into this amazing program. And before I start, I’d like to acknowledge the Cammeraygal people of the Guringai tribe of the Eora Nation. They are the traditional owners and the custodians of the land I’m joining you from today. And I’d to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. May we continue to love and respect the lands as they have. So what are the highlights of this program? There is a long list, but I’ll try to focus on just a couple. Just for a bit of context, when I joined the program, I was associate director in the financial management policy team at New South Wales Treasury here in New South Wales in Australia. And I had just released a very important policy. I had done a lot of work to streamline investment requirements and basically needed some knowledge on how to support effective implementation. And in general, what I had noticed, not just necessarily within these organizations, but in the duration of my entire period in government is that we work in this black box, we design these policies, and then we’re like consulting them, and then, we go back to the black box. And then, we design some more, and we’re, like, go to the world, and be effective and impactful, and then wonder where did things go wrong. So in general, what I had noticed is that, uh, implementation is indeed the poor brother of strategy and policy design. And I was like, there’s got to be a different way. And I really cared about this work that I had done, and I really wanted to do a good job implementing it effectively. So I was looking for a course that offers this and I literally stumbled across the course. And I have to say… It was the best coincidence that could ever happen to me because what I was hoping to get is learning and gain all this knowledge, et cetera, which I did, and it was amazing. But what I also got is perhaps something that is valuable to a much larger extent, which is an amazing community of practice. Meeting the lecturers, the people in the program, Salimah, Matt, Amber, Anisha, Rob, you name them, and all the peers in this program, a fantastic people, high caliber of expertise. And they’ve been an important factor that has helped me in my work. And beyond that, the learning of course was about different methods on how to implement public policy, more the standard methods, which are the plan and control. And of course, the gem was this idea of facilitated emergence, this problem-driven iterative adaptation. Which is particularly important for complex problem solving. So when you work with a high degree of uncertainty, which in general, most complex problems or wicked problems, as policy wonks call them, deal with. So yeah, I think these two were perhaps the biggest highlight. And I’ve implemented. Most of the methods which are incredibly hands-on throughout my work beyond that.

Amber Thacher Thank you, Jori. Shanequa, do you want to share your thoughts?

Shanequa Moore Absolutely, and thank you so much and welcome everyone. Thank you all for being here. So echoing some of the sentiments of my colleagues here, when I started or when I originally applied for the IPP program, I was looking to really move the needle forward in my industry and to paint some context. I run and operate a CBO, a community-based organization that’s based in New York City. And we work directly with elected officials to shape policy on a myriad of levels. And one of the major policies that I have been working on is how do we work with the city of New York and the state of New york to implement a model to support kids’ mental health? And there was so much uncertainty when I started the IPP program, just not knowing where to start and how to begin. But I think there was a lot of substance that I got from the program. I think one of the major things was a paradigm shift. When I first started the program, I thought I sort of knew what to expect. I came with a strategic plan that I thought was going to work and I was told to essentially throw it away. And that for me was one of my defining moments that I was getting ready to essentially adopt a whole new paradigm. And I think that’s what IPP was for me. It was a paradigm shift in how policy is done and how to work with people and how work on teams. The second for me was really the experts that were in the room, which were my colleagues, being able to learn from people around the world, other policy professionals that were in various industries, it really added to a meaningful and impactful experience. We have a cohort that is very connected and very bonded. We share stories throughout the days, the weeks about what’s going on. Not just in our professional world but our personal world and I think that is really important and something that was a highlight and is a highlight for me. So I would say those two things resulting in a paradigm shift in the way that I do policy and also having a new family that really are policymakers around the world.

Amber Thacher Thank you. I’m glad you touched on that too. I think Salimah and I would both echo everything all of you have said, but I think that community that is built through this program that lives on beyond the end of the program is extra special and she and I stay in touch with it. And I think we get energized as well and supported as well in our work from all of you. So thank you so much for addressing that. I want to next talk about the format of the program. So I’m going to share my screen again, just to give a little visual. It is something that is very, well, it’s unique to Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education. And we launched this program in 2019, and thought our online presence was something that we were venturing into a little, did we know, a year later. We would all be online doing a lot of different things. But we are back to the blended format, which I think everybody appreciates and is excited for. So I just want to talk a little bit about how this program actually functions and then I’ll turn it over to the alumni to get their take on their experience doing something in this format and how they integrated it into their lives, both personally and professionally. So the way the implementing public policy program is set up is a blended program that runs from May until December, which is a lot of time and seems like a lot of time, but it’s broken it up into different phases. So the first month is online. People can expect to do two to three online, what we call asynchronous modules, where you’re doing some reading, you’re watching some videos, you’re listening to some podcasts, a lot of different modalities thrown in there. There’s a couple of assignments during that time. And then, there’s a few live sessions that happen where you come together with the faculty and with the rest of the program participants both in a peer learning group setting and a full class setting, but that’s all done virtually. The focus of this one month online period is really on implementation challenge. So everybody comes to this program with an implementation challenge, which Salimah and the alumni will talk about later on. But that one month period is really focused on honing in on what that challenge is. Then in June, you come to campus for a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Harvard Kennedy School campus, which is always a good time. You get to meet the people that you’ve seen online for the past month and have class sessions together. It’s a very intensive week, but really built around having you focus on the learning, the tools, the frameworks. You have class sessions, three to four class sessions a day with various faculty who teach in our program and are focused on different aspects of policy implementation, or leadership, or teamwork. All the different things that Salimah will talk about that are covered in the program. I would say that the week on campus is very stimulating, engaging. People often comment that they’re excited to be a student again, to be back in a classroom setting, but it is an intensive week for sure. Once you leave campus, the program doesn’t stop. There’s five more months to go, and that is all done online as well. So that, again, is what we call the action learning phase. That is when you are really applying what you’ve learned in the classroom to your work and to your implementation challenge. It’s similar to the first month where there are asynchronous modules on a monthly basis. Again, reading, podcast videos, and then live sessions each month that you come together with the class and your peer learning group. As we talked about, the program really ends in December, but the experience doesn’t. After completing the program, all participants are now members of the implementing public policy community of practice. And as Shanequa and others have described, that is really a robust network of policy professionals who have all gone through the program and are there to continue learning to continue supporting one another. It’s run by a group of moderators that are program alumni. Shanequa was actually one of our moderators right now. I think Jori has been a moderator in the past. So it’s really driven by the alumni, which makes it even more special and keeps everybody connected. So I want to turn it over to the alums just to get your perspective on this model and how you found the experience. Dovetailing both online asynchronous in-person work and how you incorporated and managed seven months of program commitment into your both professional and personal lives. So I’m going to go backwards this time if that’s okay. And we can start with Shanequa. Shanequa, do you want to share your thoughts?

Shanequa Moore Yeah, I was I was like thinking back to what it was like when when I first started I think online we’ve when just looking at let me look at the screen one more oh you put this slide down that first month when you’re online I think is just sort of getting you very introductory getting you sort of acclimated to the material into the curriculum and to essentially what the rest of the program is going to be. I love the first month because it was sort of a light touch a light dive. But when you get on campus, I think that’s where the intensity starts to build up. And for me, and I think for a lot of my classmates and my colleagues, that was the part that was most meaningful because we got a lot of in-person interaction. The activities were very intentional. Even the pace of the material was very strategic. There was a lot information and a lot of times we felt a little overwhelmed in full transparency. But it was intentional. It was strategic. And so I really enjoyed the activities that involved around peers, that evolved around our challenge. I think that week was something that gave us essentially a toolbox. And we got a lot of tools that week that we essentially were able to take and now start to utilize in our work. Following the on campus part, That’s when the real work started. And so I think for many people, we were like, well, where do we start? But what I love about IPP is that it really gave us a step-by-step process. And it was very different for everyone based on whatever policy challenge you’re working on. You’ll really get something that’s really customized and meaningful to your policy challenge. And so, I was able to take the tools inside of my toolbox. And essentially start using it. And sometimes it’s confusing because you’re like, well, I have all these tools, so which one do I pull out? What I love about the program is you get to learn which tools do I use for which problem I’m facing within this implementation, right? So you’re prepared for a myriad of challenges that may arise off campus when you’re now back into the real world. You’re prepared to pull out different tools and you essentially begin to learn what those tools will be. And so I found it very, very useful to take the material and really implement it in my work. I thought it was going to be difficult and there were some challenges, but I think what helped me was that it was interwoven into my place of work. Well, my staff didn’t really have an option. They had to take the material, but I was able to take their material, bring it back to my team and we really digested. We really began to work. Strategically with what we had based on what I received from the IPP course. And what I also loved is that not only did I take the material to my place of work, but I took it to other places of work within the city of New York. We brought the material, to the mayor, to different commissioners, to different organizations. And they were able to take this material and also adopt it. And so it allowed people that never came together in government to come to the table and begin to talk to each other. And I really, really did see a lot of transformation within my work, I wanna say within maybe 60 days. So the material, it works, the tools, they really do work, but you have to be committed to the work. You have to committed to process. And if you are, if you have that commitment, I think you really will see some level of transformation in your work. It also allowed me to start seeing the needle moving forward. When I first started IPP, I was in a place where I felt like I was hitting a roadblock. But when I took that material, brought it back to my place of work, I began to see change and I began to see that needle moving forward for me. And so I’m really grateful. I think the material, the pace, the curriculum, everything blended extremely well and what also helped was having that community of practice. So when you’re when you feel stuck in your work and sometimes you feel like maybe you’re the only one that understands this, you can go back to your community of practices. You can ask questions to your colleagues. You could learn from them and I think that’s really helpful and implementing your policy challenge. So that was my experience.

Amber Thacher Thank you, Shanequa. Jori, do you want to share your experience, especially given your time difference on the channel?

Jorida Zeneli Um, I, um, thanks so much, Shanequa. And without wanting to, um repeat some of the aspects, I actually chose this program because it was over seven months. So for me, um this was the only way. And because it blended, cause I have two young kids and, um, it’s not possible for me to leave Australia for a longer period of time. Um, however, I think for something to really stick for it to become a habit and so on without wanting to like bed mouth other amazing programs at Harvard. But I feel for me it does need to extend over a period of time and seven months sounded to me perfect. So you have this period of like intensive learning and faculty interactions at the beginning and then you have the week in Harvard where you get to know your peers and this full immersion week where… Literally, I think no one that I know, including myself, didn’t experience fear of missing out. I think I hardly ever slept in that week. And thankfully, it was not longer because it wouldn’t have been sustainable. But because all these conversations and all these… lectures, and all these interactions were so interesting. Everyone is working on such interesting stuff. So you are literally learning also what else is going on in the world. What’s in every corner of the world, literally, and both in the public and in the private sector, because we in our cohort, we also had people from the private and non-for-profit sector. So that is gold and and then In that week we were assigned to different groups of people. That was really such an interesting way to build up something that’s then going to sustain you for the future. Because even, so we started working in these groups, in these smaller groups on case studies. And so applying literally what we had learned the day before. And then slowly towards the end, we’re like, okay, so now we all have our individual challenges and this is gonna be my group and this group is gonna support me implement, you know, these challenges when I go back home. And so after that, that sort of relationship was intense. It was moderated by Anisha, brilliantly done so. And it was weekly, basically, touch points with these people, delving from whatever corner of the world, which was great. And What else did I want to say for me didn’t feel like it was, you know, overburdening me because you could choose a challenge from your own work from your own area of work. So for me, it was like, Okay, great. I’m doing work. I am thinking deeper about this work. I’m actually elevating this work, I’m pitching this work to authorizers. So basically, it’s your work. And The good thing about the work or the challenge that I had chosen is that it didn’t have any urgency, so it allowed me to stretch it over a period of time and really integrate all the learnings. I had a lot of time to iterate and experiment, which made this work really, really fun. And yeah, I think this is me. Yeah, with regards to the group, I also wanted to say that… Every time I wanted to pull the plug out of something, they were like, that’s not you. Don’t do it. And on the other hand, every time I was experiencing some win or gaining momentum, they were, like, yes, you’re biggest cheerleaders. And when do you have that? Like, um. And the entire method is like, you literally don’t experience much defeat or failure. Like we hate that in the public sector. We are so risk averse, uh, you know, because you have all these entry points into this complex problem that you are trying to solve, you’re like, Oh, okay. I’m going to park this because it doesn’t look like this entry point is working and I’m gonna. To tackle this problem from a different angle. Let me try this for a period of time and then go back to that. So yeah, it made work so much more fun.

Amber Thacher That’s great. Thanks for making work fun is always a good thing. Agustin, do you want to share your thoughts?

Agustin Filippo Yeah, so for me, after completing the course, the program, in my opinion, you cannot do this program any other way, right? If you believe you can learn this stuff and learn how to put this in practice with a one-week course, I think you’re fooling yourself, right. So for me it’s a necessity. That’s my first point. My second point is when I was facing the program, should I take the challenge or not? And I talked to colleagues, some of them didn’t wanna take the course because of the seven month commitment. And I did it, right? However, I think the way you look at this from before enrolling and before completing the program is like, okay, this is going to be like going back to school and it’s going back to school for seven months. So I’ll be reading for seven months and next year, I’ll doing something with the human capital I’ve accumulated in this seven month course. But it’s completely different than what I’ve just described, right? It’s not that you’re gonna be reading for seven month and then the year after you’re going to be doing stuff, right. It’s a very practical day to day. Your work is your course load and your readings are going to help in your afternoon video conference. It’s not something you read and forget, and five years later, some will say, oh, you should have used this. No, no, it’s what you read in the morning, you’re going to be using in the afternoon. So it’s very, very practical. Shanequa and Jorda already touched on what you do in the first month, the online, the on campus and afterwards. But I wanna go back to everything that happens after campus, right? So it five months in which what you have is the most talented people you could ever think of, right there to help you with your struggles, right. So you’re doing progress in your work. In your work, like you’re paid for your work whatever you are, right, and things not normally don’t go as expected, right. So on a weekly, monthly basis you get back to faculty and peers and you share your problems and they give you the most useful advice you would ever have, Right. So it’s completely the opposite of what people may think of when they start. It’s not something that’s subtract from your work. So you have to budget the time to do this. It adds to your work, so you can do more if you are in the course than if you’re doing your regular stuff, right? And lastly, for those of you who work in an organization, like I do, like you probably have year-long plans, goals and development goals, personal development goals. And you have to write up and be assessed on how useful you were to your organization in the 12 months prior. You have a bunch of stuff to show of how you’ve done things differently by being enrolled in this course. So again, this doesn’t subtract from your day-to-day activities. It actually provides and adds up to whatever you are, and improve the quality of your work, and it shows, and you’d be rewarded for that. That’s my message about the seven-month time commitment.

Amber Thacher Thank you Agustin. All right, so I want to turn it over to Salimah now to talk more about why we designed this program, what the need was, and what is covered in the program. So Salimah over to you.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you, Amber. Welcome, everyone. I’m just really delighted that you’ve decided to join and learn more about our Implementing Public Policy program. So as you’ve already heard, we started in 2019 in the last four years, we have 294 alumni from 71 countries who’ve completed the seven month program and they’re all part of our community of practice and we’re really delighted that we have with us today, a current moderator, Shanequa, and an older moderator, Jori, who are here, who can speak both about being moderators of our community and also being participants in our program. And from our first and last year, we ran 2020 and 2021 virtual because Harvard was remote. But 2019 and 2022, we ran this blended version where you start online and then you come to Harvard and then we continue online. Now, why did we create this program? And it was very, very different and still remains a very different type of program even within the Kennedy School, a very unique program. And a lot of it comes from our experience working in development. And what we saw very often is that people come up with great plans, but they don’t get implemented. They don’t solve problems. And sometimes the plan itself is too simplistic for a complex problem. And in the world of complex problems, you need a different approach that actually allows a lot more learning where there’s a lot of unknowns. You really have to spend time to reflect, to learn more about the unknowns and then to adapt and to iterate. So different approaches are required for the different types of problems. But what we find often is that there is the same plan and control type of approach that gets used for any kind of problem. When the management method should be something slightly different. And so what we decided to do is create a new program where we can train people to learn these new approaches to working on complex problems. But I really am happy to hear what Agustin said that you can’t do it any other way. And it’s true, you can learn, we already have this experience. And in fact, the program that I am the director of is called Building State Capability. And the reason why we use the word capability is because the word capacity means one work training, which oftentimes doesn’t lead to much change. You can be wowed. You can’t be excited. But the problem with the one week course is you are the one who’s transformed. And then you go back to your system, your organization that did not get your training and did not change. And then it’s you fighting against this huge mountain. And it’s really, really hard to be able to do that. And so… From our own experience, it’s about building the capability. And the way we want to do that is empower you to learn while you go back. And so creating this long program where the first part, including the part that you come to Harvard, is learning the tools. And then when you go home, I also liked how Shanequa said that’s when the real work happens. That’s right. The real work happened when you go back home and you start to implement this. You start to build a team. That’s gonna help you, you start to build coalitions, you start really better understand, have you really understood the problem correctly? Who do you need to be on your team? So we teach a lot, as you see on this slide, the problem-driven iterative adaptation is the approach that we teach. And this really has a lot to do with how do you work with the problem? How do you identify a problem? How do you deconstruct it to find out what the root causes are? Because oftentimes what we see time and time again is we are more hardwired to sell solutions than to solve problems. And in order to solve a problem, you need to understand a problem. There’s this huge bias to jump to solutions. Oh, we know how to do this. When the reality is, do we really know what the problem is? And if we spent some more time understanding what the problem is, we could probably find. Solutions or ideas that we can test that will solve the problem that you’re trying to work on. And in this process, we also talk a lot about how you manage your authorizing environment. In the Q&A chat, there’s also a question about private public, there is people around, how do you manage them? And you are in a system and there’s plenty of authorizers, whether it’s your boss or you work in a government and it’s other ministries or other departments. How do you work with them? How do build authorization? And how do you maintain and sustain authorization? These are really important to be able to help implement policies. And then in the world of complex problem solving, you can’t work alone. One person cannot change things. You need a team, but it’s not obvious how you work in a team. So part of the program is really teaching you how to work in team. How you could create these teams and how you can build coalitions. And we also teach how you exercise your own leadership. Regardless of where you are, you can exercise your leadership. How do you think about your own leaders? How do think about managing up? How can you think of managing down? How do think about trust? How do you think about time management? How do you think about delegation? These are all of the different tools and strategies that we do include in IPP and something that’s been really recurrent through the past few years has been our module that we tried for the first time in 2019 on self care. And it has become a really important module where participants really value this idea of what about me in the policy making and how do I take care about myself. So that kind of is, in a nutshell, why we decided to have this program, why we structured it. It came from practice. You know, we are an 11-year-old organization. We have been doing this around the world with teams. We wanted to bring these great ideas and the way we work internationally to Harvard to be able to open it up to even more people around the word because we are a small team. We can’t go everywhere, but we can have an open enrollment program that allows many people to come in and really build a community of like-minded people who can start to help each other in implementing public policies together. So with that, Amber, we can stop sharing. I’d like to pose a question to our alums on sharing what implementation challenge you brought to this program. So this program really is one where, in order to teach you something, PDIA or problem-driven iterative adaptation. Is a way you can only learn by doing. I can stand and lecture till you’re, I’m blue in the face and nothing’s gonna change for you. You have to work on a problem yourself and work through it for it to become a habit. And so everyone in the program comes in with an implementation challenge that they will work on and will continue to work on and use the tools in practice on that. So I’m wondering if the three of you can share, I know you already shared a little bit, but both what challenge you brought to the program and what sorts of impacts working through this challenge had, both for you personally, for the challenge, and your organization. And, Jori, why don’t you kick us off?

Jorida Zeneli Thanks a lot. This was so good. I felt like I refreshed a lot through your… Thanks, Salimah. So the challenge I had chosen was on how to embed resilience. Um, principles in investment policies and with resilience, I mean resilience to natural disasters. This was my task. This was the program that somebody put on my desk that I had to basically deliver this, this piece and the policy we had just been delivered in the format of a pilot and, um, I knew that this is not going to go anywhere. Um, that you know, so I used this problem which was given to me on which I had authorization to anchor this other piece of work which was like, okay, so what’s the real problem I’m working on? Because this is a solution to something, but this solution to something might be a new problem in its own right. So basically going back to the drawing board. There was no sense of urgency. So I could really take time to think deeply and implement the methods. And natural disasters, unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of them since the catastrophic bushfires in 2019. So literally, that gave the burning platform for them this work to be really… Front and back of the mind of many authorizers. When I started it, it was not the case. And so that basically shifted the conversation so much. And then I had all this work ready on time to go when the time was right. And that I think made a huge difference. Yes, I think so. In general, I think the methodologies helped me understand how this problem at a much deeper level and also at a more broader level because I came back with this massive fishbone diagram about all the root causes, about where are viable entry points, and then I could test all of this in the sector. And it so happened that my authorizers, a lot, were outside of the organization, because I had authorization to deliver on this work from my own organization. What was not working was this scattergun approach to this piece of work. And and to the fact that there were many, many entities in charge and that we didn’t have necessarily a centralized function that held all the knowledge, all the know-how. So one thing is to tell them, invest in this space. But how should they do it if they don’t have the data, if they have the knowledge? If the knowledge is sitting somewhere else or constantly changing? And those are the clear barriers that became so apparent through this work. The work didn’t just change the organization I was working in and necessarily the teams and the people that I was. Having coalitions with it, it literally changed the landscape of the sector because after the bushfires, a new agency was created, and that doesn’t happen very often in the public sector. Like we change the landscape or the public sector, we then had a centralized function, a new agency to do this work. And in the meanwhile, the agency has now reshaped. It’s now part of the ministry, et cetera. But the fact is that the premise of that work, of the need to have a centralized function to deliver on this important work hasn’t changed. And also the course changed me a lot to some extent because I had sort of lost a little bit the spark on why this, that I’m doing this day-to-day work in the public sector when I see no impact sort of thing. And I’m sure a lot of us have been there and just interacting with you guys, it was so inspiring, it reminded me. Why did I want to do this work in the first place, you know, what was my purpose, what was my mission, and it was such a good reminder because it reinvigorated my entire approach to work and to my own discovery as well, because a lot of these methods we don’t just take to, you for people like us who love this work, and probably I’m talking too and they’re working. Um we we we don’t finish work and never think about work ever again you know we bring it home we talk about it with our families and so on so this this method literally changed my life because i was then implementing some of it at home iterating at home you know which was great and um you know eventually i then realized that it’s uh this is it for me within the public sector I… Didn’t want to be given a problem anymore. I wanted to choose my own problem, and I wanted imagine something bigger for me. And I was ready for it. And basically, I’m now the proud founder of a startup company. And you’ll be surprised how many times I’ve gone back to my notes and used the methods that we learned to build my business, especially in the planning phase. So I think you can go back to the Harvard Business School, charge them a lot more and teach them these things.

Salimah Samji Great, thank you, Jori. Shanequa?

Shanequa Moore Oh, I’ll try to be short because Jori, you said it all, right? My challenge was mental health in schools. And my agency received a large grant to scale mental health and schools in New York City. And so we were tasked with the challenge to create a model for kids in New York City that worked, where there is no model. And so, we worked a lot with stakeholders. We connected with people throughout New York City. We really hit a lot of roadblocks and challenges with the mayor of New York city, because I think the way that the mayor was doing, or at least addressing mental health in schools, was in a way that left out a key group of people, which are social workers. And I didn’t know that coming into the IPP program. But when I started to implement and iterate and experiment, we started to find out answers. And one of the key things that we found out is that the mayor of New York City was blocking social workers out of this challenge. And so we’re still working with the mayor to try to get them to bring us to the table, but we have made a lot of progress in the policy. So we were able to, through the work that I’ve been doing with New York city, we were finally able to get the mayor to adopt at least a model and to now say that he’s gonna invest and making sure that every school in New York City has a social worker and has a model. They don’t have the model yet, but this is where we’re gonna come into play and really work and sit at the table with the mayor of New York City to address what that model looks like. So I’m grateful that using experimentation and iteration has worked for me and my challenge. I’d also say, Salimah, you said a whole bunch of things that I was like trying to take notes. But I think the other thing we did was we impacted a lot of systems on multiple touch points. And that was really great because prior to IPP, again, we were stuck. We were not, there was not a lot progress happening. But once we were able to get into the rooms, talk to the right people, connect the dots through stakeholder analysis, we were able to identify the right that we needed to speak to. Who are our authorizers? We were able to understand our authority, our level of competencies, and to really begin to really navigate through the politics and policy, which was huge for me. And so I was able to navigate and still learning to navigate the politics within public policy, which is really essential when you’re trying to understand your authorizing environment and when you want to see policy success. And then the last thing I would say is the leadership part. That has been so huge for me. As Yuri said, really echoing her sentiments, this work has changed me as a leader. And I am grateful because it’s changed me not just as a person and as a CEO, but it’s changed me as a mother to my daughter. It’s changed in all parts of my, my world, and I appreciate that. It’s changed my staff. You can see the change and the transformation actually happen when you utilize the materials that are given to you. And like you, Yuri, I am now teaching PDIA, and probably didn’t mention this yet, but NYU now wants to learn this as an elective course. I’ll be teaching it to social workers in New York City at NYU. And I’m also going to be utilizing this work out in the state of Georgia where I’m currently running for office, for city council and building a new city so I will be using PDIA to build a new city out here and so I’m grateful for the material.

Salimah Samji Thank you so much. I didn’t know that, Shanequa, congratulations. Very exciting. Agustin?

Agustin Filippo Well, impressive. And coming last, there’s not a lot left to share, to say, I think Jorida and Shanequa mentioned the big transformation you can experiment by going through this program. I worked on economic development challenges in some states in Southern Mexico. That was my challenge. And I came to the program perhaps already knowing what the challenges were, or at least I thought, at the technical level, right? I’ve written strategies as to how to diagnose those challenges, what to do about them and all that. And of course, before I did it, many others, smarter people have done so, right. It’s everyone and everywhere probably in the world, not this is this doesn’t stop in Mexico. Everything has been overdiagnosticized. So vices are known. The problem is how to make things happen, how to change, and change is hard. And perhaps what I want to highlight about my experience is that this program encouraged me to move closer to the people I was trying to help, to connect with them in a different way and understand their context better. They all know they are in this big play where they have a role to play, they have their script and they move from one conference to the next, from one office to the next saying and doing what they’re expected to do and to say, right? And that hardly brings any change at all. And showing like, look, you need to change things. Are you happy with how things are going? And let me help you. Let’s work together on how to refocus your priorities and how to come about with a plan as to make things happen and to change things one step at a time. So, I mean, that’s the technical part of what you learn in the program, But the. Unexpected consequence of that was you actually move a lot closer to your clients in your own organization and outside of your organization, right? And you learn from them and you learn and they learn from you. And you can see them finding something on all of this, right. They get inspired and as a benefit, you get inspired as well. So that’s, I think that’s behind what Jorida and Shanequa said in terms of the joy they get after applying these techniques into their own work, because it’s actually that. I mean, we were all motivated professionals, but I mean I think we all discovered that there’s more joy to have from our day-to-day work once we get this close connection to the people we work with and the people who are trying to help. Those are my last two cents.

Jorida Zeneli I agree totally. And do you know what brings that connection? I was reflecting about it because you were right that what, what became really apparent is that the bonding between colleagues was so much stronger. I think this method always invites to, uh, authenticity. It keeps you very honest. And because you keep learning, it also keeps you very humble and you’re like, okay, so what’s next? And this, this is what, makes the bonding, I think, really, really good. Sorry, I interrupted.

Salimah Samji Not at all, not at all. I see that we are getting to, there was a question in the Q&A about what skills you’ve learned, but I think in the last round you actually did answer a lot of these, and I think, Amber, we can just answer some of the other questions about what do we look for in participants, etc. I can start on that one. Generally, you can be in the private sector, you can be in the public sector, in fact, in our first cohort, Jori, we had Mitch who worked at Bank of America in London, and he was a participant in the program and he found the tools extremely useful. So I don’t think there is a private versus public NGO government. I don’t think there’s those kinds of questions that you can ask, but what you do need is a problem to work on because that is a minimum criteria. If you don’t have a real problem that you could do something about. Then because the program is long and requires you to work on a problem, if you don’t have a real problem that you can work on that you have authority to do something on, then the program becomes very difficult. And that’s, you know, when we read applications, it’s the first thing that we do. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t find you a problem that you had in your organization. We actually have had people who’ve worked on problems in their own organization. We had one participant at the World Bank. And this was during the pandemic. And the challenge was being able to work in the country given that they weren’t able to travel. And so they said, oh, but I really want to work on this. And we said, yes, but you can’t take action. So this is not a good problem. You will be frustrated. You will not learn. Let’s look for something that you have control over. And she happened to be on the diversity and inclusion team within the organization. And she worked on that internally at the World Bank. And It was the success that she had from that. She thought, oh, but I’ve been doing this for 10 years. And we said, but it’s something that you can do something about, please just trust us. Why don’t you work on that? And she ended up making huge strides on that work in the organizations. Cause to learn the approach, you have to use it on a real problem. This is not theoretical. This is, not let’s all work on somebody else’s problem. This is you work your problem.

Amber Thacher Yes, thank you, Salimah. I think that is the honing in on, you have to have a problem to be working on is the key to being successful in this program and being admissible to this program. We have, as Salimah said, people from all different sectors. We have people from all different experience levels as well. First year of the program we had a very very young person in the program but he was in a position to make change and to to do work and had a problem so we admitted him to the program and he was fantastic so it’s it’s not about level of experience it’s really about is your work going to benefit from what we are teaching in the program. I just put a slide up that has some detailed information about the program. Everybody who has registered and also attended this webinar will receive all of the slides and we’ll send a follow-up informative email with more program details. I’d encourage anybody that has further questions to reach out to the program director, Jesse Delano. Unfortunately, she’s traveling abroad right now and running another program, so you can join us, but you will meet her. And I really, really, just want to again thank profusely Agustin, Shanequa, and Jori for joining us. I think this program is so unique that it is best described by you guys and the experiences that you had and I’ll speak for Salimah but we’re just like so overjoyed that you all have gotten so much from this experience but also you’ve brought so much to the program itself and to the community of practice, so. Again, thank you all. Jori, thank you for joining at 3am in Australia. And I wish you all the best of luck in your work ahead of you. It sounds like you are all doing great things out in the world. So thanks again. Thank you, everybody. And we look forward to hearing from you. Have a good day.