Reflecting on a Decade of Building State Capability around the World

Salimah Samji Okay. We’re going to get started. Welcome, everyone, to our reflecting on a decade of building state capability around the world event. And we’re really excited. Marshall, front row. For you, front row. Thank you so much for joining us. What an honor. Welcome to all of you who are joining us on Zoom. It’s a delight. We have a lot of friends who are joining us today from around the world. And welcome to all of you. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about how our event is going to work today. We’re going to start with a presentation to kind of map our decade of what we’ve actually done in the ten years we were actually 11 years old, but in the ten years that we’ve been around. And then we’re going to introduce some voices. We have a video presentation. Three speakers who are joining us from Zoom from around the world. Also, we’re going to share some of their reflections and then we’ll open up for a Q&A. So that’s how the session is going to run. I’m going to start with our presentation and walk you through our journey.

The first thing I’m sure you’re asking is who are you? So here we are, the Building State Capability team. Anisha is on Zoom, Kathryn is standing back there. Danny is standing over there. I am Salimah Samji, the Director of Building State Capability, and Matt Andrews is our Faculty Director and he will be joining us shortly. So we actually empower organizations to find compriate solutions to their problems. And we use this approach that we’ve developed called PDIA or Problem Driven, Iterative Adaptation. And what it does is it empowers action, it facilitates the emergence of local solutions, local solutions to local problems. That’s one of our things that we talk about. And more importantly, creates new capabilities to solve public problems. What do we do? You ask? Well, we always work with problems, public problems, and we work with teams. Those are our two big things that we work with. And the third is an authorizer. If we’re going to be able to change anything, we need somebody who is authorized to allow you to try different things. We have actually trained and engaged over 3,500 development practitioners in 148 countries, and this was a count that we did in March. So that number is actually up.

If we were to look at where we are today. And that gives you a sense, the map, the the light blue are the countries that we’ve had projects and the dark blue are practitioners that we’ve trained around the globe. But now we’re going to start a story of what did we look like when we started. So our founding grant, this is year zero, when we launched the program, it was September 27th. Chuck was in the room. Chuck is there. He’s the Director of Communications. He was there. You see Chuck is right there in 2012. And we were launching the program because the first grants – right, you need money to start a program – and our first grant was given to us by the University, United Nations University WIDER, which is World Institute for Development Economics Research. And they were our grant, our founding grants, and they gave us a grant to write some papers. And as part of that, they have a WIDER annual lecture. And we let Pritchett, who is an author of the book, also, he was doing the annual lecture on September 27th in Helsinki. And the title of his session was The Folk and the Formula. And we were livestreaming. That’s Perkins room here. So if you just walk down, that was Perkins room and we were streaming it. And the reason you have the shot is, do you know how HKS makes these videos of a Day in the Life at us? We captured that event. Turns out they actually did that on September 27th, 2012. And so they have live footage from Perkins of them launching this event, as well as all other things that happened on that day. So I just wanted to share kind of where we started. It’s hard to think about livestreaming in 2012, but apparently we were able to do that. Chuck is like our hero. He makes things happen.

So this grant actually gave us money to write eight papers which were then published under the RE COM program, which is the research and Communication on Foreign Aid project. And our work fit within governance and fragility as their focus area. And you can see the first PDIA paper, which was called Escaping Capability Traps, was published. It’s published in many places, but it was also published by WIDER in 2012. In 2013, we held a conference called Untying Development. So we had we were at this point of thinking that things in development aren’t working. We need to do things in a different way. How can we have a convening with people who are trying to think about this and start to have this conversation? What can we learn from others who are also thinking we need change? Implementation is much more important than just coming up with a good plan. The real devil is in the detail and how you’re going to implement. And so you can see photos from here. We had Frank Fukuyama, who is at Stanford University, who is here at this conference, Matt Andrews, a younger version of Matt Andrews sitting there. Marilee Grindle, for those of you who don’t know her, she was quite the star and had the title that Matt has today. So it’s kind of nice to look at that photo and see that she was the Edward the S Mason professor, and Matt now holds that title. She retired and then that’s your hands and you’re going to hear from Peter. He was actually a student at HKS at that time, and he was a participant in this conference. And he was talking about his work. He had worked at the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and he was sharing some of the types of activities that they had done in that conference.

And then in 2013, our first year, we launched our first blog, and that’s the first blog that Matt ever posted on our blog in 2013. Today, Hirschmann we love. And for those students who are here or anyone who’s listening on Zoom, if you don’t know Albert Hershman and you are interested in economics, you should really read his work Development Projects Observed. If you read it today, it reads like it was written yesterday, and yet it was written in the seventies of the eighties. We now have 650 blogs and they’re searchable. You can actually find blogs by region, by sectors. So we had this idea of there’s this thing that we should do development differently and let’s try this thing called PDIA. But it’s one thing to have an idea about let’s do something and another to figure out how are we going to do this, right? Everybody bought into the critique. But the question has always been, so what are you going to do about it? And so in Mozambique, Matt actually was working from 2012 to 2014 and then ended up writing this paper again for WIDER on how can we tell a story of the Mozambique reform through a PDIA lens? And a lot of learning of how things work. You know, you see in this slide in 2013, the Minister of Justice asks for help. And that’s when we have an authorizer with an itch. They really want to solve this problem. We can try doing some things differently and let’s see what that’s going to look like. And that essentially was like the first real experimentation of what does PDIA in practice look like?

And then. I love this one. “Books are Dead.” So Lant Pritchett, for those of you who know him or don’t know him comes in once and he’s like, I just spoke to my friend who’s an editor, and he said, books are dead. And we’re like, okay, remember the book outline? They’re writing a book, right? They’re thinking about and Building State Capability exists. The book is there. But he’s like, books are dead. Nobody reads books anymore. Let’s make videos. And we’re like, All right, let’s make videos. So the whole idea was writing a book takes a long time. It’s a two year minimum. Those of you have done it the minimum two year timeline of doing that. And we already had things we wanted to share. And we thought, how can we share this with the world before we actually have the book come out? And so what we did is we recorded 35 short videos, each of them 3 to 5 minutes, which really had the key elements of the PDIA concept. And you can see these are real screenshots of our videos. They again look different at different stages. In one of our executive programs in an assignment, a student actually mapped all photos of Matt over time and all the videos and it was pretty hysterical. We have 236 videos and over 100,000 views. Our videos still get watched that we shot in 2014. In 2014. We also started to work in Albania. So Ricardo Hausmann and the Growth Lab were already working in Albania. And one of the things that they were finding is that it’s one thing to help a country develop a growth strategy, and it’s another thing entirely to help them think about how do you implement that strategy? And so he invited Matt to Albania to come and see how can we work together and how can we really help them help the government think about implementing a growth strategy. So three years later, we had actually trained 131 government officials in ten ministries and agencies working across 20 teams. And what we did see is the real emergence of capabilities. So building upon what we had learned in Mozambique about how to do PDIA, Albania was really another testing ground. And Peter, I’m hoping when you speak, you can speak a little to that. Peter’s in this picture, right there. Peter and Matt were very engaged in Albania. Tim joined us at some point. Tim McNaught in this. So it was really an opportunity for us to try and test how do you do PDIA in practice on the real in the real world. In 2014. You know how we did the conference in 2013. So we had another conference in 2014. And this is where I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the DDD Manifesto or the Doing Development Differently Manifesto that was born here in Cambridge and ODI, the Overseas Development Institute and Building State Capability, hosted a two day workshop to really get people together and think about how can we do development differently, How can we think about a community of practice? And that’s actually a picture from a board. We were at 1 Brattle where we held this conference.

So that is really what was born out of this process in 2014. In 2015, you know, we’re now starting to do PDIA. There’s a lot of demand. We’re a very small team. How do we reach people where they are? And that’s when we had the idea of do an online course like this is 2015, way back, and we think we have videos. So what do you need for an online course? We have videos already. We’ve done those. We’re writing a book. We have chapters and material to give them that kind of makes up a course. So why don’t we start to experiment with an A free and free? Because we felt if we really want to give these skills to the people who need it the most, they cannot afford to be able to pay even executive education or whatever. So let’s offer it for free. And we were allowed to, Suzanne Cooper was very, very we’re very grateful to her for allowing us to do this. And between 2015 and 2019, we actually offered 11 courses and we went our learning was really tremendous because the wisdom was nobody can take a course more than six weeks. And we’re like, we have a 12 week course. And so they’re like, Cut it into two. And we said, okay, we’ll cut it into two because that’s what you say we should do. And so we did A part A, part B and Lant, I remember, said to me, if 50 people register for this class, this will be a success. 800 people registered. 600 actually signed in for the signed onto the the course website. 300-something did the first assignment 296 finished six weeks and we ran this ending the week before Christmas.

Every week we were like, people aren’t going to do their assignments and we were wrong. But then taking those people who had momentum and putting them in the second class was very difficult. And we learned our first lesson that don’t listen to what people tell you sometimes and just try because they might be wrong. So we lost people who were very excited and they didn’t ever take the second part just because there was time in between. And we didn’t run a 12 week. So we went from one person, two parts to two different courses to adjusting times. You know, remember six was the magic number. We were offering 16 week courses with 90% completion rates. We count completion rates from doing your first assignment, right. If you do your first assignment, you kind of have a sense of what this course is about from the first assignment to the last assignment, whether it was six weeks, 15 weeks, we landed on 15 weeks. It was really that high a completion rate.

And then in 2016, again, the Growth Lab was working in Sri Lanka. We’d already had this work that we were doing in Albania, and it all was it was almost an automatic reaction of you’ve done this in Albania, why don’t you come to Sri Lanka with us? And so learning again, how to work with the Growth Lab we were able to really take this is how we should structure Sri Lanka because of what we’ve learned in Albania and how we’re going to work with the growth lab here. And we were only there for nine months. And I’m I’m hoping Anisha will speak to this. Anisha, we found a Nisha in Sri Lanka and she worked with some of these government teams and we also had so in Sri Lanka. So while in Albania we were working on implementing a growth strategy, in Sri Lanka, we were actually working on the problem of attracting foreign direct investment into the country. Now one key player in this is the economic attachés who are in the embassies around the world. So in addition to like building capacity and capability of the teams, the government teams in the country to think about how we can do that. We also did a training of the economic attachés or diplomats around the world to be able to sell their story of why people should come to Sri Lanka.

And then we had another DDD conference doing development differently. In this time. It was ODI hosted it in London, and this was more to share for all people to share. Okay, so we signed this manifesto. We came up with it. What have we done in the two years since then? And that’s a picture of Peter and me. Peter was talking about the work in Albania, and I was talking about our online course and what we had actually learned through this process. It was at this event that Matt Andrews and Neil Cole from the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative, CABRI, that’s located in South Africa. Their main function is they have African member countries and they do training of public financial management. And what they wanted to do is try to use PDIA in Africa. And so we announced that in London of what we would do together. In 2017, learning again from what we had done in Mozambique, what we had done in Albania, what we had done in Sri Lanka and our online course, we developed a program for Cadbury on building PFM capabilities and we coached them on how you would actually do a PDIA training. If anyone knows anything about us, none of our trainings are one week, we don’t do that. We always do extended because there’s a spacing effect to learning. You have to try, you have to learn a lot of things.

And so this program, it started online and then everybody met in-country. They went back to their countries to do the real work and then come back at the end to have a closing workshop where everyone could really share with each other what they’ve learned. We were there for two years. Our first year. It was really like developing the course and testing it, seeing what it would, what it would look like and train people. The second year we said, All right, we’ve done this in English, let’s try it. And Africa has multiple languages, not just English. Can we do this for two country, two languages at the same time? And so our experiment for the second year was running a simultaneous English and French training program. And the Central African Republic and Cote d’Ivoire were the two country teams that participated in the second year. CABRI continues to do this. We were only there for two years and they are funded. They continue to get funding by the Gates Foundation to do this. And I encourage you to check out their website to see all the cool things that they’ve done with this training. In 2018, Gates Foundation also commissioned an evaluation, an independent evaluation of the PDIA process in the PFM sector. That evaluation was public, but recently there is a World Development Perspectives Report that was published in July this year that does talk about this work. So it was not only done design, but it was also evaluated, and it’s been written about in a journal. In 2017, Remember, books are dead. So we did publish the book.

But as you can see, we’d done a lot before the book even came out. We were teaching online courses on PDIA before the book came out. And I think the real big innovation here was, you know, download the book. It was in London at the DDD conference that we ran into. Duncan Green, who had just published his book with Oxford University Press. And he said, Oh, I bought it. You know, I have open access rights to the book. And we were like, What? You mean we can actually get this book to be downloadable by Oxford University Press? And he’s like, yeah, you can do that. And we were just in time because the book hadn’t gone into publishing yet. And so we actually signed a deal with Oxford University Press to allow us to offer this book Open Access. What that meant is, because it’s Oxford University Press, the date that it gets published in the UK is different than the date that it gets published in the US. But because it was already published in the UK, the downloadable version was available at the date it was available in the UK. So we had the downloadable PDF before we had the physical books for the the BBC book. In 2018, so again, we’re learning all of these great things and we’re thinking, what are we doing about our students here at HKS? How about we bring what we are actually learning on the ground to our students?

And in 2018, we basically started to teach MLD 103, which is PDIA in action. This is a field lab class where one thing that we learned and I think it was our online course that really taught us that the only way to learn PDIA is by doing it. This is not a conceptual thing. You cannot understand it. You have to do it and then you understand it. And that’s why we have longer programs. So we said, Why don’t we create a seven week course where we can teach students a version of PDIA, but they have to learn it by doing so. Let’s give them real people that they can work with and real problems and teach them how PDIA works. And so we’ve actually iterated on this. This is 2020 when we were are all on Zoom. This was just before we literally went into lockdown two days after this photo was taken. That was March. Andrea took that class with us. So in this class, what we’ve actually seen is the challenge that we had is finding an authorizer that actually understands PDIA or understands what we do. And by that year we’d figured it out and it was basically pick people we’ve trained in executive education. So all the authorizers that any student works with are people we have trained in an executive program ourselves. And that allows us to be able to have that sort of learning happen to everyone.

In 2018, we launched the PDIA Toolkit. Again, books are dead. This is kind of the current theme of this whole story. The book is out, but people can’t read the whole book. So can we come up with an easier way to teach people how to do PDIA? That is a little more interesting and easy to read, and that’s Tim McNaught. You’ll see him in a video. We launched it at the Harvard Worldwide Week, the PDIA Toolkit. It’s now available in six languages, German being the latest one. And that was interesting. We did a program with the Bloomberg Harvard Center for Cities, and there was a team from Mannheim that was actually being trained and they were so excited about this that they came to us and said, Can we translate this in German for you? And we said, Yeah, by all means. And so thanks to the city of Mannheim, we now have a German version of the PDIA toolkit. Honduras. So in 2018, we were in Honduras and we tried to share some photos to be able to give you a sense of the kind of fun that we have in some of our programs. So we worked with seven government teams and with the Delivery Facilitation unit. And at this point, Danny joined us, who also happens to be from Honduras and worked on this project. In 2019, again, learning from all of the things that we’re learning, we thought, how do we bring this idea to executive education? We’ve now bought it, we’ve brought it to degree programs, but how can we teach this in executive education? And we designed our first program. It’s five years already, and the model of the program is they start one month online. They spend a week here. It’s usually in June and at the Kennedy School. Then they go back to their countries. Six months, they form a team. They start to work on this. We check in with them very regularly and then they join at the end. They join the community of practice. And we now have close to 300 people in our community of practice. And that’s a picture from one of the classes, again, to just show you the fun that happens in that it’s not all boring. In 2020 when the pandemic hit, we had just finished teaching a class. Matt had this great idea of this is a time when leadership really matters and how can we really help people in real time? If you look at the dates, that’s March 15. So while people started to quiet down, we went into crazy mode where we launched this 18 part blog series.

We also held virtual sessions to get people together, to have conversations. How do we think about this? How do we implement things? The world is very different. What can we learn? What about burnout? The types of issues that we really thought about were really diverse, but all related to how you can lead through crisis. In 2021, we offered a program, a virtual training program in Brazil. We don’t speak Portuguese. The entire program was run in Portuguese. Thank you to Zoom, where we had translators on Zoom so they would see Matt and I’s faces, but they would hear the Portuguese translation and when they would speak, we would hear the English translation 12 weeks. And we actually did this training for 60 public servants in two states and Brazil. And you can see people will still have etc.. And that’s kind of you have a good sense of what this virtual thing looked like. Sometimes they were in the room together, sometimes they were on their computer screens. And something about the Brazil one. This opportunity actually came to us through a participant who had taken the online course. So she had taken the online course in 2016 and was really excited about it and then found a job at this NGO that was doing work on education and then came to us and said, Can you do this for me? And it was it was actually very exciting. Tim McNaught who you’ll also hear on video helped us with this. He does speak Portuguese, so we did have someone and he ended up writing a paper on the case of Sobral through a PDIA lens as well.

In 2022, we did the Fcdo actually wanted to test out this idea of what would a PDIA education systems look like. And we ran a 12 week program for 56 education practitioners and nine country teams. Papua New Guinea again came to us because the team in Papua New Guinea had actually the executive director of this NGO called The Voice had taken our online course in 2018 and then came to us and said we’ve got this new funding from the Australian Government to run a local leadership and collective action program. Can we use PDIA as a base for this? So we are in our second year. This photo was taken in August this year. That’s the second cohort and this is from the first cohort that we trained, the 31 of them that participated in this program and it’s currently running through to December.

In 2023, we redid our website and if those of you want to learn anything more about what we have talked about, everything plus more is available on our website, including videos of those events that I’ve talked about. It’s all on our website. And for that one, I wanted to give a huge shout out to Kathryn, who’s just sitting there. She I can’t tell you how many pages she’s built for this website and if it was not for her care and concern and detail orientation, this website would not exist. So thank you, Kathryn. Sneak peek to 2024. We’re going to be talking a lot more about students here who are taking an M.D. One or two might find this familiar policy making as mountain climbing is going to be the place that we’re going to be headed in 2024.

And then finally, I just wanted to do a thank you. You know, we this is a lot of work and we cannot do it alone. And we have a lot of people, students included, who’ve really been helpful down here. There’s Andrea Hayes in the front row and Chuck and Katelyn. And Sarah who helped us with finance a long time ago. We have a lot of you know, to get things done is not easy and we need a lot of people. So thank you very much to all of these people. I’m going to end with you know, I started with who we are and what we do. And people like to use this analogy. If you teach someone to fish, you feed them for a day or whatever. We’re slightly different. So what we do at Building State Capability is teach them how to teach themselves to fish so that tomorrow if they need to farm, they can teach themselves to farm. That’s what we do. We don’t teach them how to fish because that restricts what they can do. That’s the difference between capability and capacity. Thank you.

Salimah Samji We’re now going to show you a short video and it has Lant, Michael and Tim.

Lant Pritchett So I have an interesting story. I feel I was moving into PDIA, moving out of PDIA, and then coming full circle back to PDIA. Before I started working on the state capability book and approach that led to PDA. I was working on basic education. How much do kids actually learn when they go to primary and secondary schools in the developing world? And the more I dug into it, the more awful it was. It was just an example of which people were trapped in incredibly dysfunctional institutions and had been trapped in those institutions in ways that people just didn’t see a way out of. And I wrote a book that was about how to create education systems that would produce more learning. Then this led to a broader attention of state capability. And I realized many organizations providing services were similarly trapped and compliance driven, bureaucratic, top down, nonperformance driven situations, which led together with Matt and Michael to the PDIA approach of breaking out of those cycles of compliance driven us increasingly focused on performance, being able to search for positive deviation and reinforce that. Then, after working on helping to create the Building State Capability, I went back to an eight year research project on education. And after eight years of research, what we turned out is the most important thing about improving basic education in the developing world is creating a PDIA like environment in schools, creating an environment in schools in which teachers have clear performance criteria of what they’re trying to achieve, are equipped to achieve those, and then then, given the opportunity to use their professional skills to pursue for better performance with feedback loops for them and others about what leads to better performance. Trying to create that system inside the large scale public education systems around the world is the challenge going forward, and I feel that challenge merges precisely a concern about education with a path forward, about generic state capability, which applies well to education. So I feel I have come both a fertile circle, but I spend more of a spiral in which I have learned more about education from focusing on state capability and more about state capability by focusing on education.

Michael Woolcock For me, I think the big gain from media has been really helping us to respond more effectively to what governments want and do. One of the maxims that one of our colleagues, Lant Pritchett, has at least instilled in my brain was that we can’t want it more than they do. And so but when they do really want change, when governments are really focused on trying to change the mindset and the skill set of the public employees, then we need to be able to respond to that in ways that don’t just presume that we know what the answer to that particular problem is. The work that we’ve been doing with with the Building State Capability program has been really centered on trying to build out an approach that looks, feels and tastes and touches like those who are working with it. It’s not that they’re just copying and replicating something else from somewhere else. It’s them being able to own a change process in ways that make sense to them with a vocabulary and examples that are all from their particular world. And that’s what we’ve that’s what when this works well, that’s what it looks like. It’s not just they perfect what we’ve taught them. They own what we’ve taught them and they can do it and teach it and replicate it among their own colleagues. And that’s the really fun part of it for us from our point of view as well. It’s not that we are just cloning ourselves. We are creating people who are willing and able to own this fully and then teach us about how and how to work with this elsewhere, because we haven’t solved this. We are in the business of learning systematically and helping systems to learn systematically. And when we do that at scale and when we are able to give incredible examples of other countries and places where teams of people have come to embody a process of change that works for them and that solves the problems that they are wrestling with every day, then I think we’ve done our job and I hope that’s the legacy of the PDIA work and I hope that’s how it continues into the future. Thank you.

Tim McNaught Hi, everyone. Tim here. Congrats to everyone at BSC. on ten years of incredible work. First and foremost, I’m just a big fan of you all. You know, like I first started learning about PDIA in grad school, in Matt’s class, and it was just something that really connected with me from the beginning. And after graduating, I took the first PDIA online course, and then when BSC opened their first position for a fellow, I just jumped at the opportunity. So I joined BSC seven years ago, flying straight from Timor-Leste to Sri Lanka for a project that we were starting there. I have a super blurry photo of Matt, Peter and me in the back of a tuk tuk that brings back a lot of good memories. When I think of BSC, I think of all of the incredible people I had the opportunity to work with. Matt, Salimah, Peter, Anisha, Geeta, Edit, Marla, Dany and everyone at the Growth Lab, and of course all of the inspiring civil servants that we had the pleasure to work with as well. I just love how BSC’s work was always about empowering civil servants. So instead of coming in with solutions, it was always asking what do you think the problem is and what are your ideas for making change? And what do you need to start taking that first step? And then the most rewarding part of the work was seeing civil servants like Ganga and Awa and Eleo and so many others taking some of these PDIA tools and making them their own and just running with them. So even though I no longer work at BSC, I still feel like I’m part of the family and we’ve continued collaborating together. I had the opportunity to write a paper about education reform in Sobral, Brazil, looking at it through the lens of PDIA, and I still often watch the videos of Matt and Michael on YouTube, which are still an incredible resource. What I really admire about Salimah and Matt is that they practice what they preach. So they know that the best way to learn is by taking action and they are never afraid of trying something new as they know that they will learn and adapt and figure it out along the way. So I just want to say thank you. I wish I could be there all with you today. And congrats again on an amazing decade of work and hope to see you soon.

Peter Harrington Well, Salimah asked me to join and I’m really honored to be joining. I can’t see the room or others online, but I’m really happy to be here and kind of delighted to be celebrating this with everyone. Salimah gave us 3 minutes to speak, so one thing that you learn at BSC is if Salimah says 3 minutes, you’ve got to stick to 3 minutes. I was asked just to say a few things about my sort of journey and, and participation with BSC over the years. A bit about my journey, I joined in 2014. I mean Salimah it’s, it’s funny to see photos of myself, it’s a much younger me as well in some of those photos as a, as a graduate student at HKS, um, I had read the CGT papers published by Matt and Lant and Michael and Salimah before I came to HKS while I was working in the President’s office in Liberia. And I remember reading these papers and they were sort of light bulb moments and the ideas were incredibly salient and refreshing. And so I sought out Matt when I got to each case and I participated in the untying development conference, as Selina said, um, and when I graduated, Matt asked me to work on the Albania project just as it was starting. And over the next five years I worked on that project, I worked in Sri Lanka and on other projects and then have continued to write and contribute with Matt and the team ever since. And it’s been, it’s been an incredible story. And in the process I’ve worked on a lot of PDIA projects, a huge amount of PDIA projects. So, you know, supervising the Albanian Sri Lanka teams in those early years, as Salimah said, we were sort of iterating the practice of PDIA as we went along. You know, how do you actually do this in the real world?

Lots of the tools in the PDIA toolkit were kind of developed in their raw form during those years, those projects. There was so much sort of PDIAing of PDIA itself, which is a bit meta, but yeah, there was a huge amount of just working out what works and testing and learning and changing and developing. You know, the learning was, was the huge part of it, um, looking for different ways of structuring support through teams, through these courses that Salimah mentioned and all these various models. And in terms of what I’ve learned, I mean it’s more than I can possibly summarize here and in a few short minutes. I think apart from, well, apart from learning where to find the best bootleg Albanian raki and also the best food in Colombo, I say I’ve learned a lot about why things happen and why they don’t happen. The real reasons when it comes to implementation, that’s a big lesson or big set of lessons. And also that there are really good people around the world, all over the world, in the public sector, outside the public sector, who are doing really good work against incredible odds. And that’s that’s kind of, you know, core for me. I remember sort of just the last few thoughts.

I remember Matt and I were sitting once having a beer. It might have been in Colombo after a sort of a long day of meetings. And I remember he kind of asked me, why are you here? Well, you know, why are you doing this work? Why aren’t you at McKinsey like lots of your HKS colleagues? And the question kind of stumped me at the time because I had never thought about it. But the best answer I could come up with at the time was that this work is authentic. PDIA is authentic. It’s authentic because it puts people at the center. It’s authentic because it deals with the world as it really is, and it’s authentic because it works for results which are real, not just not just for show. And after 15 odd years working international development, I can tell you that’s incredibly rare. That authenticity is incredibly rare and incredibly special. I find different people relate to PDIA differently. Lots of people, you know, think of it as a set of tools. It’s a cliche, but for me it’s always more of a way of working and a way of thinking than any specific tools. You know, I work mainly at a firm called Arab doing infrastructure in the Global South that I use PDIA every day. It’s not necessarily fish bones or, you know, using Triple A tools, but it’s the principles, the core idea, the philosophy that turns a lot of development dogma on its head and puts the right people in the driving seat. That’s what means a lot to me.

I think apart from all this, all these principles, what means the most to me is not the projects or the results. It is the people that we work with and the PDIA community. I always felt hugely honored to work alongside officials in the difficult struggle to, you know, change the country or do something meaningful. And that motivation, when you find people that really care about it, it’s not incentives, it’s not anything else. It’s not career advancement. They just really want to do something, that’s really special. And that’s meant a huge amount to me. And of course, it’s also meant a huge amount to be part of that BSC family. It’s honestly been the most meaningful work and the best team I’ve been part of. And yeah, I love these people, so I’m very grateful to be here and I’ll stop before before I run too over the 3 minutes Celina gave me. Back to you, Salimah.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Peter. Anisha.

Anisha Poobalan Hi, everyone. Can you hear me?

Salimah Samji Yes, we can.

Anisha Poobalan Okay, perfect. As Peter said, it is such a joy to be here with you all, Just kind of reflecting on a decade of amazing work. Just a little bit about myself. I started off with the PDIA team in 2016. As Salimah mentioned I was in Sri Lanka and so I got to work with the team on the Sri Lanka project and then I moved into helping out with the PDIA Online Course Alumni Network. So the community of practice that we created in 2019 and then on to the IPP Community of Practice. And in the past few years I’ve worked as a teaching assistant for some of our exec ed courses. So I’ve gotten to work with a variety of practitioners around the world at different levels, and I think it has just been amazing to see how PDIA can be applied to every aspect of your life professionally and even personally in all regions at all levels. And so I just had like three quick reflections from my own journey kind of learnings that have stuck with me over the years. The first one being and it cool because Peter mentioned this too, just the sheer talent, knowledge capability that is out there amongst the practitioners that we work with. I just, that was the motivation for me to keep showing up to work was the people and the heart that they have for the work that do, for the communities that they serve. Against all odds, you know, it’s not easy facing community members who are suspicious of your work. It’s not easy reassuring authorizers to trust you and the process. It is a huge challenge sometimes to just get your teammates on the same page.

But despite all of that, you know, our teams would show up and they would keep working and they would persevere. And for me, that was my motivation to, you know, keep showing up for them as well. The second thing that has stuck with me is kind of how the PDIA creates this space to fail, or as we like to call it, kind of have key learning moments. And I think that has been so liberating and empowering for teams coming in. Because we find that teams come in feeling like they need to have a plan, feeling like they need to have the solutions all figured out. And we kind of say like, Hey, wait. Like, it’s okay. We can try something. We can take the risks. We can even make mistakes and learn from them. Like, you know, this is all learning. And even for myself in my own personal life, like, I’ve found that to be kind of a relief sometimes, but also empowering to be like, okay, I can try something out. I can try like, a new thing out, and the world is not going to come to a halt and crash. In fact, it might work out for the best. And so that has really stuck with me. And then finally, you know, these are moments of reflection. It is so inbuilt into the PDIA process. And I think that that is a big part of the impact and success that this approach has. You know, we always talk to teams about having check-ins like, what did you do, what did you learn, What did you struggle with? What’s coming next? And just seeing kind of the power of such a seemingly simple thing, just taking the time to stop, lift your head up from your work and just check in with your team, with your self has been very impactful, I think.

And so even today’s event, you know, it’s right in the PDIA spirit of just having that reflective nature. How far have we come and what’s what do we have to look forward to? And so that’s all from me. I just want to say thank you to everyone for your time, for your hard work. You are an inspiration to us all. And just keep going. Thanks, everyone.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Anisha.

Awa Touray So my name is Awa Touray. I’m from the Gambia and I’m a Public Policy Practitioner. So my journey or my first first touchpoint with BSC started in 2017. I was nominated whilst in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs in the Gambia to participate in CABRI’s Building PFM Capabilities Program. And that’s where I met Matt, and he introduced us to the PDIA approach. And then I was a junior member of the Budget Directorate. Right? But it was a touch point that has changed the way my entire career trajectory has changed, the way I see development. It has changed the way I approach service to the public in the sense that I was a junior budget officer who felt empowered to shift away from my routine work. I felt empowered to be able to tackle issues, challenges that I saw on a day to day basis in the way that we were managing public finances within the ministry, but that I had previously felt disempowered to be able to take on. I remember our initial response to to the PDIA approach was, Wow, you’re doing work that we would normally contract consultants to do. And that was essentially the selling point for him that we were tapping into our abilities are very technical abilities. We were collaborating across government within the Ministry of Finance, but most important people in ministries. So that was my first touchpoint with PDIA. Within that same year I joined CABRI, and the selling point for me in joining CABRI was that I saw the ability to now deploy this this approach beyond the Gambia. So joining CABRI joining the Building PFM Capabilities program and being a coach to country teams. So I went on to coach several teams as part of whilst I worked at CABRI, including The Gambia, Rwanda, South Africa and to on various problems in PFM. And I reiterate any point that that this is hard work and you see the sheer dedication of these public servants.

In Rwanda. I had a team that was meeting on weekends because of the sheer workload that they had during the week, but they were dedicated to make sure that they made moves with regards to their problem. After CABRI, I became an international consultant and was invited by a state building contract, an EU funded project in Sierra Leone, largely because of my PDIA expertise. So they wanted to deploy PDIA to develop a public financial management reform strategy for the government of Sierra Leone for a period of 4 to 5 years. And I see this as a huge step because it signals that there is a willingness, there is a move by key development partners. You mentioned Gates as a key funder to cap the EU in doing in providing support to countries in a different way in making sure that local agency is different, too. So it was really the PDA framework that we use to leverage to decide what it is that was going to be within a strategy, whereas previously it would be led by the consultant. The consultant would decide the issues that would be tackled. But we established a process where we engaged various stakeholders across from cross-functional teams in the very PDIA way we identified problems and the root causes. We used the Triple A framework to sequence the reform interventions, and we made sure that the implementation strategy had tight feedback loops so that key stakeholders were able to reflect on how they were implementing these strategies and had the room to adapt as they were as they were implementing it.

And then finally today, I’m still doing PDIA, but in a different sector. So I am the Deputy Chief of Party for a US aid-funded project in Liberia, supporting education system strengthening. And here again, PDIA is really the anchor for this project where we are supporting or we’re trying to develop a more capable Ministry of Education by establishing PDIA teams at the central level, but also in subnational government. And in terms of the learning that I take away from all these experiences, I feel like PDIA is about empowering local actors. And veritable change only really happens when local actors want it and when they drive it. But this process is not automatic, right? PDIA is hard work. It’s time consuming. It’s not a linear process, and it’s often easier to tick boxes, right? You publish more documents and your OBS score goes up, so you’re able to signal to key development partners that you’re doing the hard work. It might trigger some budget support. So you’re constantly faced with this battle of reverting back to an easier way or the traditional way of doing things. Let’s just conform to form and do things that will signal some that we’re doing some work while not having a very meaningful change take place. So it really is about key actors having some intrinsic motivation to address the issue and making sure there’s some urgency that people believe in or want to address the problem is a key part of the process.

And a second learning point was for me was about leadership. Previously, I saw leadership being often identified by a single individual. It’s about a position. It’s about an authority figure. But doing this work showed me that it’s really about having a vision for change and mobilizing other actors to make that change happen. And so for me, this has been extremely rewarding work. It’s hard work, but I find it so much fun. The learning has been monumental. I cannot even believe I’m beginning to tell you how it’s changed my life and the way I approach things in life. So thank you to BSC thank you to Matt and the team, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be talking to you all today.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Awa. Do you also want to share a little bit about not just your career, but your life partner?

Awa Touray So I also met my husband through PDIA. So he was an assistant minister in 2017 and was part of the CABRI program and a team member of the Liberian PDIA team. So we met through BSC. We’re married currently and have a boy and a girl, twins.

Salimah Samji Congratulations.

Awa Touray So thank you.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Awa. And I’m now going to pass it on to Danny and then to Matt. Danny.

Danny Barjum Thank you Salimah, and good morning or good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to everybody on Zoom. It’s it’s very difficult to follow up on our three speakers because it’s really hard to add to anything that they said, but it’s even harder to precede Matt Andrews so I’ll keep it short. I think. I think the thing that I really liked about PDIA. Well, I’ll start with me just quickly. I’m a research fellow at Building State Capability, and I’ve been there for now almost four years. And before that I worked in the government in my home country, in Honduras, which is incredibly difficult country in terms of politics, in terms of crime, in terms of a lot of issues, which I’m sure resonates with a lot of you here or on Zoom. And I think one of the key learnings and what I like about PDIA is that it feels very natural. It’s a very natural way of engaging with people. It’s a very natural way of thinking through problem solving. I come from an engineering background, so we’re taught a lot of how you actually solve problems and find the right solution. The difference is that there isn’t the right solution necessarily in development compared to, say, in engineering or a technical field. And so PDIA is a really awesome way to kind of respond to problems and to respond to people who tell you no. And I feel like it’s empowering in that sense that, you know, you’re often come to someone and you tell them we should do this. This is a really smart idea. This is a really smart thing that we should do. And then, you know, this is maybe the best solution for this. And we often are like, what do we do in this situation? What do we how do we confront this? We sometimes shy away. What happens in practice, I see, is people just kind of end up settling for their position and say they’re kind of stuck. And and we provide like a framework to kind of figure out, okay, this “no” can empower me to think about my problem differently, to think about what I should go about. What is it that I need? What authorization do I need, what abilities, what capabilities? And so it’s a really great way to confront those challenges. And I think the second learning what I enjoy about is Peter kind of referenced this as well, and everybody referenced this is how we put people first.

And the power of that isn’t necessarily that you get success is that you get success with the people you work with. And and these people really tend to engage because it’s something different that they haven’t seen. And and they buy into this not because they like the frameworks and their tools, but because they see the value in our work. We’ve had, I’ve had so many people come to us and after we give a session or engage with them, tell us Danny or Matt or whatever, whoever’s doing this, they’ll say, look, thank you, because this just gives me brings back motivation and joy to the work that I do. And it’s something different from the norm that is in governments or in public sector or in positions that work in development. And so it’s it’s just a really fun way to engage. It’s a really human way to engage. It’s a really personal way to engage. And surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, it is one of the best ways to discover solutions to your problems. Oftentimes we come and we see in development not necessarily that people come in with ideas and solutions and try to convince someone by saying you should do A, B, and C, but then, you know, how many times does that actually work? At least in my experience, it’s I don’t think it’s ever actually worked. So the approach is more humanistic more about asking, more about figuring out how do you connect to the people that are doing this work that really know the concepts really well and discovering solutions together. And I’ll keep it there and I’ll keep it short. Thank you.

Matt Andrews I really don’t have much to say that has been said, but I think I think I’ll say two things. The first thing is when I think back to when we started this stuff and in in Mozambique in 2008, and I’ve been writing a lot of criticizing development. And I think Danny Roderick said to me, It’s time for you to come up with another idea. And then I remember going to Mozambique and finding myself in a meeting in the Ministry of Health where it was swelteringly hot and complaining that it was so hot. And then the people complaining that the World Bank wouldn’t let them buy air conditioners and sitting there and thinking, do the World Bank really believe that it’s possible to work in a place where you actually can’t concentrate? It’s so hot and just getting so frustrated at everything about development. And in that meeting them saying, well, what can we do differently? And I literally sat there and thought like. I don’t know. Let’s try to do a fishbone. And I remember like, experimenting with fishbone and it was like they sat and they loved the fishbone. And it was like, oh, they like the fishbone diagram. So we can now use the fishbone diagram. And so we just kind of made stuff up as we went along, in a sense, and tested a lot of the a lot of playing with all the people in this room.

And so this wasn’t something that came from one place and it didn’t come from some like high level of design. This came through iterating and finding people who wanted to do things differently and they’re all over the place, everywhere, right? And actually it’s like finding those people, people will say to me, like, so what then happened was then, of course, you know, within three months we had the World Bank saying, okay, tell us how to do PDIA, tell us exactly what the process is, blah, blah, blah. What is your proof? What is your evidence? And you know, it’s like ten years later we have more questions than we had even then. But then, you know, we had no answers. And I think it was confronting this world where nobody has any patience and nobody really, really wants to do things properly. And I really mean that. And I don’t think it’s that people don’t want to do a proper job. But the organizational settings to be in create the incentives for us to do stuff before those things have been thought out. And what’s been great is that we spent ten or 11 years working with people who have actually said, no, no, no, we want to do proper things. So, you know, the key message from everyone is just there’s a lot of people out there like this. It’s not that they’re hiding. It’s just that they have to have to be shown that there’s another way. I was saying some people will say, well, how successful is this? It can’t be successful all the time. And I’m like, no, it’s not all the successful time. Depends what you call success though. But I’m like in probably 60% of the time, I would say confidently, teams make much more progress than they would have thought. at the beginning. Probably in 80% of the time, they have a lot more fun than they do normally. Even if they don’t make progress and maybe like 20% of the time, like we have issues that we have to work through and it’s a problem. But 60% is a lot, right? And then they’ll say to me, well, I don’t believe it.

And I say, well, you know, you should believe it and say, well, what’s the key? And I say, the key is that there are so many people out there who have been put into boxes in their job. And as soon as you give them something that allows them to be creative, to work with other people, to to be respected, they actually put their hand up and they say, I’m there. It’s not about PDIA being great, not about any of that. It’s literally creating a space for human beings to be human beings. And then people say to me, Well, how do you do this in budgets and how do you bring money to this? And I’m like, the number one thing that we’ve observed is that development and policy is more about people than money. And right now, when you don’t have enough money to throw out all of the things that need to be done, we need to pivot. We need to pivot away from we need 100 million for this and we need 50 million for this and we need this for this. We need to remember that people are the key. And if we can develop policy mechanisms and tools that that inspire people, that bring people together and that kind of empower them, that’s the key. And and we don’t do it enough.

But people are the key and they are all over the place. So for me, probably the most amazing thing has been ten years of working with people who don’t mind ambiguity. Salimah Samji, all of these people that you’re meeting who don’t mind ambiguity or the number of the number of times, you know, Peter came and worked with me in Albania and it was like we in Albania and what are we doing? We’re working on these teams, working on the growth issues and working on like electricity. How do we do this? I have no idea, Peter. I don’t know. Peter was like, This is cool. It’s let’s do this. And Danny was like this is cool. And all the Growth Lab guys that we’ve worked with, including Ricardo, he just was like, this is cool. I don’t mind that you don’t have all the answers let’s just go and make it up. And I think creating that space for that is something that we’ve benefited from and we’re still doing it, but we’re still trying to do new things and trying to mobilize people. The people who are executive programs, they bring that spirit too. They bring that spirit of saying, we’re going to take risks and we’re going to we’re going to support each other.

I was saying to Salimah, the new thing right now is not the mountain climbing that is going to be fun. The new thing that’s on my mind right now is just, in the last few years, a lot of the work has been kind of how do we think about managing time? How do we think about managing self? And how do we think about the fact that, you know, a lot of people who we work with are, like, damaged? They hurt. Doing public service in the modern world. It’s very hard. And a lot of those people, every day, they’re going through a skirmish and honoring those people and bringing them together to talk about that. That’s the new thing. And so, you know, I don’t know where we’ll be in another ten years time. I’m not sure that we have all of the academic articles that everyone else has. I’m not sure that we have all of, you know, the coin of the realm of the coin. Yeah. We don’t really do well in that. But I do think that these people are making a difference where they are. And I think these people are empowered. And for me, the fact that this work has brought me in contact with all of these people across the world, in this room and everywhere else, is, what a great way to spend 10 years. So thank you, everybody.