Jessie DeLano Hello, and welcome to today’s Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education faculty webinar, From Ideas to Impact: The Practice of Policy Implementation with Professor Matt Andrews and Salimah Samji. I’m Jessie DeLano, Program Director at HKS Executive Education. And it’s wonderful to have so many of you joining us from all around the world. As many of know, Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education serves as a platform for current and aspiring leaders to deepen their skills, broaden their perspectives, and tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time. By bringing together accomplished practitioners and our world-class faculty, we aim to foster the exchange of knowledge and ideas to inspire impactful leadership across the globe. Our speakers today are Matt Andrews and Salimah Samji. Matt is the co-founder and faculty director of Building State Capability and the Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has worked in over 50 countries across the globe as a civil servant, international development expert, researcher, teacher, advisor, and coach. Salimah is the co-founder and executive director of Building State Capability and an instructor at Harvard Kennedy School. She has more than 20 years of experience working in international development on the delivery of public services, implementation, transparency and accountability, strategic planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Together, they lead the HKS Executive Education program, implementing public policy as a blended on-campus and online program that spans this coming May through September. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that this session is being recorded and will be sent out in our follow-up email to all of you. You can submit questions during the webinar through the Q&A function, and we’ll address as many as we can after the presentation. Thank you all for joining us. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Matt and Salimah. Welcome everyone.

Matt Andrews Thank you, everybody. It’s really great to be with everybody, and thank you for joining. And it’s an amazing thing to see people from all over the world, from many, many countries, some of whom I have been lucky enough to see and some I would hope to visit in the future. So we are always just so impressed, so amazed, so happy to see people who are interested in this concept of getting things done, implementing policy work. Many times we see people with great ideas all over the world to solve problems that need to be solved. Finding that those ideas don’t necessarily translate into action, they don’t necessary translate into results. We at the Building State Capability Program and with colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School have been working on this now for the last two decades to try and understand what it gets in the way of implementation of success and of impact when we are doing policy work. Why do we seem to have so many great ideas and yet those ideas don’t translate into the action that we want them to? We have been experimenting for a long time. Our experimentation usually involves kind of a research, which we call action research, where we embed ourselves or our research teams with groups of policy workers throughout the world to see how work is really done and where work really runs into difficulty. Where we’re not trying to be theoretical only, we’re trying to do applied learning and applied theory where we can really get an experience of what the real process of getting things done looks like to try and understand where that process runs into difficulty and then to address it. It’s been really interesting to be in this journey and as Jessie said, I personally have worked in over 50 countries, and most of the work has been embedded in teams trying to do things. And we’ve learned an incredible amount about what it takes to go from ideas to activity and to impact. I’m going to tell a few stories about this today to offer a simple message about how we understand the challenge of implementation and the challenge of doing policy work. We understand this as a very simple model that we can take all across the world in all sorts of sectors. We work in the US, we work in Latin America, we work in the Pacific, we work in Africa a lot, we work in Europe. We work in rich countries, we work in not so rich countries. We work small places and big places. And we found that our understanding has developed into a kind of a stable equilibrium as to how things work. So let me give you a simple understanding of things is I think that a lot of people emphasize what they’re doing more in policy work than anything else. And the time that we spend doing policy work and trying to solve problems is often focused very much on identifying that what, identifying the idea, identifying the thing that we think will change the world, the thing we think is gonna be the response. Whether it’s creating a new law or whether it is creating a new incentive mechanism or a new training mechanism, or maybe a new governance regime, or maybe it’s a new subsidy program. We spend a lot of time hiring firms, consultants, talking in conferences to identify what we want to do, what we think needs to be done. In the last 20 years a lot of people have started to realize that you know that’s only part of the story and we need to also be answering the question how are we going to do it. So part of this challenge is how do you move from the what to the how? And when you get to the how, you say, well, what are the processes that we put in place? What are the mechanisms? What are the tools? What are the strategies? What are tactics? And those are really important questions about how that I would say we found people spend a lot less attention on. Now, it’s really important because when you’re trying to implement the what, what you’re going to find is that there’s a lot of challenges, there’s a lot of difficulties. And the how that you choose to walk through is gonna be very important to determine whether you can actually address those challenges as you move along. What we find is in many places, the how, that is put in place, is fairly rigid. We often call it the plan and control mechanism. And it’s like… Writes a very long proposal that gets into your budget, or that gets approved as a project, and that looks very smart, that is very detailed, that has a very detailed theory of change with a lot of assumptions. Then you lock that in through your budget and it’s fairly rigid, fairly difficult to change. And then 10 days in, 11 days in the political support you thought that you had evaporates. Maybe the money that you thought that you had turns out it’s going to take three months to get to you rather than three weeks. Maybe you find that the procurement process that you thought that was going to work in two or three weeks works in six or seven months. Maybe you found that the community members who had said, gee, we really want that now say, hey, but we didn’t want that. We want something else. And you run into all of these difficulties, but you’re too rigid and your plan is too hard to change. And so you actually can’t adjust and you can’t adapt. And so what we find is that one of the challenges is when we get so tight on the what and we have a how that doesn’t let us move enough, we find that we actually end up producing things and doing things that can’t actually deliver even on the ideas that we had. And this is one of the major observations that we have across the world is that many of the ideas we have don’t get there because the process doesn’t allow us to deal with the challenges that we run into along the way. It’s really interesting because oftentimes when people are doing the plans, they’re trying to in the plans deal with the risk of any of these challenges. And they say, well, what we’re going to do is we’re gonna make sure that none of that stuff happens to us. Well, here’s the tough thing is that when we look at policy work across the world, whether it’s done through a project in a developing country, or whether it’s down through a budget, or however it’s done we find that the one thing that is true is that you will run into difficulties, you will run into challenges. And so you need a how. You need a process that gets you working through that. Now, over the years at the Kennedy School and at Building State Capability, we’ve developed a mechanism called Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation, PDIA for short. And all this is a process that allows you more leeway to learn and to adapt as you move through the policy work. Adapt on the idea that you have, adapt on the process that you put in place, so that you are going to be more able to respond to the challenges that you face. We find it’s a very, very flexible model. It’s a model that works across the world. And one of the things that you’re going to learn in IPP is how to work in this model, how to work in this process. It is an answer to the question of how do I do this that we think travels well across the world, that gives people the flexibility as well as the focus to get things done. So one of the challenges is how do we think beyond what am I doing to how am I doing it? That isn’t quite enough and one of those lessons we learned with PDIA was taking a new process to a place is only half of the battle because the process has to be inhabited by people. And actually implementation is all about people. Delivery is all that people. Ideation, coming up with the what, coming up what we want to do, that’s really about ideas. And that sometimes can be about data and can sometimes be about analysis. And yes, there are people involved, but usually it’s kind of small numbers of people. When you get to implementation, you’re talking about lots of people And you’re talking about people working together, sometimes in a coordinated way, sometimes in an even thicker collaborative way, where coordination is usually we know what we’re doing and we’re just making sure everyone does their job. Collaboration means we’re learning as we go and we need to be able to move and adapt and we able to engage with each other in a much more fluid way. So we’ve actually found even in the PDIA process, which is very much designed to be flexible, We found that… If you don’t pay attention to who you’re working with, you get lost. So it’s not just about what, not just about how, it’s very much about who. And we speak about the who in many ways. We say that when we work with folks, the first who we work is whoever comes to our courses. Wherever you are sitting in your system, some people are sitting at the top of the system and they’re the minister, some people in the middle of the the system and they are mid to senior bureaucrats and some people are new in the system. And, you know, we have people come in, they’re teachers, they’re frontline service providers. Or they, you now, a few years ago, we had somebody who was a fire chief in a local fire department out in the West Coast of the US. We have people who are working at the grassroots and who are engaged in NGOs or engaged even sometimes in private organizations and trying to do public policy work with people on the ground. Whoever you are, first thing we work with is those folks, right? You bring yourself to your policy work and we need to understand where you’re sitting, what can you do? How do you authorize yourself? How do your strengthen yourself? How do learn how to manage your time better? How do how to learn how manage yourself better? How do to learn to manage confidence better? How do manage to balance the travails and the difficulties of work with your own personal health? And that’s gonna be something that we focus on a lot in the IPP, because it’s important to people don’t focus on enough. The second who is, well, who’s your authorizer? Everybody’s authorized by somebody, right? And what we want to do is we want to make sure that everyone understands who their authorizer is, what space that person provides for them to work, whether you are being authorized by a principal or by a teacher and your space is really small and it’s just a classroom and I’m going to tell a story about this in a second or whether you are working at the top of government and you’re authorized by the prime minister and I’ll tell another story about that. You need to understand what is my space for authorization and then you need to learn how do I engage with my authorizers and how do i engage with authorizes in ways that build and grow that space for authorization. Because when you go from ideas, oftentimes, the space you need to generate an idea is usually quite small. It’s usually a technocratic space, probably tied a little bit to a high level political space. But then we take that into the real world and we say, okay, now we want that idea to grow. And now we start to say, hey, we need to get more people involved in implementing. And they’re only gonna implement that if they buy into the idea, if they think it’s a good idea, if they think that they actually can pull it off. Now we have to start engaging with those folks because one of the things that we learn is there’s a lot of incentive mechanisms that don’t necessarily run in the positive direction of change, for instance. So we need to be working with those and working out how do we grow that, and we need to be building our space for authorization. So, we think about ourselves, we thinking about our authorizers, and then we think, you know, about the work of these and the people we have to work with, the people that we have learn from, the citizens and the firms who are going to use or not use the ideas and the products and the policies that come out of our work. And so we go from saying, okay, let’s think about ourselves. Let’s create a team that we can work with. Let’s engage with our authorizers. And then let’s build a big network of folks that we learn from, that we test with, that we experiment with, that can walk with, that we generate more resources from, that we build resilience through. And this is essentially what the IPP program is about. It’s about saying, come here with an idea, a what, and then let’s think about the process, a how, and then let’s work together on the people, the who. And it’s one of the reasons why in the course, and Salimah will share this more as we move on, in the course we don’t just wanna have people come for a week because we want you to learn ideas and learn some of the tools, but we want to take them home and try them. Because this work and learning is not something that happens in a classroom, it happens in the real world. So, it’s why our course is a course that is hybrid, where some of it is here and some of is you doing things at home. It’s why it goes over long periods of time because we wanna be walking with you while you try things so that you can ask questions and so that can turn any of the ideas about how you engage or who you engage with into fitted ideas to your context and to you and to your work. So what I wanna do is just share a few ideas and a few stories, and I’m going to ask as we go through that, Salimah just in the chat put some links to these stories into the chat. We like very much for everyone we work with to tell their own story, so we’re not telling it for you. Sometimes we do this through podcasts and interviews, and the first interview is going to be with a really, really great friend of our program called Christy who is from Belize. And you’ll see an interview with her in the chat. And Christy essentially came onto our radar a number of years ago when she and some colleagues asked for some help with some ideas that they have. And Christy was focused on a really big and important what in Belize, which is a fairly small country in Central America. And that what was about inclusive education, where there were a lot of folks who had learning disabilities, maybe physical disabilities, who didn’t have easy access into the education system. And Christy had been given a role of trying to deal with that, trying to make the system more inclusive. The first conversation I had with Christy was saying, you know, she said, we need a new law. We need to get a law that requires that schools and teachers make their classrooms and the schools more inclusive, more accessible for folks who at the moment can’t get into the school system. And it was a very interesting conversation that the first conversation I had where I said to, okay, you know, are you, are you the minister of justice? Can you pass a law? And the answer was no. And so part of this was kind of saying, okay who are you? You aren’t somebody who’s going to be able to act immediately on that what. That is a what that you’re not authorized on. So let’s start somewhere differently. Let’s say, what’s the problem? And let’s say who am I? Or who are you and how can you create some space to pursue that problem? So Christy then said, Okay, well, you know, let me bring some friends. And this is one of the things that we do is we work with teams. And she had one friend who was a principal in a school. She had a couple of people who were working with us who were worked for Christy at the time and who were like counselors to schools who could help with kids who were struggling. And we had a team of I think maybe five or six people at the beginning and they said okay we have access to one school because we have a principal who will open that school and we can try some new things. We have a teacher there who’s willing to try something new and they identified that instead of starting with the law they would start with trying to see in the school who would be interested in doing some work on inclusive training. And they did this partly because we said what’s the problem and the problem isn’t just that you lack a law. They said well the problem is that teachers don’t know how to do this. Teachers don’t necessarily understand who has special needs. Teachers don’t understand that there are things that they can do, that there’s ways that they could be working with those folks. School principles are not open. There’s a stigma around this and they started to kind to break up the problem and see oh, This isn’t going to be solved by just having a law, we need a lot of other things going on. And so Christy came in and she said, okay, um, you know, this is the space that we can play in. It’s not that big, but we’re going to start in this one school. And so they created a thing called the inclusive corner in the school where they started to say, Hey, here’s some of the signs of kids who might have some issues, kids who not need some help. Does any of your kids in the class have these signs and teachers would go and they would have a look with these things. And then they’d say, you know, if you’re concerned, if a kid is tilting his head, or if the kid is struggling to hear, if the kid is acting out, why don’t you invite us and we can kind of come and observe that child. And we can see if we can be helpful, because there’s there are things to be done. And they made it very open, because this is about people and we don’t want to force the process we want to invite people. And, and some teachers, a teacher came and said, Yeah, I have a kid who’s struggling. And Christy and a couple of their friends went and observed in the classroom, and they recognized that what looked like a kid who was misbehaving was a kid who couldn’t hear properly. And so they started to engage with that, and they found a pragmatic solution. And in many cases, we’re looking for a pragmatic solution, a solution that we can actually act on. Because there’s many times that we go back and we find a solution that we don’t have the money for, we don’t have the people for, we don’t have the training for, and it sits on the shelf because we can’t do it. In this one, we said, okay, instead of saying, we’re gonna get some technological solution that probably would be much better, but we can access, we’re just going to make sure this boy is at the front of the class, that we can speak to him, that we can make sure that he hears. And we make sure, that, you know, if he’s not hearing that we explain things to him more than once, twice. And pragmatic ways empower people because people start to say, I don’t need a fancy what I can get a what I could get an idea that is mine, that is our context that we could do. So they started to do this. And, one teacher asked, then two teachers asked, within a couple of months, they had engaged in 50 classrooms. And all of those teachers were saying, hey, you know, we do have kids who need help and we’re just impressed that we actually can find ways to help. And because of that, they start to say, we’re up for this, we’re up for this challenge. Because sometimes people don’t want to jump into your idea because it’s beyond them, because they feel it’s going to disempower them, it’s gonna reveal what they can’t do rather than empower them with what they can. And so after a while they started then creating an online inclusive corner where any teacher in the country who needed help could sign up and say, hey, I have this kid in my class and could someone come and help me? And this started to grow. And as it started to grow more principals started to say, would you come into our school? So you’re not just in one school or in one classroom, now you’re in a district. And now you’re kind of growing. And more people are saying this is a real thing for us. After a while, Christy and her team started to grow as well. And they did the first nation-wide analysis of how many people in the country, how many children in the county seem to be struggling. Now, this again is not bringing a first world solution to this. This is creating an idea that’s local. They didn’t have a way in which they could actually diagnose kids properly, because they didn’t have enough psychologists for that work. What they could do, however, is they could go to teachers and say, tell us when you have concerns about this. And they managed to identify, we think we have this number of kids who might need this kind of help. And they didn’t label kids. They just said, we need this help. Now, what this allowed them to do is it allowed me to go to the Ministry of Finance and say here’s the amount of money we need. Here’s some help we need. And within two years, Christy and her team had developed a network of teachers and network of principals, a financial allocation, and most importantly, they had a law that got passed that said schools need to be more inclusive. So this is a way in which you say, hey, you can start with an idea, but what we need to do is we need to find a way which we can start bringing that idea into the world, and sometimes we make it smaller, we make more practical, and then we need to mobilize the who. We need to build our authorizing environment, we need build our own confidence, we need our network of folks. And we don’t necessarily begin at the end, but we work our way towards a solution that works. This is how you make solutions happen and solutions that are real in the world. So the second example is gonna be from Papua New Guinea. And I’m not gonna go into a lot of detail with it, but I think Salimah will put the link to some of the work that we’ve done there. And I just want to raise the example because we’ve been working for a number of years with an NGO that is working on specifically youth-related issues. And it’s called The Voice Inc. And I use the example because we don’t only work with governments, we don’t only work teachers, we work with people in the private sector, we work people who are in the nonprofit sector as well. And in this case, we had some folks who engaged with us from 2016 in some of the work that we were doing and said, can you help us? Help us to build connections into our system so that we can help to generate ideas that are useful in governments, in communities that people actually don’t just talk about, that people act on and people use. And one of the things that has been wonderful working with the folks in PNG is that this NGO started to invite people from the government, to invite people from civil society, and invite people just from communities to be part of teams to address problems that they had. So instead of being an NGO that was writing papers on what the country should do and what the government should do to solve problems, they said, let us be the ones who create a process and who invite people into the process so that we can build relationships and we can help people develop trust and we’ll help people together get the right answers to the problems that they have. And again, this process has involved sometimes in becoming smaller in terms of looking at the problems and growing together. And they’ve done this in incredible ways in areas related to youth policy, in areas, related to violence against women. And it’s been a very, very exciting journey to be with them. And I think you’ll see some of the blogs from them. The last group I wanted to speak about was one where we weren’t starting from the bottom, we weren’t starting from middle, we were starting from top. We worked in Albania, this is now more than a decade ago, and we had the prime minister invited us in and said, you know, we’re trying to grow a sector, which is our clothing sector, but it’s in decline and it’s having a really tough time. And we don’t really know how to address this because we’re not fully understanding why this sector is in decline. Is a very important sector for them at higher, it employed a lot of people, it, it got them a lot of foreign exchange. So this was a really big problem. Now, in this one, the first conversation is with the Prime Minister. So the level of authorization is big, right? You can, you can work, you can do a lot things, people would say, Oh, this is great. You can run with big ideas from the beginning. But actually, when we got the team together, we couldn’t run with big ideas from the beginning, because they didn’t know what to do. And the big ideas were ideas that were coming from the outside that they had actually already tried and hadn’t worked. So even in this case, you had a lot of authorization, but you didn’t have a lot know-how. And so they needed to learn. So we got a team and the team started to engage with firms. And this is again, remember, it’s about the who. So the team, we said to them, hey, let’s start to build your network. Because when you start to engage, with people, you start learn. And when you start to learn, you start to develop new ideas. And so what you have is your idea starts to change and to become more focused with your community. When you start to talk to people, you also start to build relationships. And now you create places in which you can locate those ideas when they are good ideas and you can try them and you could experiment with them. And so the team started to learn and they started to engage with firms and they start to built trust with firms. And when they got an idea and they said, Hey, we think that this might be helpful. Could you try this? Could you experiment with this for us? So you’re taking the idea and in real time, because you have that answer to the who and because your process is experimental and you can learn, you could try things and you could learn really rapidly. So they started off and they, at the beginning, identified between 30 and 50 problems that they had to address. And you think, wow, that sounds huge. They’re never gonna solve this problem. Well, as they started to work with firms and they started to try new ideas, small ideas, ideas that were accessible, ideas that didn’t require a new budget item, they didn’t required a big political conversation, the firms started to build relationships and trust with them. And the firms started to say, hey, we have a partner here. And what you started to realize that in public policy, one of the problems that we have oftentimes is not the lack of ideas, it’s lack of relationships. It’s that the citizens haven’t really seen us working with them and they don’t feel that whether we in the private sector or whether we in the public sector or the nonprofit sector, they don’t necessarily feel that we are together and they don’t therefore give us their time, give us the effort, give us their space in which to work. So as they started to build these relationships, they said, okay, we’ll try your idea. We’ll give it a go. And they started trying the ideas out. As this happened, they started learning more ideas. And within seven months you started to see that the sector started to recover that all of the issues whether you counted them as 30 to 50 and why there’s a little difference in my head is that it depended how you how you package them together they solved all of the problems the sector starting to grow the sector grew for the next six or seven years all the way up until they hit COVID you know for the clothing sector across the world COVID was a very big disruption. But it grew while other countries around were seeing that their clothing sectors were in decline. And people said, oh gee, wow, they must have had great ideas. And I say, no, they started with the who, with a good how, and they generate out ideas that fit. And this is the story. No matter what you’re doing, whether it’s in the education sector in Belize whether it’s  working on youth issues or issues to do with violence against women in Papua New Guinea, whether it’s issues to with economic growth in Albania, whatever it is, you need to have a process, a how, and you need a way of mobilizing people, the who, that allows ideas to emerge and to find places where they can grow and where they make a difference. This is what we work on at IPP. We spend a lot of time with people, we spend a lot of time with process. You come with your ideas, and we grow the ideas, and we ship the ideas. And we sometimes make the ideas smaller so that we can allow them to really make a difference. So thank you for your time. We like telling stories. We believe we learn through stories. And we believe that stories can also be inspirational. But now I’m gonna hand over to Salimah to tell you a little bit about the area we work, who we work with. And what some of the substance of the IPP course actually is. Thank you so much, Salimah.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Matt. Welcome, everyone. We’re really excited to have you here today with us. And I wanna just pick up from where Matt left off. He gave you three stories, Belize, Papua New Guinea, and Albania. And these are three examples of work that we’ve been doing. To give you a sense, since our founding in 2012, we have actually worked with over 4,800 practitioners in 157 countries. So those are three example you’ve heard, but we have a lot more. In 2019, based on the work that we were doing in Albania, Sri Lanka, and other places, we thought, how can we bring this work back to Harvard and teach it in executive education so that we can bring it to more people? And we created our program, which I’m gonna talk a little bit about, which is called Implementing Public Policy. I’m going to share my screen. So Implementing Public Policy, we first started in 2019. And the idea was, as you’ve heard Matt say, these things, there’s three steps, right? There’s the what, and the what can be an idea. The what can a problem. There is a how, we need a process. And then there’s a who. There is people that we need to mobilize, whether that’s a team, whether that your authorizers. Whether it’s mobilizing even more people in your environment to be able to get things done. And so the reason of trying to link all of these things together, we thought it can’t be a one-week program. Come to Harvard for one week, and then all of a sudden, you will be able do these things. In our own experience, we saw that that is not how it happens. You need to be to work on this in real time, in your context. So that you run into these challenges and we can work through them together. So in IPP, there’s four phases and I’m gonna walk you through each of the phases and explain to you what we do in this program. But before that, when you apply, you need a problem because there needs to be a what. So everyone who applies to the program brings their own challenge. And as Matt had already said, there is a variety of problems that we have worked on. We like to say that we’re problem agnostic. PDIA, we’ve used PDIA on all sorts of problems and people have used it in their churches, in their marriages. If there’s a problem, then there is an opportunity to use it. So we are problem agnostic. And I just wanted to share with you some examples. And these are real problems that people, participants in our program have actually worked on. And you can see there are countries, there are cities. We’ve got Rhode Island in the U.S. They’re across, and I’ll show you a map at the end to kind of show you where our alums are. But this is just to show you the types of problems people bring in, whether it’s mental health in Kenya or it’s low student participation in STEM careers in the Dominican Republic, urban innovation in Amsterdam. Whether it’s EU, the separation that people make often of developed developing is something we don’t find in our work. All governments have problems, whether it’s the US, whether it’s, the EU, whether it’s Papua New Guinea. The nature might be different, but everyone has these challenges. And so we have people from all over the world who come to our program. Okay, so the program starts with three weeks online. So you start with a problem that you’re gonna work on in this five month period. And in those three weeks, what we do is we first start to dissect what is the problem, right? What is the nature of the problem? Is it a simple problem? Is it a complicated problem or is it a complex problem? Because oftentimes what we end up doing is we use plan and control or a very rigid plan-based approach to a complex problem, which is a real mismatch of your management method with the problem that you have. So we spend the first three weeks identifying how many unknowns do we have? What do we need to learn? What do know? Mapping out our problem to be able to really determine is it complicated? Is it complex? What management method are we currently using for this problem? And then the second phase, everyone comes on campus for one week. And in that, it’s really a pressure cooker environment. There’s not a lot of time, there’s a lot time for fun too, but there’s lot of work that happens in that one week on campus. And this is where we really go in to the how. So it is full on process, but it is, we generally tend to use a very experiential nature. You can also see you bring your problem and we will kind of show you the processes. So in that week, we allow you to try PDIA and we walk you through each of the steps you share with your peers. You talk about it and you kind of learn how do I do a fishbone diagram? How do I use the AAA change space analysis? For those of you who know PDIA, you know what these terms mean. And in that one week, you learn all of the how skills. You also learn a lot about leadership. Leadership is extremely important. And while a lot of participants, regardless of where they are in their environment, they are leaders and everyone is an agent in and of themselves. And sometimes they don’t see themselves in that light. So we do a lot of work with them to see how there is this thing called multi-agent leadership. And there are leaders across the spectrum. It’s not just a director or president or prime minister that’s a leader. There’s multiple leaders across the board and you are one too. So those are the kinds of work that we do. But we also know that in the world of complex problem solving, you can’t solve the problem alone. So while we might train these individuals in the classroom. The key thing when they go back home, you see there’s 14 weeks of action learning, once they leave campus, people are very excited to come to campus and they’re like, oh, this is great. They’ve got their photo ops, but we tell them the real work begins when you go home because you have changed, but your context has not changed. How are you going to do the who, right? It’s not just you, you need to mobilize the team. So we help them with teaming. There is an art to teaming, So we help teach. How do you team? We help them with authorization. How do you delegate up and down? How do you build trust? It is all this who people skills that are really, really foundational. We also spend that time talking about burnout, because self-care is extremely important. All these people working, whether it’s from an NGO, or the private sector, or government on public problems. Burnout is real. How do you avoid that? So we spend time talking about all of these and the participants come to the program in that action learning period are doing things. They’re taking steps. They’re talking to people. They’re uncovering things that they didn’t understand. Picking up on the Papua New Guinea example that Matt started with, one of the teams that found out that, actually there’s a lot of, they were working on gender-based violence. They found out that there’s a lot of NGOs doing that. Yeah, but they’re not talking to each other. So by talking to others, engaging with others, you start to understand the lay of the land and ideas of what you can do. We don’t like the word solution. It means that there’s, it sounds like there is one and oftentimes in the world of complex problem solving, there isn’t one solution. There is a variety of them and they iterate. So in this phase, they’re learning about people, they’re learning about relationships, and they’re learning about iteration, taking action, learning from the action so that it’s not coming up with this grand plan of six months where we’re going to do this in six months and then we’re gonna check in. It’s we’re gonna do things every week or every two weeks. Stop, reflect, and learn. What did we do? What did we learn? What are we struggling with and what’s next? That’s the PDIA iteration check-in tool. And that allows this continuous level of learning. So you move from this idea of you say something you’re going to do in six months, it doesn’t happen. That looks a lot like failure to we’re taking these shorter sprints of one week, two weeks. We find out we didn’t have the data. We found out this doesn’t exist. So what are you going to about it? Okay. We’ll collect the data, we’ll go find it. We will do something. And you are constantly taking action and making progress. So in six months, you might actually achieve what it is that you want it to do. But you didn’t know at the beginning of the process how this works. That’s the third phase of the program. And then upon the end of the program, when everyone gets their certificates, everyone joins our community of practice. Now this is something that is extremely special for us because the people who come to this program really care about public problems. And our idea about creating a community of practice is, and we now have it for not just IPP, we have a community of practice of everybody that we have trained in any of our PDIA programs and we have several of those programs over the years that we run, but this is a space where we hope that people can meet each other. We have a lot of alumni across several programs in Nigeria, for example. Can they all meet together? Can we do, and we do monthly sessions. So it’s a space that we’re really hoping to activate. We just created a new platform last year and we’ve added members. And this year we’re really focused on engagement. We have community moderators and that’s another really special element of the IPP program. I wanna show you how many alumni we have from around to give you a sense of how many people have taken IPP since 2019. So we’ve been running it for seven years. What we started last year was allowing teams to join and Jessie can share more about that, how that works. But as you can see, 84 countries and we have 418 alumni who’ve taken the IPP program. So, I just want to go back to it’s, if we’re talking about from ideas to action, which was the title of our session, it’s not just the what. You can’t get the idea and say, yay, it’s going to happen. No, it is also the how, but it’s not just that. It is a hundred percent about the who in our experience we see over and over and over again people and their programs die on authorization. That is the people part, the politics part is something that you have to actively engage with to be able to make progress. So I will stop there. And Jessie, maybe we can take questions.

Jessie DeLano Right, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Matt and Salimah. Matt, I’ll invite you to bring your camera back on as well. So we’re gonna move on to the question and answer portion of this webinar. So thanks to everyone who has submitted their questions. We’ll answer as many as possible. And if you haven’t yet, please use the question and answer function to submit your questions. Okay, so the first question we have is, people is important in PDIA. How do you identify all relevant stakeholders to a problem? If it’s iterative, what’s the initial approach?

Matt Andrews Great question. So, you know, in practice, you do this in different ways in different places, because you’re starting in different places. And, you know, I think what I would say is first thing for us is, you know, we engage with the person who comes and says, I have a problem. And we say, let’s talk about who you are, and how you fit into the system. And what you can see, and who you can engage with, and what your reality is, and how you understand this, and what are you willing to do to solve this right? So we start there, we start at that place. I think a lot of other people start somewhere else and they say let’s do an analysis of all the people in the system and we say look if we can just work with this folk and this person can mobilize themselves and then iteratively they can grow their community that’s how we’re going to solve things. Sometimes I think we start off and we say create a picture tell me who has influence, tell me who has impact, tell me who has this and that and it’s really a lot of guessing, it’s a lot of guesswork. And, but then we get this kind of analysis of stakeholders in this map and we think, well, this is really meaningful and it’s a lot less meaningful than we think sometimes. So we want to start off and say, who are you? And then we say, okay, who’s your authorizer? And tell me what that person can authorize. Do you have to authorize this? How do we think about that? And then, we start to say, who could be who you work with? Who could be in your team? And we’re trying to create that kind of, that human mechanism that is going to move things along. And then we iterate by constantly coming back and saying, okay, you know, is your authorization space growing? Are you bringing more people into this? Every week, we have you or every two weeks, we’ll have you communicate with someone new and say, who don’t you know? And who do you need to get hold of? And what do you to learn from that person? So we’re not against sitting and mapping out what you think your stakeholder space looks like. It’s not a bad idea. But we also are very much for saying that we want a stakeholder space that you’re engaged with, not that you are observing from a distance. And so the iteration is useful to say, let’s start from you and maybe two or three people around you and your authorizer, and then let’s grow that. When you come to the Kennedy School, we’ll speak about you and your authorizer. You, your authorizer your team, you, your authorizer and your team and your network. And this is how we grow things through the process. So it’s not just about looking and saying, who do we think are the people in our system? It’s like, let’s engage with people and let’s build a system where people are really, really working, they’re really connected to each other.

Salimah Samji I would just add, start with what you have and take small steps. It’s people are, you don’t go straight with a contentious boss or whatever. That’s just not gonna work for you. You’re gonna work with who you have and what you have and keep in mind where you wanna go, small steps, that’s really key.

Jessie DeLano Right. Great. Thank you so much. Another question we received, what tool do you recommend for us to identify the problem? That’s the most challenging part for a lot of folks.

Salimah Samji So we have a toolkit that I will put a link in the chat where you can kind of see how PDIA unfolds and the tools that we like to use. But we particularly have two in the problems. And I think it’s problem construction. Those of you who know PDIA and problem deconstruction. The construction part, people think it’s like, it’s a waste of time. Why are you asking me what the problem is? Of course, we all know what the problems is. And the reality is actually, no, that’s not true. Because people think about the problem in different ways. You think that it’s unanimous and you all agree, but the reality that in our experience of over a decade is that’s true. And so what is the problem? Why does it matter? To whom does it matters? Who needs to care more? What does problem solved look like? These are basically the questions in problem construction. They help you peel a problem down. Because oftentimes when you ask people, everyone says, oh, we’re problem driven, but really they’re solution driven. And so they frame their problem as a lack of a solution. Oh, we don’t have a law. That’s a, a law is a solution to, but what policy problem is it the solution to? The, you know, if we could hire two teachers or X number, that that’s going to solve our problem. That is not a problem. So our way of determining whether it’s a problem or not is ask yourself, can you come up with at least three possible solutions to your problem? If you can’t, it’s not a real problem. And that’s why you peel the question of why does it matter if you say this is the problem? Why does it not matter? And you keep asking and you peel the layers of what is the problem. Because we find identifying the problem is a real challenge. People think that it’s easy, but it really isn’t. It’s a process. The second is once you know what your problem is, we like to use the five whys and the Ishikawa diagram to be able to break the problem down into its root causes. And again, that is something that we are very inclusive about. You don’t do it alone, you do it in a team. So you get multiple perspectives. And we like use the word shop your fishbone diagram to others, going to them and asking them. What do you think is missing in my fishbone diagram? Because there aren’t three causes to your problem, there’s probably a lot more. And in some courses we’ve done, people have done a fishbone diagram that fills a whole table in a conference room. Yeah, because these are complex. No wonder they’re still sitting around as problems. But that just allows as a visual, and we like the fishbone diagram as a vision, because it shows the complexity of the problem. And it’s, you know, it’s a visual to say, yeah, one thing is not going to solve this problem.

Jessie DeLano Great, so just building off of that, how do you entertain experimentation in this course? Suppose one changes completely the what in the middle of the course.

Matt Andrews It happens a lot. And it happens a lot because that’s the reality of doing this work. When people are changing the what, they’re not changing the what because, you know, it’s in some arbitrary way. They’re changing the what because they learn. And experimentation is really about trying things and learning. And one of the things that we often find is that people want to learn about the what. Right? So an experiment is often, oh, We try to learn about the solution. We try and make sure the solution is right. Oftentimes what people learn about is the how and the who. And very, very commonly the key learnings are about the people in your system. How much political support do I really have? What are citizens or firms or teachers, what are they actually able to do in their classrooms? And oftentimes when we start with a solution, And then we kind of say, okay, let’s step back from the solution and identify a problem. And then, we’re gonna start to experiment. We start to learn that people see the problem differently, that people have different appetites for the solution than we thought about, that people different capabilities than we’d thought about. And that halfway through the process, because of that learning, because we’re experimenting, and experimenting is not necessarily in a scientific way, creating an experiment with a solution and seeing how it works. It’s more trying things and seeing how the world responds and what the world tells you about itself. We often find people coming back and saying, hey, we got the problem wrong. Hey, we care about the problem in that way, but we found out that actually people have a different way of thinking about it. Oh, people are not capable of doing that. Sometimes they come back and they say, we can do much more. We found that our system is capable of doing more. So the iteration here is we identify a place, an entry point to which we can start working. We identify an idea that we can start working on. And then we try that idea and we come back and we say, what did you do? What did you learn? What are you struggling with and what’s next? And that iterative process is designed to get us constantly learning about the who, the how, the what, the whole system. And so when people come back and if they say, well, we actually think that we’ve got the problem wrong or our idea was completely wrong. It’s not that it’s a statement of despair. It’s a statement of enlightenment. We’ve learned more. And because of what we learned more, we’re doing a pivot to what is really going on or what we really think we can make some progress on. And that’s a very important part of this process. And it’s a very important part of adaptation. We don’t adapt narrowly. We adapt broadly based on real learning. In the policy literature and also the learning literature. We talk about learning in multiple dimensions, not just learning based on, you know, well, is my thing right or wrong? No, we want to learn about our system, and that’s what happens.

Jessie DeLano All right, so here is another question. In the case where a system is already operational within an existing framework, but further iteration is desired and resistance is encountered, how would you solve for that?

Salimah Samji That’s a really broad question. So one of the things that, you know, we have participants come and they say, oh, we want to work on corruption. Okay. Corruption means a lot of things in a lot of places. So that’s really when you want to narrow things down. A lot of these things work in context and particular local situations and environments. And so understanding that becomes really a key place to start. So when people say, and it’s not that we say, oh no, we can’t work on corruption. No, no, no. We say, yeah, yeah. Bring it on. Let’s work on it. So while others say, oh, the project failed on politics. We’re like, bring it on, bring on the politics. We’re gonna deal with that. Cause that is, that’s why you go back and do the 14 weeks of action learning. Hit against the wall, learn, because you have to figure it out. Who else is gonna do that? Or are we just gonna tolerate failure after failure after failure and blame it on politics? We kind of need to own up on that. So it’s really about narrowing down what is the problem and these tools help you with that. And as you break the problem down, you’re sharing it with your authorizers. You are including them in the process of understanding the problem. Not selling a solution. A lot of times we find solutions are the ones that want to be owned, right? Everybody wants to say, it’s my idea. Can I get like my name attached to that? And that’s when you have a lot of problems. But problems, nobody wants to own them. Everyone’s like, it is not my problem. You can deal with it. That’s where we start. So it’s on the problem that we create coalitions. We get people’s feedback. What’s the cause of this? How do you feel about that? What does the problem do for you? Because we have found in our experience, when you get people to work together and understand the problem and the complexity together, they will be ready to co-solve the problem with you. Even in our experiences, people that the team that’s working on talk to outside, they say, can you come back to me and keep this such a great conversation? I want to know what you’re doing and what you are thinking. So you kind of build the snowflake of multiple teams that are working on this, and you grow the space to be able to do that. I think it’s, we like things to be granular and specific and not, I know development is full of these vague statements, but vague is not helpful. Specific is extremely helpful in being able to answer that. Matt, I wanna know what you would say to that.

Matt Andrews I think dealing with resistance, dealing with opposition, dealing with complexity, dealing with all sorts of interests a lot of people, they’ll say to me, well, what happens if you have to deal with that? And I’m like, you always have to do with that. Like that’s my answer is like that’s why. That’s why we don’t just focus on what and it’s also why we just focus on how we focus on who. And, and everybody brings themselves to this work. And so everybody brings interest, because a lot of policy work involves change. One of the things we know about change is the change involves, involves risk and it involves, you know, it involves resistance. And, so the PDIA process allows us to learn our way about incentives, resistance, behavior and to work with people along this way. And this is where it’s actually quite different from a lot of other policy work. And a lot other policy we make assumptions about people. We make assumptions about whether they support us or whether they don’t. And we often treat their behavior in, I think, a very transactional way. And so we create mechanisms in our policy work to try and give them the right incentives to work with us. But their behavior changes. You know, I found in politics, for instance, you know, a lot people will say, Well, this person supports us. And they do. And then in my experience, oftentimes, the politician who supported us on day one, didn’t actually know what we were doing. And when we started to actually have some success, and things started to look like it’s really good, they said, Oh, is that what you’re doing? I don’t, I don’t support that anymore. And so what we wanna do is we wanna constantly, constantly through our iteration, constantly be building relationships, constantly be listening, constantly be learning, constantly be finding out where’s the resistance growing, where are we having some breakthroughs, who is surprisingly supportive of the work, who is not. And because we’re iterating, we can constantly be stopping and starting. We speak about building our stairway to success. And building our stairway to success, a key part of that is constantly ensuring that we have legitimacy, which means support. And we don’t treat it as something that we have and then we, or we don’t have. We treat it is something that grows, that ebbs and it flows, and that we need to constantly be paying attention to and working with it. And that’s part of the PDIA process. It’s one of the reasons why you constantly are stopping reflecting because these things are part of the work.