Doing Development Differently

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Hello and welcome to Building State Capability at Harvard University’s podcast series. In this podcast series, student Ambassador Emily Ausubel interviews Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability Program at Harvard University, and Matt Andrews, senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Faculty Director at the same program. Matt and Salimah talk about how the Building State Capability program came about, explain its core methodology and how it’s being applied by hundreds of practitioners worldwide.

Emily Ausubel Hi, Matt and Salimah. I’m really excited to talk to you today about the Building State Capability Program here at CID. And to begin, I’m just wondering if you could introduce yourself and tell the listeners a little bit about your background and how you got here.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you very much. My name is Salimah Samji and I am the Director of the Building State Capability Program at CID. Before coming here, I have actually been working in international development for 15 years. I worked at the World Bank, I worked at Google.org, and I’ve done some independent consulting as well. So a nice range of of experience.

Matt Andrews My name is Matt Andrews. I am a senior lecturer here at the Kennedy School. I’ve been here for about ten years now. Before that, I worked at the World Bank and before that I worked in the South African government, spent a lot of my time working in development, working on development projects and honestly failing in development projects and then trying to work out why that’s the case. And I think that journey is the thing that has led us to where we are in thinking about PDIA and not just my journey, but the one of my colleagues around me.

Emily Ausubel So what is Building State Capability? When did this get started and can you tell us more about this program?

Salimah Samji Sure. I joined the idea in 2012, which is when we launched the program, the Building State Capability Program and Building State Capability Program basically uses an approach called PDIA, which stands for problem driven, iterative adaptation. And this is an approach. It’s actually a process. So it’s a it’s a tool where you can actually get people to build capability to learn how to do what they’re supposed to do. Because one of the things that we found in development is that oftentimes the capability that you need to do your job you don’t have and sometimes you’re given this sophisticated say management information system when you don’t even know how to use Excel. And so it’s really about finding where the people are at and starting there and building their capability with small steps, getting them to where you want them to be. And you don’t always need sophisticated tools to be able to do that.

Emily Ausubel Great. So you mentioned pedia. Could you talk a little bit about that? What is that approach and how does it solve some of the problems that you saw when you were working earlier in development?

Matt Andrews So I think when we see my colleagues Salimah and Michael Wilcox started to look at development, we saw that there was the strange situation where there was success in some areas and then just persistent failure in others. We started to see that the kinds of projects and things that were successful, what we’d call complicated, which meant that we knew what we needed to do in those projects and you really just needed to mobilize the right experts and the right amount of money. And that actually the development community had learned how to do that. The development community knows how to put a good project together. It knows how to put a good loan together. There’s huge amounts of expertise in most of the areas where expertise really matters. And so many of those things have been solved. But then we saw that there were other projects that were addressing issues that were complex in nature, something like corruption or even how do you facilitate learning of children? And in those we don’t really know what we’re doing. We don’t know the solution, or the solution requires significant adaptation across contexts. And the tools that we were using to deal with complexity just were not right because we were taking what we used with known solutions and applying them with first and just banging our heads against the wall. PDIA emerged as essentially a response to this, which is just a process to address a complex challenge. So instead of starting with solution, you are honest about the fact that we don’t know the solutions. So we’re going to start with what we know, which is the problem, but we’re going to try to make sure that we know as much about the problem as we can, and then we’re going to use our knowledge about the problem to start iterating, to start trying ideas to solve it. And we’re going to allow ourselves to learn about which ideas work and why and to see if a solution emerges. The key thing about PDIA is that it’s not so much the solution that’s really the end goal. Although we like solutions, it’s the capability that is built en route to finding the solution. And so the idea that, you know, you’re going into places that have been dealing with these problems year in and year out for so long, and part of the reason why they are is that they don’t have the capability to navigate them. So if you take them through a structured process of saying let’s determin what the problem is, it’s break it down, let’s try some ideas out, let’s learn. As you move along, you find that people start to build the capabilities to be able to apply some of the reasoning to other problems that they have. And that’s kind of what PDIA is all about.

Emily Ausubel So what projects is your team working on right now? Where where are you located?

Salimah Samji So we have three ways. We work at the Building State Capability program. One is a high touch way that we work and this is when we actually work with governments and teams in government and we are in-country every 3 to 6 weeks. And this is when we actually go we work with the teams were involved with coaching them, helping them through, seeing what challenges they face, what they’ve learned, what they’re doing next, etc.. And we usually work with teams for a period of 6 to 8 months. We’ve done this in Sri Lanka and we’ve done this in Albania, and then we have this thing called a medium touch approach. And here we actually work with we collaborate with an organization and we’ve done this with Cadbury, which is an inter-governmental organization based in South Africa, and they have member countries and they do training on public financial management. And so with them we worked with seven African governments and budget teams to be able to solve problems that they’ve nominated in the budget process. And so we had a framing workshop. So we start these engagements with a framing workshop where all these country teams come together and we help them deconstruct their problem and they leave the workshop with a clear set of ideas of what are you going to do next week? And then they go back to their countries. And over a period of six months we work with them and we have coaches from Cadbury and our team as well, and we check in with them every week to see what have you learned, what are you struggling with, what’s next? And we do that over a period and help them out because what we find is these short periods of action lead to the emergence of capabilities because they realize, wait, no, this isn’t working. Maybe we should try this and give some other ideas and other things emerge through the process. And then at the end of the six month time period, we bring them all back to a workshop where they all share what they did, what they learned and what they achieved. And we just held our workshop with the first set of seven countries in December in South Africa, and it was just amazing to be able to watch how empowered the teams felt. They came. They’re proud of their own achievements because it was them who did the work. We facilitate. We’re coaches. We are not the experts or the consultants doing the work. They are the ones driving one, the problem and emerging solutions is something that they drive the process. That’s the second thing we do. Then the third thing we do is we have we work in a low touch modality and for that we offer an online course. And this is a course that we offer. It’s free. And they usually we have two different versions. We have a version that’s ten weeks and we have one that’s 15 weeks. We currently have a version of the course running right now for the 15 week course. We’re in week two of that course and this is the course for teams. So the course is free, but you come into the course with a team and a problem. So you pick your team, you pick your problem, you come to our course and we will give you the tools, the PDIA tools and process to be able to help you solve your problems. And so currently we have 804 alumni in 75 countries who have completed our online courses and are actually using PDIA in their day to day lives. We found that we needed to try an online modality is because you can imagine that like going to countries or partnering with other organizations, we have a limited bandwidth. We’re a small team. We can’t do all of this. And yet there is huge demand for PDIA. And how do we find other easier ways of being able to teach PDIA Because we do want success for us is really diffusion is getting other people to be able to use the tools that we think would really be helpful in solving their problems.

Emily Ausubel Great. So for listeners who might be interested in taking this course, where could they go to find out more information and when does the next one start?

Salimah Samji Absolutely. Our courses are always there. Registration is always posted on our blog Building state capability dot com, and the next course we will offer will be in the fall. We usually offer something in the February time period and they’re 15 weeks, so they go through to May. Then we take the summer off and we come back again in September through to December to offer another version of 15 weeks.

Emily Ausubel So how does the Building State capability program in this PDIA approach, how are you defining success when you look at the programs that you’re dealing with here?

Matt Andrews So we have actually spent a number of years now on this issue because the difficulty we face is that we work in a development community that defines success in specific ways. In the last 10 to 15 years, everyone wants to speak about results and performance, etc. and it’s a kind of a strange and uncomfortable conversation because people will say to us, we deal in results and we look at the projects and we like, No, you really don’t try. The project hasn’t been successful. You haven’t produced the results. What we see people dealing with is promises. And so you come up with a really big project and you say, This is where we going? And and the promise of results is really, really high. And in five years time, when no one gets to those results, you’re not really having as loud a conversation about that. But if if you don’t start with the conversation about results, people say you’re not results based. So what we try to say is we’re focused on solving the problem and we focused on not solving the problem, but solving a problem through a process whereby the people in the place that have the problems, so the government officials we work with build the capabilities to be able to solve other problems. So what we measure success by is firstly, was the problem solved or was there progress in solving the problem? Right. That’s really important because you don’t know if you’re going to solve it to resolution or if you don’t know if you’re just going to make progress along the way. We measure that fairly regularly so that we we can keep communication about kind of what we’re learning about that progression. And the learning itself is one of the measures of success in the face of complex problems. Problems are complex because we don’t know much about them. Some way you can learn about them, the more you can start to manage them. So we emphasize learning – what is being learned along the way by the teams, by outsiders, by the authorizers. And then the third thing that we pay a lot of attention to is engagement. We think the complex problems are often problems that involve a lot of different agencies. And the reason why they can’t get solved is because we can’t coordinate, we can’t bring people into the room. So we kind of say one of the measures of progress is how many people are involved now that weren’t involved at the beginning? How many voices do we have? How much commitment do we have? How many people are trying things that weren’t their beginning? So these are measures of progress. Now we think that these are the measures of progress that facilitate the emergence of solutions. So we are not we’re not not looking at solutions because we are saying we want the problem solved. But we’re saying these are the indicators that tell you whether you on route to do that along the way. What I would also say about our measurement of results is we found that in short amounts of time the progress that you have in every project we worked in every place has been significant and much more that we have in counterfactual projects that are happening at the same time. So when we do measure these things, we are finding that the narrative about PDIA is one that people are becoming more and more attracted to because of what’s coming out, not just because of the conceptual promise.

Emily Ausubel Okay, so you just talked about defining success. Could you actually talk about one of the programs that you have been working on recently that you would consider to be a model of of that success or show us what that has looked like in practice?

Matt Andrews Sure. So we started in a country a few years ago, and we’re helping them think through problems that they have of stagnation in certain sectors. And so they said, you know, we have certain economic sectors that are stagnating. We, as a government have an obligation to help them. If they stagnate too quickly, we’re going to have an unemployment problem. They’re not going to be producing the exports. They’re not going to be producing the foreign exchange. So we said let’s let’s think about what their problem is with the teams of people who you think are going to need to be involved in solving it. And so a core team came together and they started saying, we’re going to need to have a bunch of different people involved. It’s constructive problem in a way that mobilizes them into the room. So for the people who are interested in the fact that they’re going to have an unemployment problem, let’s say to them, come in, you need to be with us because this is your problem for the people who are going to be concerned about a revenue shortfall come in because this is your problem for the people who are basically saying we support that industry and if it goes away, we’re going to there’s going to be a knock on effect when you’re not in the room. And the first step then is to bring that group together. And they managed to come together and say, we need to do something. And they said, well, what’s causing the problem? And instead of jumping to a solution, the methodology is go and get evidence about that. Go and find out why you think the problem is being caused. And so they went to firms and they said, why? Why is your sector stagnating? And the firms gave them a bunch of different ideas and they came up with 42 different causes of the problem, which we then helped them arrange on what we call a fishbone diagram, which is kind of like a problem tree. It’s a very basic tool that just lets people visualize what’s going on. We then said to them, Well, where do you start? Like, you know, you can’t address all 42 of those issues, but where do you start? And we find that the fact that you’ve identified so many of these causes and you’ve deconstructed them meant that people are no longer dealing with kind of what we need one solution. They kind of say, wow, there’s 42 things. Some of them are small. Some of them are easy. In this case, they actually said some of those things have already been solved. And so they said, you know, the businesses had come to them and said, we don’t have enough funding to innovate. And someone in the room said, but they do have funding to innovate because we have an innovation fund for them. And I said, But, well, what’s the problem then? I said, Well, maybe they don’t know that they have an innovation fund. And so they went and they said, Well, no one has taken any money from the innovation fund. So then they say, Well, now this is what we can try to access right at the beginning. So they took five or six of these things at a time and they just went step by step. And over seven months they addressed all 42 issues. Some of them were low hanging fruit, some of them were a little harder. Some of them in the end, they came back and they said, we can’t solve those problems. They just they contextually are too difficult. What we found, though, was they made enough progress and enough engagement that they got the the confidence of business in the sector back. The sector started to come back, employment started to grow. And, you know, you had significant progress. Some members of that team then started to say, well, these are the problems we’d like to work on. And so we went from that team to working with, I think, five or six teams the next year on five or six other issues. And you start to almost build that that methodology, that capability to identify a problem and break the problem down. Just invade the problem where you can and not be scared about where you can’t, which we see a lot. So that’s kind of an example of of of the work that we have seen. And what I’m describing is something that happened in, you know, a six or seven month period, which is I think the thing that has been the most interesting learning for us is how rapidly you can have progress. And part of the reason we see that is because in many of these countries, the government counterparts who we’re working with, the mid-level people, even the low level people, have not been entrusted with the problems of their countries and their capabilities have not been allowed to emerge. So there’s really a huge amount of kind of latent potential that is out there.

Emily Ausubel Thank you. What does the future look like for the building state capability program? Where do you see this program going and are there any new exciting initiatives that you have on the horizon?

Salimah Samji Absolutely. So one of the things that we are really working towards is building a community of practice, because for us, it’s not just about training people to do PDIA and then finding it useful. It’s how do we build a community of PDIA practitioners, but continue to learn because our understanding of PDIA has evolved in the last five years. Every time we try something, we learn different things and it’s just wonderful to be able to have a community that’s experimenting, that’s learning that, trying different things in different contexts, but that’s also that sharing back. And so we have a real active community that learns together, that grows together. And that’s really something that we’re focused on doing next.

Emily Ausubel Thank you so much for talking with us.

Salimah Samji Thank you. It was my pleasure.

Matt Andrews Thank you very much.

Learn more about the Building State Capability program. Visit bsc.cid.harvard.edu.