PDIA in Practice 3: Building the Capability You Need

Camila Lobo: Welcome to Part 3 of the Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results Podcast series. This 12 part series, based on a video series used for our PDIA online course, will walk you through the PDIA or Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation approach to solving complex development problems. More than 1,500 development practitioners in 90 countries have used the PDIA approach.

In today’s podcast, we have with us Professor Lant Pritchett who will share with us a typology that will help you determine what kind of capability your organization needs, in order to succeed.

Lant, you have developed a typology that can help one answer the question “building the capability to do what?” Your typology has four analytical questions one needs to ask in order to determine the implementation capability required for one’s program or activity. Can you please share what these questions are? 

Typology 1: Is your activity transaction intensive?  

Typology 2: Is your activity locally discretionary?  

Typology 3: Is your activity a service or an obligation?  

Typology 4: Is there a known technology for your activity?  

Camila Lobo: Thanks Lant. Let me summarize the 4 questions you have just shared. The first is “is your activity transaction intensive?” The second is “is your activity locally discretionary?” The third is “is your activity a service or an obligation?” and the fourth is “Is there a known technology for your activity?” … So once you have answers to these four questions, how do you put them together to create a classification?

Typology: Putting it all together.  

Camila Lobo: Thank you for listening to Part 3 of the Practice of PDIA Podcast series. Tune in to listen to Part 4 where we discuss PDIA as a way to escape capability traps. To learn more visit bsc.cid.harvard.edu.