Public Leadership Through crisis 17: ‘Keep an eye’ on how your crisis response impacts Public Value

written by Matt Andrews

This post captures the second part of my interview with Mark Moore (you can find the first part here). It asks how governments should think about public value in times of crisis—and especially about the potential public value tensions implied in choosing different courses of action in response to crises. For instance,

‘Stay-at-home’ orders might promote public health (a public value) but is this at the expense of economic well-being (another public value)?
Rigorous contact tracing might promote public health (a public value) and even be key to helping countries break out of isolation and promote economic well-being (another public value) but is this at the expense of rights to privacy for individuals (another public value)?

These tensions matter a lot, because the organized action of government always impacts on public value(s); creating and promoting some types of value and (potentially) undermining other types of value. Given that actions in times of crises are rapid and experimental, these impacts on value(s) can be particularly unexpected and unplanned. How does one manage such impacts?

As with prior blogs, I provide Mark’s video, then offer thoughts and questions for your reflection.

Mark begins answering my questions with some basic concepts from his work on public value, to help show how complicated the topic is—and how hard a challenge it is for governments to think clearly about the public value implications of their work (especially in times of crisis).

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Don’t be Afraid to Change

Guest blog written by Joshua Higginbotham

Coming into the course, I felt overconfident in my own policy-making abilities. Now, I realize that I don’t know as much as I thought I did, and that’s a good thing! My assumptions about the course were that it would be like any other professional development experience, the cliché “trust fall” exercises included. However, it was far more interactive and policy oriented than I imagined, and the best part was that we discussed systems changes.

Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) was the most useful method we learned. In my government’s structure, we meet very often to discuss and contemplate ideas, we travel and work year-round to get ideas from constituents and key stakeholders. However, we only have a very brief, couple month window

at the beginning of every year to actually change the law. This drives away innovation and stifles the learning process. This course has inspired me to change that by introducing a Constitutional Amendment allowing for shorter, more often sessions throughout the year so we can learn and adapt every few months rather than once per year.

My problem became many problems throughout this learning process. The fishbone method in particular taught me to break down the problem to truly identify where West Virginia’s shortcomings are. For example, before my Harvard experience, I believed that only job-creation and economic development could change our state; while that is still true, I learned that it takes a myriad of changes to fully transform the state. We have health and wellness attainability standards to meet, infrastructure to rebuild, as well as education and workforce development innovations that must be made. Companies are certainly attracted to our state because of our pro-business reforms but bringing up our own people to unleash their inner entrepreneurship will not occur like we want it to until we attack those other problems mentioned above.

Every legislative session, I would normally only be the lead sponsor on two or three big bills that did overarching changes or improvements, yet the impact would be minimal or gaining support would be difficult. Now, my focus is on the smaller problems. This coming year, I will have around 50 bills for consideration, each making small but meaningful changes that can get more buy-in from stakeholders and are easier pills to swallow than sweeping reforms. This course—the PDIA method in particular—is the reason I am making this change.

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Listen to our fourth virtual discussion on Leadership Through Crisis

On April 17th, 2020, we hosted a fourth virtual discussion with Matt Andrews, who answered audience questions on his new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series.

Here are some of the questions he answered:

I am curious to explore the impact of the COVID-19 on the global value chain. For sure it impacted in a way the supply chain, but what will the global value chain post covid-19 be?
I would like to have your thoughts about the impact on the travel industry and possible evolving requirements for global travel going forward.
What will the role of public investment and public infrastructure? Do you expect a Keynes’ come back?
If we think about the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, how do we should change and improve a new narrative?

Thank you to ALL those who attended our third session and for engaging with us. If you missed the session, you can listen to it here. We are now holding these virtual sessions every Friday morning at 9am EST. Follow our blog to get registration information!

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc-7-a-virtual-discussion-with-prof-matt-andrews-april-17-2020

BSC’s new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series offers ideas for leaders questioning how they can help and what kind of leadership is required in crises. Each blog offers a few ideas as well as questions for reflection, thus creating a space for learning and contextual reflection.

Public Leadership Through Crisis 16: Empowering work and learning, even if things seem chaotic

written by Matt Andrews

The last few blog posts have offered various lessons from practice – in Liberia’s 2014 Ebola crisis and Bahrain’s current Covid-19 crisis. I offered these lessons at this point partly because they provide excellent applied narratives on the importance of adopting fast, flat and flexible organizing structures when faced with crises. Regular readers will know that I like the ‘snowflake version’ of such structures (where many satellite teams locate themselves organically around a central coordinating nuclear team). I will offer more detail on various aspects of these in-practice structures in posts to come – including how political leadership relates to the snowflake, what ‘nuclear’ teams could look like, what information flow through structures might be useful, how satellite teams can be identified, how work could be organized, etc.

In this post and the one that follows, however, I want to share the broader idea on why fast, flat and flexible structures are vital in the face of crisis, and offer thoughts on how leaders (or authorized supervisors) might see their role in such a system, and how leaders might navigate the public value concerns organizations face in crisis situations.

To offer these thoughts, I’d like to introduce readers (and viewers) to Mark Moore, a Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School whose work on public management is legendary. His work on Public Value has had a significant impact on public policy education and thinking across the globe. He participated in a Zoom interview with me, and I am breaking it into two parts (one in this post and the other in the next post).

This part of the post reflects on Mark’s comments about the importance of leaders mobilizing work and learning through the crisis, even if it seems chaotic. Here is the video; my thoughts follow, with (as usual) a set of questions at the end for your reflection.

I began this discussion by asking Mark for thoughts on how to organize in chaos (often what crises pose for us), and particularly about the challenge of getting bureaucratic leaders to let go of controls and allow flexible coordination. Mark responded by reflecting on the difficulties encountered during crisis: resources are overwhelmed and not in the right places, gaps persist, [my addition] people face a direct threat, and lack knowledge on exactly what to do.

Given this perspective, Mark notes, “the idea that we can manage our way out of crisis using plan and control is misplaced.” Existing organizing structures—and the controls they provide—were not created for the crisis, are over-stressed by the crisis, and do not allow the learning you need to deal with the crisis.

Mark opines, however, that you have an unusual asset in crises: “the urgency to do tasks”. He notes that, “During crises you can’t forget about the task [as organizations sometimes do]” … “The tasks are staring you in the face all the time.”

Mark suggests that the goal of leadership in times of crisis should be to leverage this urgency and promote learning through the creative action of ‘your people’. “Can you depend on your people to just start acting, [and] report on what they do, so that information can be recorded and you as an organization can learn?”

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Register for our new Executive Education program: Leading Economic Growth (online)

As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to evolve in the US and around the world, we believe now is an important time to convene policymakers and practitioners around the critical economic issues all cities, regions, and countries are facing.

In response, Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education is shifting its longstanding residential Leading Economic Growth program to a highly engaging 10-week online format for spring 2020. The online program will cover all of the content of the residential course.

As participants you will learn new ways to think about your country’s growth challenges and to develop a strategy for addressing these challenges—including ideas on what you can do, how you can do it, and in what kind of structures, just as you would have on campus. The online program will be delivered over 10 weeks, and each week will include two self-paced sessions and one live session with the faculty chairs Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews. The design of the online program includes important team-based opportunities for robust peer engagement throughout.

Visit the course website and register here.

Public Leadership Through Crisis 15: The COVID-19 Crisis in Bahrain

written by Matt Andrews

Hamad Almalki is the Undersecretary for National Economy at Bahrain’s Ministry of Finance and National Economy. He is a graduate of the Edward S. Mason mid-career Masters in Public Administration program at the Harvard Kennedy School.

My Zoom interview captures Hamad’s reflections (as of April 3) on Bahrain’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. It is an interesting case, especially because Bahrain has –to date—managed to control the crisis better than most other countries (as evidenced in the relatively flat curve here—the red line at the bottom of the chart, showing the situation on April 2-3).

It should be noted that Bahrain is an island-state in the Middle East with a population of about 1.5 to 2 million people. That makes it about the same size as Philadelphia in the United States, or just more than twice the size of Boston. It is similar in size, or larger, than many countries (including Latvia, Estonia, Trinidad and Tobago, Timor-Leste, Cyprus, Mauritius, Malta, Iceland, and more). I make this observation because the case will be more relevant to specific places or levels of government than others (as with all cases).

This post works progressively through different parts of the interview, such that readers (and listeners) can more easily digest thoughts emanating from the full 1.5 hours. As with all blog posts, I conclude with a set of questions for reader reflection.

PART 1. A strong, inclusive, coordinated head start

Bahrain began preparing for the Covid-19 crisis 3 weeks before they experienced the first case. They “watched China very closely” and knew it was just a matter of time before the virus came to their shores. A 24 hour War Room was operational by February 13, coordinating an inclusive, varied group of experts focused on three streams of work – medical, economic, and social. The focus on all three streams from the start has meant that Bahrain has been able to balance concerns in all three streams at all times. (more…)

Public Leadership Through Crisis 14: Lessons on Crisis Communication from Liberia’s Ebola epidemic

written by Matt Andrews

Peter Harrington is an alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School, and a former fellow with the Building State Capability program (BSC). In 2014, Peter worked with the Africa Governance Initiative helping Liberia’s government deal with its Ebola epidemic. He assisted in an area called ‘Social Mobilization’; an area of the organizational response focused on engaging citizens—and fostering behavioral change in the citizenry—through communication.

In this podcast interview, Peter describes his experience and I summarize his thoughts thereafter.

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc-4-lessons-in-crisis-communications-and-response

Here are some key takeaways from the interview.

1. Liberia’s organizational structure made a huge difference

You will hear Peter speak about the Incident Management System (the IMS) at the beginning of the podcast. This was the organization created to respond to the crisis. Peter notes that it was ‘hierarchical but also remarkably flat’ like the snowflake mechanism discussed in a prior blog post.

Peter describes the IMS as being composed of many ‘teams’. Some teams focused more on ‘hard’ aspects of the crisis response (like logistics) while others focused on ‘softer’ aspects of the response (like communications, psychosocial concerns, and others). Remember prior blog posts where we discussed the importance of having clear roles and keeping in your lane — these teams were a way of ensuring both things happened at the same time (people knew what they were doing and did not interfere with what others did).

Peter notes that this structure was both flat and hierarchical. Each team had a leader and all the team leaders reported daily to Tolbert Nyenswah who was the ‘Tzar’ of the IMS. Member of the international community slotted into teams (so they too played specific roles). Each and every team was led by a Liberian. Peter notes that Tolbert Nyenswah and his close team at the center of the ‘snowflake’ was like a ‘server’ – the connection hub where all parts of the response came together. Other teams analyzed the problems, came up with ideas, implemented, monitored, produced data, etc. The central team processed the knowledge, ensured it was shared, made decisions, followed up with decisions, and orchestrated the overall coordination. Read more about this kind of structure in blog post 11. (more…)

Listen to our third virtual discussion on Leadership Through Crisis

On April 10th, 2020, we hosted a third virtual discussion with Matt Andrews, who answered audience questions on his new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series.

Here are some of the questions he answered:

How do you best gain community buy-in to a response strategized and enforced by institutional and government actors?
Given how long this crisis is expected to last, what advice and strategies would you recommend to prevent burnout among leaders?
Usually pandemics last for years. We cannot have highly restrictive government measures for too long. Already the economic damage has been huge. What would the governments likely to be doing after the current rounds of lockdowns and restrictions to tackle this
There is concern that those suffering from partner violence or child abuse are unable to get assistance. Asking them what they need isn’t feasible or even safe for them. How should we be getting their insight?
What could be the impact of COVID-19 on Sub-Saharan Africa and other fragile economies, particularly if the scale of outbreak is beyond the limited capacity of Government to deal with it. Also, when these countries cannot afford long-term social distancing measures or lockdowns because of frail economies. Number of these countries are facing impossible scenario and lose-lose policy options?

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc-6-a-virtual-discussion-with-prof-matt-andrews-april-10-2020

PDIA Helped Me Find My Way and My Voice

Guest blog written by Yasmine Robinson

At first I was not sure how PDIA would be applicable to what I do as an urban planner, but as I listened to Matt’s first lecture about why policies fail, lightning struck. Over the years I had witnessed the adoption of many policies that were not successful for a variety of reasons, and often as one of the people responsible for implementing those policies, I felt that I was set up to fail. I knew that a flawed policy could not be implemented to achieve its original function but I didn’t have the tools or vocabulary to communicate this to those who mattered.

The key takeaways from the course felt so obvious after the fact – why wasn’t everyone already doing this?

Define what success looks like
The problem might not really be the problem
Consider the user
Engage your authorizers

Through this course I was able to understand a few important things about my challenge of plan implementation:

My problem wasn’t really the problem – deconstructing and reconstructing showed me that there were several problem areas that needed to be addressed. Simply organizing myself in this way set a clear path forward which felt empowering and alleviated a lot of the frustration I had been dealing with.
Change needed to happen at every step of the planning process – especially public outreach.
Bringing authorizers together helped to break down the various silos of government so that decisions could be reached as a group and nobody was “out of the loop”.
I can’t do it all alone – creating a team that allowed others to grow and learn moved the process along faster and kept up momentum even during slower times.

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Public Leadership Through Crisis 13: Tolbert Nyenswah on leading through Liberia’s Ebola epidemic

written by Matt Andrews

Tolbert Nyenswah is a Senior Research Associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2014 he was the head of the Liberian Incident Management System (IMS), leading the operational aspects of the government’s response to the Ebola epidemic. Following this, he led the establishment of Liberia’s First National Public Health Institute and became its First Director General and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) 2017-2019.

This is a podcast of a conversation with Tolbert on his experience (interviewed by Peter Harrington and Matt Andrews). Brief summary thoughts follow, with questions for leaders facing crises today.

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc-3-lessons-from-leading-through-the-ebola-crisis

1. This can be terrifying

Tolbert relates to the Covid-19 challenge facing many leaders, noting that he was asked to create the Incident Management System when the crisis had already begun (not in preparation for it): “When you’re in a dire situation where people are in the streets, [you have] no best practice testing capacity … and you are setting up an incident management system at the same time … Before you really understand what the process is about, especially when information is weak …”

I am sure may leaders feel like this in the face of crisis: unprepared and with much to do. In addition, Tolbert notes, the country was in a politically fraught position: “The president was in a very, very uncomfortable position as a leader .. in fact political leadership were calling for the president’s resignation [arguing that] the government should step down.”

At 6:38 into the interview, Tolbert simply says, “It was terrifying.” If you feel you are in the same boat … read on – terrifying things can be dealt with. (more…)