The reality of public service is that you are often bogged down with routine tasks that don’t often allow you the room to innovate and initiate. So, in an environment that is very reactionary, the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) project provided an exciting avenue to be proactive in tackling public financial management (PFM) problems. The team spent a 7-month long journey of discovery and learning in tackling the problem of high virements and arrears leading to a misalignment in the appropriated budget and spending.
We recently wrote about the closing workshop we held in December, in collaboration with CABRI, for the Building PFM Capabilities in Africa program. There is now a summary event page on the CABRI website with all of the presentations from the seven participating country teams. During the workshop, each team presented on the progress they made on their self-identified problems over the previous six months, the lessons they learned, and their next steps. (more…)
Taking stock of our achievements in 2017
written by Salimah Samji
The Building State Capability (BSC) program had a very busy 2017. We are a small team of doers who are constantly testing, learning, reflecting, and adapting our approach – essentially PDIAing our way forward, often while charting new waters. (more…)
Learning to improve Sri Lanka’s business and investment climate using PDIA
written by Peter Harrington
This past week, the Building State Capability (BSC) program published two new papers about our work doing PDIA-in-practice in Sri Lanka.
The first paper is about working to improve Sri Lanka’s business and investment climate, and is the subject of this blog post. The second is about working to promote foreign direct investment in Sri Lanka, and will be covered in a separate post . (more…)
PDIA and PFM in Africa
written by Salimah Samji
We just held our final workshop for the Building PFM Capabilities in Africa Program, in collaboration with CABRI, in Johannesburg from December 11-13, 2017. Teams from Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, The Gambia, and The Kingdom of Lesotho, participated in this program.
For the past 30 years, governments across Africa have been implementing public financial management (PFM) reforms with mixed results. While budgets, laws and processes have improved, they are often not effectively implemented (Andrews 2010). Technical solutions, commonly copied from upper-income countries, do not always take into account the local context and can lead to capacity gaps and a lack of ownership when the project finishes and the consultants leave. (more…)
Register now for the free PDIA online course targeted to climate change adaptation!
<update>: Registration is currently closed for this course.
We are delighted to announce that we will be offering The Practice of PDIA: Adapting to Climate Change,from September 24 – December 17, 2017.(more…)
Register for our free PDIA online course!
written by Salimah Samji
<update>: Registration is currently closed for this course.
We are delighted to announce that we will be offering The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results once again,from September 3 – December 17, 2017.(more…)
Democratizing PDIA knowledge one practitioner at a time
written by Salimah Samji
We now have 569 development practitioners in 64 countries who have successfully completed a version of our free PDIA course.
Since we began our online journey in November 2015, we have learned, iterated and adapted our course three times, essentially PDIA-ing our way forward. More than 80% of each cohort has completed our course evaluation, which has enriched our understanding of how our content was received, as well as helped us identify learning gaps. To address some of these gaps, we went against conventional MOOC wisdom and increased the length of our courses in our last offering, by adding 2 weeks to Principles and 4 weeks to Practice. As we had hoped, this change did improve the learning and did not significantly change the attrition rates or the overall rating of the course.
Here’s what we have learned in the third iteration:
Groups in the Practice course were able to hold their members accountable and they learned how to work together. 30 groups working on problems in 15 countries successfully completed the course in June 2017.
The practical parts of the course continue to be rated as most useful. In particular, problem construction, deconstruction, crawling the design space, authorization, isomorphic mimicry, reflections, and multi-agent leadership were listed as key takeaways for both the Practice and Principles courses. In their words:
“Construction and the deconstruction of problems. Because it helped me focus on smaller element of a complex problem by the help of a fishbone, which in return helped me solved complex problem with ease.”
“Authorisation – the clear articulation of what authorisation is, why it’s important to have, and why conflicting or unclear lines of authority can cause program failure or lack of authority to deliver a program.”
“Crawling the Design Space Worksheet helped me to apply the concepts and tools in a real problem.”
“Reflections, which allowed me to apply the learnt knowledge to my particular local context and experience.”
“The real-life based experience, very hands on approach and some of the fundamental issues and reflections such as a new perspective on leadership in development contexts or tacit knowledge and ways to acquire it or how change happens in practice.”
The participants of the Practice course, a course for self-created groups working on a problem of their own, also listed change space analysis/AAA, iteration, teamwork, small steps, patience/persistence/grit, and contextualization as key takeaways highlighting the fact that they had understood the true meaning of doing PDIA. In their words:
“The fishbone diagram served as a starting point for deconstructing and constructing our problem(s) and then served as a basis for the rest of the course, namely designing our entry points and interventions.”
“The identifying change space enabled one know that even if there is small change space, there is still something one can do.”
“The team exercises and bonding it brought about, the content of the course, concepts and ideas about leadership, change space etc. Above all, working contextually to solve problems.”
“The PDIA tools are tangible outputs that I can easily explain how to use when approaching future problems. However, I also see the value in writing the reflections, as this cemented the important of the feedback process in learning from what worked and what didn’t.”
“I have learned that it may be scary to thread through the unknown, but it is the best approach to find best fit solutions to an identified problem.”
“The iterations helped bring theory into focus by practicing what we understood intellectually.”
“The iterations. I believe it is the most important aspect of PDIA and without it chances of failure are great.”
We are delighted to announce that we will be offering the Practice of PDIA beginning September 3, 2017. Registration opens on Wednesday August 23. Stay tuned for more details!
Sequencing in the construction of State capacity: Walk before you can run
Guest blog by Ajay Shah
In thinking about the State, there are two useful principles:
We should embark on things that we can do (i.e. don’t take on things that we don’t have the ability to do); and
We should walk before we run (i.e. do simple things, achieve victory, then move on to a more complex problem).
These simple and obvious ideas have interesting implications for how we think about doing public policy and public administration in a place like India, where there is a crisis of State capacity, where numerous policy initiatives break down in the implementation.
