Violence prevention against children in Portugal

Guest blog by João Duarte, IPP ’26

When someone says “I don’t know”, I have learned that it can mean one of two things – either that person didn’t do their homework, or he or she is wise enough to realize the little we all actually know. It requires humility, but also a big dose of courage. And that’s how this course started. It makes you realize, or better yet, makes you admit to yourself that most probably the problem you were trying to solve is too complex for you to know it all already.  

That was my case.  

Violence against children is a multi-sectoral issue, interconnected with pretty much everything, deep within society, cultures, customs that many times start even before a child is born. Bringing a preventive approach to a whole system with decades that was designed to just respond when violence happens is not an easy task.  

Any methodology that starts with the problem is obvious. One of Einstein’s most famous quotes is exactly about that. We intrinsically know its importance. But PDIA (Problem Drive Iterative Approach) takes it to a whole new level. It pushes you to dissect the problem incessantly, diligently, almost as an obsession. The more I dug, the more I understood how little I knew about the vastness and complexity of the problem I was trying to solve.  

My first feeling was overwhelming. I was flooded with a deep sense of being impostor, maybe even incompetence. How come I don’t know in depth the problem I am trying to address? I have come to realize I know so little about it, and the more I dig, more complexity I find. That’s where the fishbone comes in handy.  

You don’t solve a problem by yourself, so you need to frame it in a way that it is important for others to care. Again, one of those details that Matt and Salimah highlighted incessantly, that can completely shape the success of your approach.  

So, with a problem well framed and a skeleton of a fish, each bone with a sub-cause of the problem, you start to have a broader view of the pieces of the puzzle. After dozens of tries, there you are looking at your fishbone, proud that you view the problem in full, only to wonder, ok, now I understand it a bit better, but how the hell do I go about it? 

When I analyzed the change space of each sub-problem and understood which stakeholders I have most chances to engage in successfully, that was like a revelation.  

For so long at my organization we knew we were advocating for the right change, the best public policy within a specific area, backed by solid evidence, yet we were not being listened to. So, we kept shouting and shouting louder, not few times with little success. This analysis gives you a prioritized strategy of engagement. That’s gold.  

But the Social Affairs State Secretary or the Health Ministry are crucial to address this problem, how can we not approach them right away? My inner voice, screaming inside my head.  

And, as if Matt could listen to my insides crying out in revolt, he would naturally and calmly explain, like he always does, that by building legitimacy and/or increasing authorization with other stakeholder elsewhere, we are building or increasing change space in very same places that we wanted to enter. We just need to be strategic. And nurture in ourselves vast reserves of patience.   

(When you realize that a paper airplanes competition helps you better understand public policy implementation.) 

Moving onwards, you finally found the entry points and started to engage, learn more in depth about the problem, expand your authorization, but even with patience, it’s taking forever already… how do you keep up? The answer was as simple as annoying.  

Small steps. Really? Our whole lives we were being told about thinking big and here, in public policy, where you change the course of a country, we think small? More or less. Think big, start small. And the small will get slightly bigger, and bigger and if you build legitimacy with the functionality (sorry for the PDIA jargon), you open up a whole new world of opportunities to actually solve the problem.  

And with small steps, comes small wins. And small wins fuel motivation because it gives you a heightened sense of progress.  

Once I heard that the way to eat an elephant is by cutting it into pieces. Well, PDIA teaches you pretty much that. My sense of frustration by the hindered progress, by the not moving the needle, dissipated. Well, not fully, but I started to get, week by week, a sense of moving forward, of achievement. That’s another perk of PDIA.  

Small steps are tied with learning, or at least should be, because only by understanding the problem can you solve it. So small steps can mean having a brief call with a child protection system specialist. Ring that mid-level social security officer that deeply knows the system. Or go on a field visit to a foster care, and talk to the specialists feeling all the ripple effects of public policies in the front lines, daily. And in doing so you not only learn about the granularities of the problem you are addressing but you also increase your authorization. You co-create with people within the system. You create an army of allies.  

Organizations that don’t learn stagnate and die, so building an organization that uses learning as a KPI seems obvious right? PDIA takes that very seriously, with learning logs (can be just an excel sheet), simple but effective approaches that I am already using with my team.   

The last extremely useful perspective of PDIA is about authorization. You do nothing by yourself. Either you are leading and organization, in the middle of it or you need to engage with peers at the same level in other entities, you need legitimacy to move things forward. By understanding (and pushing) the authorization space you have within your organization, and by engaging with other organizations to expand it too, that’s going to be key in what you are going to achieve. That was a big lesson and made me understand my authorization space within my organization, but upwards and downwards, and how can I push it, slowly, to be more effective at what I do.  

This course is about public policy, but it could be about anything, really. It’s so obvious that is annoying, I have to say. It’s so obvious, so well supported by grounded evidence, that it’s disruptive. Above all it connects a lot of pieces that were missing, at least in my mental puzzle.  

If master Yoda taught public policy implementation, this might have been what he taught.  

This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 33 Participants successfully completed this 5-month hybrid program in September 2026. These are their learning journey stories.