Dealing with a wicked hard problem in India

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Guest blog post by S. Nagarajan

I recently joined the PDIA online course, inspired by attending the launch of the Building State Capability Book at the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

A few weeks into the course, I was introduced to the typology of the capability required depending on the task. The task could be

  1. Policy making (and elite concentrated services) which requires relatively few people to implement;
  2. Logistics, where a large number of agents follow simple scripts without exercising much judgement or discretion, and act on objective facts;
  3. Implementation intensive services delivery, requiring a large number of agents engaged in complicated actions involving discretion and interact with people who benefit from the service;
  4. Implementation intensive imposition of obligations, which could be resisted by the people; and finally
  5. Wicked hard tasks which combine transaction intensive, discretionary, and are not based on a known technology.

Learning this typology reminded me of a wicked hard problem some of us had encountered as heads of districts in Tamil Nadu State, India and how we solved it.

The state government provided welfare assistance to differently abled persons, depending upon their level of disability. In May 2011, the assistance was doubled to one thousand rupees a month. However, to get the assistance sanctioned, the applicant had to approach several departments in sequence – (i)  a panel of three doctors, including the relevant specialist, would certify the level of disability; (ii) the district officer of the department for differently-abled would issue an identity card based on the doctors’ certification; (iii) the sub-district administration responsible for social security would sanction the assistance. This would need the recommendation of a chain of officials from the village-level upwards. If the applicant was below a certain age, a committee had to be convened to specially permit the sanction of the assistance. Each of these processes was an implementation intensive service delivery task. Typically, there could be thousands of agents responsible for the service delivery, working in offices and hospitals dispersed all over the district. The applicants simply could not navigate all these processes in sequence. The coordinated service delivery was a wicked hard problem for the district administration.

Years earlier, while working as the assistant to the head of another district, I had seen how this could be solved- by conducting camps. My friends heading other districts and I proceeded to conduct camps for the differently-abled in each sub-district. On designated days, the doctors and all officials from the relevant departments would be available at a single venue. The differently-abled persons who were interested in assistance were mobilized by elected functionaries of local governments to the venue, and all the processes completed synchronously within a day. Public spirited organizations pitched in by providing support for transport, food and organization. Many other departments of the state government that has programs targeted at the differently-abled were also present to serve.

While the overall task was wicked hard, we figured out intuitively that the solution was to reduce the problem to it implementation intensive elements, and also to reduce discretion greatly –transforming the task into almost a logistical problem.

  • Firstly, the agents could not be absent from the camp. A village level official is a busy person and might not be always present at the office: the applicant could now expect to see him at the camp with certainty.
  • Second, the applicant is more confident and assertive of her rights in the camp with thousands of fellow applicants and well-wishers, rather than singly meeting the agents in their own offices – ‘the lion in the den’.
  • Third, the agents cannot wrongly exercise discretion leading to errors of inclusion or exclusion under official and public scrutiny.
  • Fourth, bringing together agents of the same type allowed them to exchange notes, build up their body of knowledge and decide fairly on each case.
  • Finally, the camp ethos was to err on the side of liberality so that more people benefitted by the welfare program. However, it should be noted the problem cannot be reduced to logistics – a doctor or a professional administrator carries a body of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a script, and would always have to exercise discretion.

At the end of the day, the applicant could walk out of the camp with an identity card, an order sanctioning welfare assistance and more. In every district where camps were held, the number of persons received assistance went up by a factor of three to four.

The district heads operated in an authorizing environment created by the state government and could innovate with ideas such as camps. Each district conducted dozens of camps at the sub-district level, learning and improving on the job. The idea of camps in successfully addressing differently-abled welfare spread out from the initial few districts: in a matter of months, most districts started conducting similar camps.

~~ The author is a member of the Indian Administrative Service and is an MPP student at Harvard Kennedy School.

Active and adaptive planning versus set plans in PDIA

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written by Matt Andrews

A colleague asked me two questions in response to last week’s blog on initiating PDIA:

  1. “It does not sound like you develop a thorough plan for action. Is this correct?”
  2. “How do you move from the workshop to action, and particularly to action learning?”

I will reflect on these questions in future blog posts, but today I will only address the first one.

It is probably easiest to say that we emphasize planning instead of plans when doing PDIA, where the former is about a process of engaging around a problem and the latter is simply on developing a documented step-by-step strategy.

We believe that planning allows for learning and interaction, by those who will do the work, and this is immensely useful.

We also see planning as an ongoing process, that is active and adaptive and does not happen in one moment or manifest in one document.

That is not to say we do not start with a defined planning exercise. We do.

The planning process is initiated in what we call the initial Launchpad event, which I described in the last blog posting. It occurs in about a day, where we (the in-country PDIA facilitators) work with a number of internal teams addressing festering problems in their governments.

The internal teams do the work at these events, and our PDIA folks just facilitate the process, taking the teams through aggressive sessions of constructing and deconstructing problems, identifying entry points for action, and actual action steps (as described in my prior blog and in the early sections of our new working paper on one of the teams in Sri Lanka).

This initial planning activity does generate a one page action agenda (or plan of sorts), which is intentionally short and simple. It includes the following information:

  • a description of the problem, and why the problem matters,
  • the causes of the problem,
  • what the problem might look like solved (and especially what this kind of result would look like in the time period we are working with—usually 6 months),
  • what the ‘indicative’ results might involve at the 4 month and 2 month periods (working backwards, we ask ‘where would you need to be to get to the 6 month ‘problem solved’ result?),
  • fully specified next steps (where the teams identify what they will do in the next two weeks and what they plan to do in the two weeks after that), and
  • what is assumed in terms of authorization of the next steps, acceptance of these next steps, and abilities to do the next steps (we want teams to specify their assumptions so we can track learn where they are right and wrong and adapt accordingly in future steps).

This kind of content will be familiar to those who know about our Searchframe concept. This content is pretty much the basis of the Searchframe. We don’t often have teams build the Searchframe itself, but it is a heuristic that allows us to work with some type of ‘plan’ but one that is not overly prescriptive and limiting.

This initial planning exercise is only the start of the work, however, and “you never end up where you start in PDIA.”

The exercise is the key to getting started, and its main goal is to empower a quick progression to action. Thus, the most important thing is the listing of key action steps to take next, and a date to come back and ask about how those action steps went, what was learned, and what will be next.

A ‘check in’ event data is usually set about two or three weeks in the future, and we inform the teams that they will be involved in a ‘push period’ between events. (This is similar to a ‘sprint’ in agile processes, but we think the idea of ‘pushing yourself and your organization’ is more apt in the governments we work with, so we call it a ‘push period’). The two to three week push period length provides enough time for teams to act on their next steps but also creates a time boundary necessary to promote urgency and build momentum.

The team meets in-between the events, and works to take the steps they ‘planned’. Then they meet at the check in and answer a series of questions: What did you do? What did you learn? What are you struggling with? What is next?

The answers to these questions provide the basis of learning and adaptation, and allow the teams to adjust their assumptions, next steps, and even (sometimes) expectations. They do this iteratively every few weeks, often finding that their adaptations become smaller over time (as they learn more and engage more, they become more sure of what they are doing and more clear about how to do it).

As such, the initial planning exercise is not the main event, and the initial ‘plan’ is not the main document—or even the final document. The event is just the start of an iterative action-infused planning process, where a loose plan is constantly being adapted until one knows where to go.

From this description, hopefully it is clear that we do foster planning and even a plan, but in ways that are quite different to common approaches to doing development:

  • The work is done by the internal teams, not external partners (consultants or people in donor agencies). We as the external PDIA facilitators may nudge thinking in some directions during the process, but the work is not ours. This is because ownership is a real thing that comes by owners doing the thing they must own, and when outsiders take the work from the owners it undermines ownership.
  • The initial planning exercise and one page plan is not perfect, and is often not as infused with evidence and data as many development practitioners hope it to be. I am an academic and I believe in data and evidence, but in the PDIA process we find that government teams often do not have the data or evidence at hand to do rapid planning, or they do not have the capability to use such. Waiting on data to develop a perfect plan slows the process of progressing to action and getting to the learning by doing. We have thus learned that it is better to not create a huge ‘evidence hurdle’ at the initial stage. We find that, where evidence and data matters, the teams often steer themselves to action around data sourcing, analysis etc. beyond planning. This allows them to find and analyze evidence as part of the process, and build lessons from such into their process.

[A note here is important, given that some recent commentaries have placed ‘using evidence’ and even using ‘big data’ as central to the PDIA process and Doing Development Differently. I love data, and think that there is a huge role for using evidence and big data in development, but I do not see how it is a central part of PDIA. Hardcore evidence based policymaking and big data analysis tends to depend on narrow groups of highly skilled insiders (or more commonly outsiders), the availability of significant amounts of data, and a fairly long process of analysis that yields—most commonly—a document as a result. These are not the hallmarks of effective PDIA and I would caution against making ‘access to evidence’ or ‘using Big Data’ as key signs that one is doing PDIA].

I hope this post has been useful in helping explain our thoughts on plans versus planning. Next week I will describe how we do the iterations in a bit more detail. Remember to read our book on these topics (it is FREE through open access) and read the new working paper on PDIA in action in one of the teams in Sri Lanka. We will produce more of these active narratives soon.

 

Initiating PDIA: Start by running…and then run some more

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written by Matt Andrews

“Once there is interest, how do you start a PDIA project?”

Many people have asked me this question. They are often in consulting firms or donor agencies thinking about working on PDIA with host governments, or in some central bureau in the government itself.

“We have an authorizer, know the itch that needs scratching (the problem), and have a team convened to address it,” they say. “But we don’t know what to do to get the work off the ground.”

I ask what they would think of doing, and they typically provide one of the following answers:

“We should do research on the problem (the itch)” or “We should hold a multi-day workshop where people get to analyze the problem and really used to a problem driven approach.”

I have tried starting PDIA with both strategies. Neither is effective in getting the process going.

  • When outsiders (donors, academics, or even central agencies responsible for making but not implementing policy) do the primary research on ‘the problem’, their product is usually a report that sits on shelves. If you start with such a product it is hard to reorient people to change their learned behavior and actually use the report.
  • When you hold an elaborate workshop, using design thinking, fancy analysis, or the like, it is very easy to get stuck in performance—or in a fun and exciting new activity. We find people in governments do attend such events and have fun in them, but often get lost in the discussion or analysis and stay stuck in that place.

Having tried these and other strategies to initiate PDIA interventions, we at Harvard BSC have learned (by doing, reflection, and trying again…) some basic principles about what does not work in getting started, and what does work. Here are a few of these findings:

  • It does not work when outsiders analyze the problem on behalf of those who will act to solve it. It works when those in the insider PDIA teams construct and deconstruct the problem (whether they do this ‘right’ or ‘wrong’). The insiders must own the process, and the outsiders must ‘give the work back’ to the rightful owners.
  • It does not work to stage long introductory workshops to launch PDIA processes, as participants either get frustrated with the time away from work or distracted by the workshop itself. Either way they get stuck and the workshop does not mobilize their action. It works if you convene teams for short ‘launchpad-type events’ where they engage rapidly and move as rapidly to action (beyond talk). We are always anxious to move internal PDIA teams to action. The meetings are simply staging events: they are not what ‘doing PDIA’ is actually about.

Acting on these principles, we now always start PDIA running.

We bring internal teams together, and in a day (or at most a day and a half) we ‘launch’ through a series of sessions that (i) introduce them to the PDIA method, (ii) have them construct and (iii) deconstruct their problems, (iv) identify entry points for action, and (v) specify three or more initial practical steps they can take to start addressing these entry points. At the end of the session they go away with their problem analysis and their next step action commitments, as well as a date when they will again meet a facilitator to discuss their action, and learn by reflection.

This is a lot to get done in a short period. This is intentional, as we are trying to model upfront the importance of acting quickly to create the basis of progress and learning. We use time limits on every activity to establish this kind of pressure, and push all team members to ‘do something’, then ‘stop and reflect’, and then do the next thing.

When we get to the end of each Launchpad event, the internal teams have their own ‘next step’ strategies, and a clear view that the PDIA process has now started: they are already running, and acting, and engaging in a new and difficult space. And they know what they need to do next, and what date in the near future they will account for their progress, be asked about their learning, and pushed to identify more ‘next steps’.

When I tell interested parties in donor agencies, consulting firms, etc. about our ‘start by running’ approach, they have a number of common responses:

“It does not sound like anyone is doing a proper diagnosis of the problem: what happens if the team gets it wrong?”

“What happens if the team identifies next steps that make no sense?”

“This strategy could be a disaster if you have the wrong people in the room—who don’t know what they are doing or who have a biased view on what they are doing…”

These concerns are real, but really don’t matter much in the PDIA process:

  • We don’t believe that initial problem diagnostics are commonly correct when one starts a program (no matter how smart the researchers doing the analysis).
  • We also don’t believe that you commonly identify the right ‘next steps’ from a study or a discussion.
  • And we also don’t believe that these kinds of processes are ever unbiased, or that you commonly get the right people in the room at the start of a process.

We don’t believe you address these concerns by doing great up front research. Rather, we aim to get the teams into action as quickly as possible, where the action creates opportunity for reflection, and reflection informs constant experiential learning—about the problem, past and next steps, and who should be involved in the process. This learning resides in the actors involved in the doing, and prompts their adaptation. Which leads to greater capability and constant improvement in how they see the problem, think of potential solutions, and engage others to make these solutions happen.

A final note:

When I discussed this strategy with a friend charged with ‘doing PDIA’ as part of a contract with a well-known bilateral donor, he lamented: “You are telling me the workshop is but a launching event for the real PDIA process of acting, reflecting, learning and adapting….but I was hired to do a workshop as if it was DOING PDIA. No one spoke of getting into action after the workshop.”

To this colleague—and the donors that hired him—I say simply, “PDIA is about getting people involved, and acting, and you always need to get to action fast. PDIA must start by running, and must keep teams running afterwards. Anything that happens one-off, or that promotes slow progress and limited repeated engagement is simply not PDIA.”

Learn more about initiating PDIA in practice in chapters 7 and 9 of our free book, Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action.

PDIA and Authorizers with an itch

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written by Matt Andrews

“How do you decide where to work on a PDIA project?”  This is probably the most common question I have been asked with respect to PDIA.

After over 5 years of doing this work in a variety of countries and sectors, I have a simple answer: “When we find authorizers with an itch.”

“That sounds bizarre,” I hear you say. Or maybe you think I’m just being cute to fit in with a playful blogging technique.

No, authorizers with an itch are key to starting any PDIA initiative.

When I say we need counterparts with an itch, I mean that they are very aware of a problem they can’t solve. Like an itch you can’t scratch, or that you scratch again and again but to no avail. This is usually a policy problem that has come to the surface one too many times, usually where various prior reforms or policies or interventions have not provided effective solutions.

Stubborn itches create frustration and even desperation, which can create the space for doing things differently—and taking risks. PDIA needs this kind of space, and this motivating influence. Without it, we have found very little room to focus on the problem, and learn-by-doing towards a new solution.

There are downsides of working to scratch a stubborn itch. The fact that others have tried scratching it, to no avail, means that it is usually going to be ‘wicked hard’ to solve (so don’t expect an easy path to a solution). The fact that it seems to move around (sometimes itching here and sometimes there) reflects the many unseen and even dynamic factors that cause the itch itself (like nasty politics or bureaucratic dysfunction). Don’t expect these factors to go away just because you are tackling the problem with PDIA. You will hit the nastiness soon. Be ready.

When I say we need ‘authorizers’ to start, it is because the PDIA work we do is always in the public domain, where no real work (with action attached) is done without someone’s explicit authorization. The required authorizer is always, in my experience, someone inside the context undergoing change. This means the work cannot be ordered or organized or identified by an external agent (donor, consultant, or even academic).

My team at Harvard found this out the hard way. As you will read in a forthcoming working paper by Stuart Russell, Peter Harrington and I, we have experimented with PDIA initiatives where problems are identified in different ways.  We have had limited success whenever anyone from Harvard or an external entity (like a donor) has been a main identifier of the problem. In contrast, we have almost always had some success when the problem was identified by a domestic authorizer in the place undergoing change.

This is simply because the internal authorizer needs to have internal authority: at the least, to convene a group of internal people to start engaging with the problem, and beyond this to protect the PDIA process from threats and distractions. No external party can do this.

Beyond convening authority, we find that the authorizers need to provide three types of authorization: shareable authorization (where they allow the engagement of other authorizers in the process of scratching the itch), flexible authorization (which allows for an experimental process), and patient (or grit) authorization (where one can expect some continued support in the search for an effective ‘scratch’ solution).

These are big authorization needs, and one does not know if they will be met at the start of the PDIA process. But they tend to come when authorizers face an itch (making them willing to share, adaptive in demands, and patient for a real solution).

We find, therefore, that there is enough space to initiate a PDIA initiative if we find an authorizer with an itch she cannot scratch.  That’s where we start our work, buckling our seat belts and getting ready for a journey of, and to the unexpected.

Are you in a situation where an authorizer is facing a stubborn itch? Maybe you have space to ask, “What’s the problem…and can we mobilize a team to try something different to solve it?”

Learn more about engaging authorizers around problems that matter in chapters 6 and 9 of our free book, Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action.

 

Toward a new theory and practice of building state capacity

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Guest blog by Archon Fung

I just want to begin by expressing my profound pride about the new book by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock: Building State Capacity: Evidence, Analysis and Action. It is a wonderfully innovative volume that is full of insights about how to do development better.

As many of you know, Building State Capacity is the result of many years of practice, teaching, and research in the area of development. Indeed, it isn’t just a book or a research project, but a whole movement within the field of development and development studies — check out the website “doingdevelopmentdifferently.com” which offers a manifesto on PDIA and has many hundreds of signatories.

The book is about how to build more capable states — governments if you like — in developing countries. This is a topic that is distinctive to the Kennedy School and other public policy schools: their book is not about how to make economies grow, nor how to make democracy work, or even how to improve human develop. Rather, they focus clearly and deliberately on how to make state institutions more capable. They tackle the urgent question of how to make governments in developing countries better at doing the many things that we ask governments to do — deliver services like education and health care, to impose obligations like collecting taxes and keeping the peace, and to make policy and regulation that is based on good evidence and reasoning.

Their book is appropriately ambitious, aiming to break through old mistakes, establish a new paradigm of development practice and offer guidance to public leaders about how to implement that new paradigm. Let’s consider these three objectives in turn.

How do they break the old paradigms of development? What is it that they reject?

First, they aim to reject a two major pillars of common wisdom in current approaches to development. I’ll use my terms rather than their here. First, they seek to reject the teleology that is common in development thinking. A teleology is the notion that things are growing toward a set, fixed point. So, you might think that the telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree. Similarly, we often have it in our heads that the telos of states in developing countries is to become like those in developed ones — that the destiny, in the fullness of time and under favorable conditions — of the government of Burkina Faso is to become like that of the United States or Denmark. Matt, Lant, and Michael reject this view. Instead, like the families in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina every unhappy government of a developing country is unhappy after its own fashion, and must find its own way out and perhaps even its own end point, which may not look at all like the developed states with which we are familiar.

Second, and relatedly, they break with the common wisdom that there are generalizable best practices — say in education, health delivery, anti-corruption, or participation  — much less best practices in the design of whole government institutions. In the attempt to adopt so-called best practices, countries engage in “isomorphic mimicry” so that their organizations assume the form of high-functioning governments with out actually functioning well. In chasing after those forms, governments and the donor and development agencies that offer best practices impose expectations that these governments cannot meet. The government organizations often stagnate or fail under such pressures. Best-practices thus creat “capability traps” that lock developing country states in to failure rather than facilitating their development.

This is a radical proposition. Much of what social science and development studies has been about is using qualitative or quantitative data, or techniques like randomized control trials, to identify best practices that developing country governments might adopt in order to, well, develop.

Whereas many research projects would be content to diagnose this major problem in development practice, this is just the first Act of Building State Capacity. Matt, Lant, and Michael go on to offer a new paradigm that they call Problem-Driven Iterated Adaptation (PDIA). If the intellectual ancestor of the existing paradigm is Max Weber, John Dewey — the most important philosopher of pragmatism and a great philosopher of education — is the progenitor of PDIA.

In reading the book, education is the analogy that came to my mind. Think of a grade school classroom or indeed any MPP/MPAID class. Each student faces different challenges to mastering capabilities like reading, communication, and numeracy. Assignments that are too difficult for any student produce frustration (the capability trap), while those they do not learn from assignments that are too easy (stagnation rather than development). Education requires exercises and problems that fall within each students “proximal zone of development” — each student ought to be challenged just enough to grow their mental muscles.

Poor teachers treat the whole class as if each student were exactly like all the rest (that’s the best practice approach). Effective teachers know that each student is different and they know how to create challenges that fall within each student’s “proximal zone of development.”

In Problem Driven Iterated Adaptation, government organizations ignore the best practice nostrums of development experts from Harvard and the World Bank. Instead, teams in those governments focus on particular problems — say of service delivery, public goods production, regulation, policy-making or other implementation — develop their own solutions to those problems, and seek to “fail forward” by understanding the errors in their own solutions, learning by iterating and adapting. Seeking out and solving problems in this way keeps government organizations in their “proximal zone of development” — building their “state capacity” muscles at an appropriate level of challenge that results in neither stagnation or over-use injuries.

The book is full of examples, showing both the catastrophic failures of the best practice / teleological approaches to development and the successes — from their own development practice, of the PDIA approach.

These paradigm breaking and paradigm making arguments are the book’s conceptual contribution. But understanding PDIA and being able to do PDIA are not the same thing. True to the book’s relentlessly practical orientation, the second part of the book is aimed squarely at development practitioners. It provides a wealth of diagnostic tools — even worksheets — that practitioners can use to begin to understand the most promising points of development intervention in their own contexts, how do marshall the authority and resources they will need to shift their organizations from best-practice approaches to PDIA, and how to begin to implement PDIA for specific challenges they face.

Though not everyone will embrace the PDIA approach, everyone should read this book. It is the clearest articulation — following in the traditions of Dewey, Lindblom, and other skeptics of synoptic public policy and management — of a pragmatic method of development and public management.

 

Register now for our free PDIA online course

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written by Salimah Samji

We are delighted to announce that we will be offering our free PDIA online course once again. This is our third iteration of the course and we will use the recently published “Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action” book as the core reading.

We will offer two courses tailored to different audiences. Please read the descriptions below to determine which course is the right one for you. You cannot register for both courses.

  • The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results (February 26- June 18, 2017). This is a 16-week course for practitioners who are in the weeds of development and actually want to learn how to do PDIA. In this course you will have the opportunity to work together as a team, on your nominated problem, using our tools. The course will include video lectures, required reading, assignments, reflection exercises, peer interaction as well as group work. We estimate that the weekly effort will be between 3-5 hours. If you are interested in this course, you will need to identify a problem you want to solve and a team of 4-6 people who will work with you. Enrollment is limited. Registration is closed.
  • Principles of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results (February 26- May 7, 2017). This is a 10-week course for practitioners who are not directly involved in the implementation of programs but are interested in learning about PDIA. The course will include video lectures, required reading, assignments, reflection exercises as well as peer interaction. We estimate that the weekly effort required will be between 3-5 hours. Enrollment is limited. Registration is closed.

Here are some testimonials from students who have completed a similar version of the Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results.

“The PDIA program faculty was truly exceptional, not only because of their expertise and individual intellect and knowledge and research, but also because they understand how to engage participants in different ways. If you are concerned about why and how countries are poor or mired in a vicious cycle of underdevelopment; then this course is just want you need to help unravel the answers to your questions and arm up with the principles and know-how to tackle them.” Abdulrauf Aliyu, Head of Business Development and Strategy, Inteliworx Technologies, Nigeria

“A couple of years ago I joined the development industry as a program officer for a bilateral aid agency in Tanzania. Three years down the line I was frustrated: our partners in the government were “always committed” but things were not really moving in the way and pace we hoped they would. In short, nothing much was changing. If anyone asked me at the time who is at fault, I would have hastened to say it was the government. Having done the PDIA course, however, I can appreciate better why things were happening the way they were, and our responsibility as staff members of funding agencies in the reform failures. So I am thrilled that it is possible to do development differently, the PDIA way. It does not promise that it will be easier doing development this way, and it might never get any easier; but I believe it offers a better chance of bringing real and lasting change even if it comes slowly.” Rose Aiko, Independent Consultant, Tanzania

“The course was terrific from both a theoretical and practical standpoint. I was amazed about how accurately the issues addressed in the course related to my day-to-day experiences working in development. In fact, our work plan for our upcoming technical assistance program is largely based on PDIA!” Team Leader, Asian Development Bank, Dili, Timor-Leste

“The PDIA course has been for me the learning highlight of this year. The course has given me the knowledge of a process and tools that I was looking since traditional approaches to projects with best practices from elsewhere, solution-based, blueprint-based, with fixed plan, aiming always at system change, etc. do not work in most cases. I have now a set of steps and, more importantly, questions that can guide me in the work with colleagues and partners to understand the context in which we try to introduce change, identify concrete problems that people want to solve, and try to solve them, one at a time.” Arnaldo Pellini, Research Fellow, Overseas Development Institute

“As a Project Manager and Solutions Consultant in Nigeria, taking “PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results” opened paths to new possibilities for finding and fitting solutions that are based on specific contexts and current realities, by working with clients, communities and policy drivers. At the heart of these possibilities is the realization that no matter what the problem is or how complex it seems, we can start acting immediately. Most importantly, the interactions with peers and access to a growing PDIA Community of Practice provide unlimited potentials for the future.” Abubakar Abdullahi, Managing Principal, The Front Office NG, Nigeria

“Having worked in development for 35 years I recommend this course to all development practitioners. PDIA is a detailed process that will facilitate your design and implementation approach. PDIA has several steps. I believe the adoption of either all of these steps or just some selected steps will improve the design and implementation of your projects and programs, with improved benefits and results.”  John Whittle, Semi-retired and Consulting in Central Asia

“Through the modules of PDIA, I have had a mindset change on how development works and how it could work. It is an approach that has opened my eyes to many things that I had previously struggled to understand in my 15 years of development practice, where I have observed vicious cycles of problems like chronic poverty, corruption, and poor service delivery despite heavy investments by donors and recipient governments. I will continue to see my work with a PDIA lens and assess new projects in the same way. It is exciting to try and do things differently in an effort to get different results from the norm.” Cate Najjuma, Economist, Royal Danish Embassy, Kampala

“The PDIA course is perfectly designed for those who are currently trying to address real world issues. It has contributed to increase my value add on reform issues in Tunisia.  The course is very focused and practical, allowing it to fit into the busy schedule of professionals like me and to learn at an impressive pace.  I definitely recommend it to prospective applicants.” Gomez Agou, IMF Desk Economist, Washington DC

“The PDIA course showed how approaching and solving complex and challenging reform efforts are not pinned on rigid, structured frameworks but rather on a common sense approach bottled in a simple method all rooted on the fundamentals of understanding, clarifying, learning, experimenting and adapting.” Abubakar Sadiq Isa, Managing Director, Inteliworx Technologies, Nigeria

“The PDIA course represents an empirical reform prescription in building state capability by delivering results through theoretical and practical approaches geared toward sustained improvement and performance.” Tom Tombekai, Liberia

“I enjoyed taking the course PDIA: Building Capacity by Delivering Results. I have been doing development work in Africa in the anti-corruption area. This course introduced me to some new concepts in terms of building acceptance for ideas and programs and especially understanding the environment in terms of what may be possible and how success should be measured. It has has changed how I will approach future development problems. I very much enjoyed the readings, lectures and interactions with other students from around the world.” Craig Hannaford, Independent Consultant, Canada

“I have also been taught that every problem has got a series of causes and sub-causes. You really have to be very critical in analyzing a problem in order to address it effectively. This is one of the products of PDIA. I find myself thinking outside the box when I have to solve a problem whether in the office, with vendors or even at home. It is in this course that I first heard “deconstruction of a problem”. Deconstruction and sequencing work has helped me to foster actions to solve a problem. Ultimately, through this course PDIA, I have learnt that in the development sector, before bringing solutions to the government, I have to understand the existing practice, positive deviance, latent practice and external best practice. Without this course, I would not be an improved reformer.” Doris Ahuchama, Finance and Administration Manager, Nigeria

 

PDIA Course: Alumni are already practicing what they learned

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written by Salimah Samji

We offered 4 free PDIA online courses between November 2015 and June 2016. They were well received and 365 people, living in 56 countries, successfully completed the courses.

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In January 2017, we surveyed the 365 PDIA course alumni to learn whether (and how) they are using PDIA in their day-to-day lives. 113 (31%) of them, living in 36 countries, responded to the survey. This includes people who work for donors, governments, consulting firms, private sector firms and NGOs.

Here’s what we found:

  • 96% of the respondents have used the key concepts, ideas, and tools.
  • 91% have shared the ideas, concepts, and tools with others. They have shared with co-workers, bosses, and friends; led study and discussion groups;  conducted workshops and trainings; and one organization used the content to train others at an annual retreat!
  • 85% have achieved something by doing PDIA. 

The findings and concrete examples that were shared in the survey have been awe inspiring. People learned the key ideas/concepts/tools we taught, are using them in their work, and are teaching others.

We plan to offer another round of free PDIA online courses soon – stay tuned!

Here are some of the things the course alumni had to say.

I think just appreciating a more building block approach to issues has offered more practical and realistic ways of working.  It has meant accepting that progress may be slower than desired but likely to be more sustainable, because you are starting at the root of the problem and you are working with the grain of political support. – DFID Governance Adviser, Nigeria

The PDIA helped transformed the way I see development administration and governance. I now use a systems thinking frame of mind to see problems and not just throw solutions at them. As professor Clayton Christensen will say, “WHAT IS THE JOB TO BE DONE?” No matter how elegant or beautiful an introduced solution is, if it does not solve people’s problem then it is useless. – Head of business development, Inteliworx Technologies, Nigeria

Before the course, I was approaching problems (ie. corruption) as a large problem to be solved with a complex approach. PDIA taught me to look at the complexities of the problem, the different interests and barriers and how to focus efforts on areas that might actually be amenable to incremental change.  I learned that any program must assess the environment and devote resources where they will be effective.  Analysis of the problem, players and barriers is key before expending resources. – Development Consultant based in Canada

The PDIA course offered some variation in how to think through and act on development problems. As I said in my summing up of the source it is an approach that can be either used in full or parts of it can be merged in with other approaches depending on the context in which one is working/consulting – Development Practitioner based in Australia