Guest blog written by Lindiwe Ndlela, Subethri Naidoo, Xavier MacMaster
This team works for the Government of South Africa. They successfully completed the 15-week Practice of PDIA online course that ended in December 2018. This is their story.
Our PDIA journey started quite innocently with us seeing it as an escape from the routine of the everyday run of the mill challenges of public service. We thought we had a chance to engage with something theoretical, relevant, but ultimately which would remain an intellectual exercise. We are now PDIA converts, for the first time excited about the potential for practical change in our bureaucracy!
During the individual submissions, we were ecstatic about what we were learning. Reality crept in when we received our first group assignment. By assignment 7, frustration set in as we faced the challenge of deconstructing our problem. We learnt that our initial problem construction was inadequate and weak. The reality was hard, particularly in drilling down to answer analytical questions of why it mattered, to whom; and who needed to care more.
We learnt that we could not fast forward to a solution, which is a typical, default behavior. This was new to us. For the first time we had to think deeply, about the need to unpack the problem, using the tools to which were being exposed.
