Matt Andrews - CAPE 2013: How can reformers deliver change in the budget...

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Key her so first I guess I said .
This AM.
I'm sorry hours later can't blame Boston Airport tool British Airways I'll but to other people but to.
Think the people here thank you to elizabeth thank you to the little keeping the wide in the car.
Is a is the first time I've been a car that has wireless incited take everyone's presentations before you did them so it was very useful.
A.m. a a I also wanna say that headless large today so you gonna be forced to look at me and not at the other screens and this of course Ryan decides that is really gonna cheat you all and put my picture up on the screen %uh.
Much with that can work your butter I'm not sure that's a good idea of thunderstorm thing of their plan burt.
A.m. it really is great to be here and it's great to be on a panel with people who actually do this work.
And don't just talk about it so it really has been nice to listen to both the view a.m. amala that this is the first I've heard you have her term.
Many times and its it's really is good too kinda learn from people who've been.
A and learn about the egregious mistakes we make as well as some other successful thing sweetie discussing PFD mean countries when you don't.
But the country just seems to be a pretty basic issue.
That we keep getting rock so a that the difficult thing for me is listening to this kinda presentation is you know what's your thing three or four years ago and maybe three or four years before that.
And I have to say that the themes don't change and a lot of the problems in a lot at this is don't change.
Either so one of the things that matter talk about the little bit later seem to be in short supply.
In our community and that's called feedback loops meaning we we we monitor we hear but does it feed back into our processes.
Do we have the ability to take the lessons that come from meetings like this take them back into organizations and say let's change the way we do business so.
And speaking about successful change.
A.m. in the loss to you're in a bit of being.
Really trying to understand successful reform I spent a lot of time in my work.
And since %uh become an academic the.
Looking at unsuccessful reform and.
Waving the flag of critique and a in the last year and a half us papers too much time on the other side saying.
What works and why genuinely and not only looking at PFM reform but because that's my bias has been most too much time looking at that.
And the two things I want to speak about today.
The first is what is successful change and the second thing is a how do we get there and hope for the.
Some follows the recent research funding can help us think about both questions.
Now the first 1 I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on because I was following yesterday in Boston.
The the tweets coming from here and I could see a.
A theme love function over form we need more functionality we mustn't be just changing the way things look.
So it seems that everyone is kinda on that agenda.
But it I have to tell you and i'm looking for..
Functional successes it's really really hard to do.
And partly because the stories we tell on not really about that they often still about the fall and I think it may be that we don't have many functional successes to speak of but I think it may also be.
That the language a functional success all the metrics a functional successful things that we haven't thought hard enough about.
So the first thing that I found myself doing when i'm looking for. successes.
Is scarring cases or getting all the people in saying.
You is something that was successful tell me about the success.
And and the thing that they'll tell me about it all that the changed forms.
Now I know that they understand the phone this is functions I'll send them to me about the functionality.
Miss able the is extra functionality but we just can't tell you what it is.
All we just can't measure it and it takes a long time to really get into the conversation of if if we really want to focus on functionality and that's what success is.
Then we needed it measures over to me need to understand what it is that we going to Will's so the concept things that up in looking for in the last little while in the PFM space would be a places where they improve procurement performance meaning that text books that went delivered fourteen years previously are actually to look at now.
And maybe or delivered for four or five years and maybe the the better every year.
So that these positive adaptation rather than negative meditation.
All with the gap between the announced budget and the actual executed spending is is is is is narrowing over the years that looks like functionality to me all in a situation where perhaps the is civil servants who weren't being paid all went being paid on time are now being paid or being paid on time okay functionality and those the things that I've been looking at I've been.
Asking some offense I'm in this room is what would your measures have this be.
As part of this project but I think the first thing is what is success can be measured can we really conceptualize it because if we all gain to go function over form we need to know what we're talking about.
And we need to have that lead the conversation and.
That's the first point the second thing is well if we identify some of these places with a.
Achieve more functionality the how did they do it.
And these two theories yet that a dominate mod the schools in my head.
The first one is the theory that goes something like this: we start of knowing what it is we want to do.
We have a solution in mind and we plan that solution not really really well.
Was really smart people okay and we identify exactly what I milestones are gonna be an exactly when we gonna do it in exactly who need to hire to pull the thing all.
And then we can implement it as plant and we disciplined and we focus then we have some visionary at the helm some champion.
Who keeps a boat going in the right direction and we end up producing the thing that we wanted to.
And that thing just happens to oftentimes give us a good people school to.
That's one version %uh effective about twenty or thirty years ago people would have gotten that the name the blueprint approach which is let's have a blueprint to do the thing and it's damn will do the thing as we say we gonna do it.
Okay and I'm I'm setting it up as a bit of a straw man I'm sitting up obviously people you know my work with know that with that thing up in critiquing for a long period but I don't wanna put it out the in a negative way or critical way I wanna say this is a way in which many projects are done very very well and it's a theory that we have about doing Pfam the drugs the way international organizations think about this and look about.
Work work on this okay the other approach.
Is something that's is well we slide with the problem and we kinda feel around in look for solutions we have different alternatives and we try them all out.
And we monitor how things work and we learn lessons about what works for me.
Also learn lessons about while others things work can we learn this is about something yet to and after a while we come up with some type of solution the and that solution is more of a hybrid than a best practice because it's put a bunch of things together.
But it works and the process is not necessarily lead by a captain that's led by a group of people.
You do a bunch of different things at different points to move us ahead.
To and it's a lot more messy than the first one.
Okay now in the nineteen seventies the nineteen eighties the work of Colton they called this the.
The the learning process approach okay.
So contrast to blueprint learning process approach very sad that they gave that name to it because mine is much better that problem driven it should sit at.
Nation the but people who in the room with know that this is pretty much kind of way win my workers be so if you say well there's the blueprint to push this the other approach if we can identify successes why don't we all ask a very simple question.
When we got back to me look at how they happened which one do we see more of.
The blueprint approach all the pedia okay.
Do we see them starting with solutions and just implementing them with someone at the helm just keeping.
The ship moving ahead or do we see a more messy process so the problem that brings people together that motivates change and then a process a funding and fitting the thing that works the that involves lots of people sub be doing some work with the United Nations University of Helsinki.
Where we've been looking at this and trying to explain what what I would call positive deviance in public sector reform a lot of these reforms in the PFM area and there's no surprise because I think close to the evaluations of public sector and government work.
Is that Pfam kinda works better than others although that is up to a dispute.
And so in the work key as the ONS this a bit at both those things going on.
Kinda disappoints me sometimes but.
Visited both you have to be honest about this.
But let me explain to you when me so the researchers in a recent paper with.
Part of the research with two thirty different cases and I won't go into the mythology because it'll boil you but what I'm going to say is.
This is what the general picture of a successful reform meaning one that delivers greater what it looked like so I generally started with some kind of problem.
Generally there was some problem some performance deficiency that pointed to elect a function that so the concert problems would be the text books weren't being delivered.
Okay the.
And someone then looked at the fact that the text books will be delivered in said this tells us something about the procurement process that we actually need to pay some attention to all the salaries weren't being paid okay all a we had a big corruption problem usually it was a specific thing.
That the blew up a and and and do people's attention K yes the interesting thing about these problems as I see them the first one is that often times they weren't the the problem.
Didn't facilitate change at the point across.
It facilitates a change quite a bit off to the crust.
The other thing is that it did facilitate narrow change it facilitates.
Fairly broad change that went beyond the immediate problem so sometimes you would have a problem with procurement in textbooks leading to a much bigger procurement reform not just of the text books so one of the things that I was it's that is kinda how did that happen and oftentimes you see people behind the scenes doing what I would call constructing the problem using.
Dates and using stories to draw attention to it in to say okay just the story with textbooks this is the precise number a text books that were missing or that would delivered.
But we also have the same problem with bicycles in the postal service.
And we also have the same problem with this and they all said the same problem with that and you taking another problem and you making it a bigger thing you saying we need a systemic but this often takes a little bit of time and often lags the crisis point where they think it's the newspaper so the first thing that I see is a bit artistry with the reformers you take something that is kinda like a moment in time draws attention and then they make it bigger.
And they make it something that they can mobilize a lot of attention around.
To not the same time in all the cases.
I didn't find that they were just problems up on that they were usually a bunch of ideas about what to do about the at the at the start wasn't these these didn't just come down the line.
So this something about the blueprint to push is something about having some solutions in mind.
But notice that I didn't say solution is it solutions in most of the cases we looking at the people didn't start saying.
Well we have a procurement problem in what we gonna do is begin to create an independent agency or we go to create this they say gee this follows six different ideas on the table that's really interesting we have a lot to work.
9 some cases there was one solution.
Was working but usually that was where people had been working on this for a number of years before.
And with the problem was very specific and very technical okay but that isn't much that the problems in Piazza most the problems in key of them involve many organizations.
Large portion of the.
Government's and are very complex and they require a lot of ideas and I think that's what we see in the cases so that's really how they stopped.
Problems with some ideas and people kind of putting these drawing a lot of attention mobilizing people in saying really need to do something about this I think when I'm always speaking about buying this is what does thats is it its people in that process earlier I'm a speak about whether it since I was outsiders in a little while the second thing is.
You know what happens then do you go into a blueprint to poetry say let's spend the next two years planning out what we gonna do about this problem not we didn't see that it'll what we saw was immediate action every single case immediate and consistent it should too much meaning that people started to do something and sometimes they started to do very small things but those very small things allowed them to see what the context look like so they would try something and they would see what the political resistance looked like they withdraw something and they'll see what the capacity constraint was.
That would hold them back from moving further ahead and you didn't see capacity building in terms of workshops where you would train people.
Usual capacity building where people were trying something that I think about it saying gee we now need to learn a little bit about Excel going on in Excel training and then coming back and say oh we cannot do the thing we tried the first time around.
So it's what in the private sector vehicle on-the-job training I don't know if we have that in the public sector the so assault fair amount of both of of this with trying many things the.
Often in small pots building your capacity as you move along that in almost all of the cases there was an emphasis explicitly on delivering quick wins on making sure that you did some small things up front whether it's inches.
Producing in your report that provided more information about the problem then we had the full all whether it was actually the in one or two schools delivering the text books for the first time ever on time.
A small things that you could actually do and one of the reasons for this is simple political support you not assuming that you have it you assuming that you need to build and building it gradually as you move along.
But be so is that in that process they started to learn about what worked.
They started to learn about what words and that was a started to develop the capacity.
And the political support to pull the thing of on a bigger scale.
The Jesuit became interesting for PDA.
Most to those cases it then moved into a much more formal project process.
Once they had some idea about what they wanted to do there was a process.
Locket be people said now we have to scale.
Well now we have to defuse it well now we have to deepen it and now we have to use a more blueprint approach to do that DRA we need to actually think about this very very seriously and we have to put a process in place.
We we do it in a more disciplined way a.m. where the use mmm more Linea management techniques.
And in most cases you had this kind of transition into this formal place.
So gay it's a little bit about now the third thing was you know who was doing this.
And remember the two.
Alternatives the one is that you have a champion at their home in the other one is that you have the multi.
Multi-agent group which is what kinda I see in most cases in every single case we looked at we had a multi-agent group every single case they were people providing different functions.
That all involved leadership pay the consequences will look to one who was it that was defining the problems.
Now that's a leadership role because coming up with the problem in.
You know trying to say said the people things are going wrong is sometimes a risky endeavor especially if you're in governments and sometimes if you in international organizations to.
Second thing is there were people who came up with new ideas.
Bringing new ideas to the fore is also potentially risky thing to do.
It's also something that takes time away from your normal job so it requires people to stretch themselves to do that the third thing we looked at is as a leadership function was having both exercising authority in using the authority to allow this to move on the fourth one was motivating and inspiring the kind of charismatic leader the first one was.
A.m. the.
The it the empowering agents so if agents came in they said will we need training she giving them the trainee.
With they said we need to be able to go and see what's going on in this country.
Actually allow them to do that K leadership election giving them money.
And other resources convening teams.
And connecting people together in the process.
Was at the functions now we looked over 30 cases and we found that the average number of people playing these.
These roles was nineteen each case.
Meaning that is a lot of space for a lot of leadership in riffle.
Not only a lot of space love need for a lot.
Leadership beautiful the other side it is in about of the cases we did find that there was a the so essentially ahead students bluntly.
Coding the cases and I had to students should ever seen the and they had to say was then outstanding leader.
And in the head to identify that was it was really interesting because the bias in the cases I use cases to teach with is always towards having an outstanding leader because when you teach something it's really useful developments agonist right.
Students like to come to think that they are that person I'm so.
I thought you know 30 under 30 we would have that we actually headed in 12 through any interesting in a bunch of them in about eight in the Sudan said there was an outstanding leader and in the identified different people which is really interesting in itself in other places they said no that wasn't an outstanding leader but with the champion was in place.
Within because I could look at what functions these people dead I could map to see did they do similar things in different and startlingly they absolutely did.
The Champions did three things reliable the one thing is that they.
Gave authorization for the riffle the second thing that they did.
Was they convened teams they convene.
Teams and the third thing that they did was that they motivated and inspired people along the way.
That's a really interesting thing because they didn't do a bunch of other things it's not that that person who was the champion the captain was defining the problem identifying the solution giving employees in information on how to implement it providing the money or even empowering the agents that was being done by the people and almost seemed in the that we looked at the two champions understood.
Precisely what they needed to do and precisely what they shouldn't be doing and that they understood that they needed to get people to do those are the rules.
I think it's quite a powerful and interesting this so the question is what was the role that the outsiders so we purposefully chose cases where they are outside organizations involved in.
Every single case because a lot of people would say well of course you gonna find this if it's kinda the domestically inspired agenda but we found that outside organizations can play nice day.
Even when the agenda is to Mystic inspired even Wayne the agenda is about solving local problems and not necessarily introducing external solutions.
The number one thing that the outside agents that was provide money nah notice.
The number one thing they did was provide money not provide to go behind their ideas provide money provide money to support when the support was needed to go behind the government's idea as to what they wanted to do the two other things that we did see them doing.
The one was sometimes I'm providing some ideas okay but it wasn't the idea was one about the ideas that could be provided.
And the other thing was acting as connectors ok on penis some other cases it seemed that the outside.
Agent and I think this goes a little bit it seems presentation in the idea of the.
The kinda trusted confidante maybe it to an outside agent could have trust amongst multiple agents and help them to engage with each other but that wasn't that wasn't as as frequent as I thought it might be.
So there's lots of PDA is lots of what I think.
Is the way that this should happen and then there's a lot of the blueprint approach to and it's about isn't ought to getting successful change happening it's not about one or the other it's not about some routine way.
I think it's partly about starting with problems and allying yourself some flexibility to find a solution that fits.
Where and in that process to build the capacity to pull it off.
But then knowing the precise moment we need to bring a lot of money in and look the thing in and actually being disciplined into the system it's about having a lot of people engaging providing leadership but having someone who may be can can can steady this thing along ensure that the authorization is there when you need.
Authorization because it does matter.
I'm and it certainly is about a.m..
The the having having these groups work in someone convening that.
So you know that the final thing that is interesting to me when I looked at this is.
In the two models in the blueprint to put you would come out with some.
Clear-cut this practice this is the solution we were after and and it's an incentive I think that we created many countries because we have the measures like P so that do you gonna say this is but good practices and this is what you know less than good practices so what we look at is it will what they come up with that they come up with what people say it is the right thing or did they come up with something else the all-star game was both is they came up with something else that allowed the functionality but usually in bed with in that was some elements all the international best practice that with Paul took the solution but also allowed them to have legitimacy outside to be seen to be doing something that that that that that could be seen as respectable.
Now the situation interesting to me because lost women who work on institutional development said that most institutions developed through a process a brick a large meaning that you take from a lot of different places.
And I think if she were kinda he earned I don't want to kinda you know assume that I know what's what was in her mind when she was writing these papers but she would say something like this:.
Simply of them is the best practice ideas.
Have a lot of significance in the discussion if you can break them down and find out the parts it then that actually travel to the places that you want to go and if you willing for those parts to be meshed in merged and a and mashed up with some local content.
That actually gives them laugh and makes them work.
And that's what we see in these cases so let me conclude by saying so wats which is think it's good thing to say so what I'm.
Does the first thing is i think thats the.
We do have successful reforms I think that would be a successful reforms meaning.
Reforms will be improved functionality i think thats they are still the exception rather than the rule.
And i think thats we week on prove.
That I'm wrong because we don had very good metrics ok what functionality looks like anyway so anybody who wants to take up the challenge should do the first thing that we need to do is a group.
And as a community is work at what functionality means and create measures I'll functionality that matter so that we can actually put some meaning behind this function over form agenda.
The second thing is I think that we has some evidence.
About ways in which success happens.
And I think that success does happen when you have a problem and it does happen when you have a process that allows flexibility up front.
To find solutions but then also at the right moment allows you to come in.
With enough scale and enough discipline to actually implement also think that we know oh little bit about the people factor.
So some other text coming %uh the 3.
Treats yesterday saying we don't know about the people fact I think we do know that about we do know that you do need lot other leadership to make these things work.
We know that that leadership call on come from one person and we know that we need to build these leadership teams and they need to include.
Champions but those champions up love the solution of decisions the final thing I think that we know is we do know.
That the solution sometimes look a little bit strange.
And sometimes they not what we think the is.
The best practice or sometimes not even the good practice but if they are the functional practice we need to start getting comfortable with my favorite the picture yea reasons that have been hit by we need to accept that.
Maybe we need a camel in the Sahara it might be smelly and it might not look that good but it works.


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