PDIA in Practice 10: Building and Maintaining Authorization

The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results Podcast series Part 10: Building and maintaining authorization Welcome to Part 10 of the Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results Podcast series. This 12 part series, based on a video series used for our PDIA online course, will walk you through the PDIA or Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation approach to solving complex development problems. More than 1,500 development practitioners in 90 countries have used the PDIA approach. Authorization is a necessary condition to build state capability. However, it is not easy to build authorization to act. In today’s podcast, Professor Matt Andrews will discuss the challenges of gaining authorization and offer practical ideas to address them. Matt, can you share with our listeners what you mean by authority and why this is important for building state capability? Understanding Your Authorizing Environment Thanks Matt. People often make assumptions about their own bureaucracy. Can you share more about the difference between an ideal and a real bureaucracy? Ideal vs. Real Bureaucracy Can you further explain what you mean by the reality of authority? What does it look like? Fragmented and Dysfunctional Authority. You often say that maintaining support in a change process is a real challenge. How should our listeners grow and maintain their authority? Maintaining Your Authorizing Environment Thank you for listening to Part 10 of the Practice of PDIA: Podcast series. Tune in to listen to Part 11 where we will discuss iteration. To learn more about building and maintaining authorization in PDIA, download our toolkit at bsc.cid.harvard.edu.