PDIA in Practice 9: Crawling the Design Space for Possible Solutions

The Practice of PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results Podcast series

Part 9: Crawling the design space for possible solutions 

Welcome to Part 9 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.

We believe that the answers to complex problems do exist and can be found, but must emerge through active iteration, experimentation, and learning. In today’s podcast, Professor Matt Andrews will discuss how to crawl the design space for possible solutions.

Matt, can you share with our listeners why it is important to pay attention to one’s own context when beginning the process of identifying potential solutions?

Iceberg metaphor

Thanks Matt. In development, external best practice is almost always used as a solution. In reality, however, finding solutions to tough problems is not so simple. How should our listeners think about this?

Learning by crawling 

Thank you for listening to Part 9 of the Practice of PDIA: Podcast series. Tune in to listen to Part 10 where we will discuss authorization. To learn more about crawling the design space in PDIA, download our toolkit at bsc.cid.harvard.edu.