Center for Public Leadership

Many states possess substantial capacity but experience gaps between potential and performance. This paper argues that the gaps reflect differences in state capability, defined as the empowered ability of state agents to transform capacity into performance. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience with Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), the paper examines how state capabilities develop and what role outsiders can play in supporting their development. PDIA combines action learning, through which insiders build capability by working on real problems, and action research, through which outsiders learn about capability by accompanying these processes. Thus, capabilities emerge through repeated cycles of action, reflection, experimentation, and adaptation. The paper also uses episodes from the television series Ted Lasso as a metaphor for this process, illustrating how a coach from the outside contributes not by providing solutions but by creating conditions in which individuals and teams learn, adapt, and discover their own capabilities in and across multiple moments. The findings challenge conventional approaches to external assistance. Capability is not built through products, plans, or technical advice alone, but through the relationships, experiences, and learning processes that enable state agents to transform capacity into performance.

Policy success is widely recognized as multidimensional, yet relatively little attention has been paid to a fundamental question: whose definition of success matters? This paper argues that different policy actors prioritize different dimensions of success because they occupy different positions in the policy process. Drawing on applied literature, the paper identifies four generic actor groups—political authorizers, designers, implementers, and civic advocates—and develops expectations about the success criteria each is likely to prioritize. These expectations are explored through a survey of 121 experienced practitioners, each drawn from one of the four actor groups and asked how frequently they consider thirty policy success criteria spanning six dimensions of success. The results show clear and consistent differences. Designers concentrate primarily on program design and goal achievement. Political authorizers balance programmatic, political, and impact concerns. Implementers exhibit the broadest conception of success, placing particular emphasis on processes, stakeholders, capability, and enduring impact. Civic advocates prioritize fairness, participation, trust, and beneficiary outcomes. The findings suggest that policy disagreements arise not because actors disagree about whether success matters, but because they evaluate success from different vantage points.

A growing literature demonstrates that kindness improves individual well-being, meaning, and social connection. This paper adds to such literature by asking if intentional acts of kindness strengthen relationships, psychological safety, and supportive norms within collaborative teams. It draws on a field experiment embedded within a three-month problem-driven learning program involving eighteen participants working in teams on real public problems. These participants undertook intentional acts of kindness toward assigned teammates and subsequently reflected on the acts they gave and received. Findings suggest that relatively small acts of kindness generate substantial relational effects, with participants reporting increased appreciation, support, encouragement, and belonging. The strongest effects occurred when acts demonstrated attention, memory, and understanding. The evidence also suggests that repeated acts contributed to psychological safety and the emergence of norms of mutual support. The paper thus argues that kindness functions not simply as an individual virtue but as a relational capability that helps teams collaborate, learn, and solve problems together. Small acts of kindness appear capable of producing effects that extend beyond individual well-being to influence relationships, team norms, and collaborative performance.

The state capability literature emphasizes the importance of problem-driven governance. Mayne et al. (2020) identify three capabilities that appear central to such governance: reflective, collaborative, and data-analytic capabilities. However, important questions remain regarding the foundations that make these higher-order capabilities possible. This paper explores these foundations—or building blocks—by revisiting an intervention undertaken within Mozambique’s public financial management reforms. Using process tracing and interpretive coding of the intervention’s case narrative, the analysis identifies and examines how problem-driven behaviors emerged. Such analysis leads to the identification of seven foundations that appear to underpin problem-driven capability, organized in three domains: 1. contextually actionable knowledge, comprising know-how and know-what; 2. the mobilization and empowerment of agents, comprising individual motivation and authorization to change; and 3. the empowered ability to navigate contextual systems, comprising institutional navigation, resource re-mobilization, and strategic time management. The paper argues that these foundations function in ways similar to conversion factors in Sen’s capability approach and to the microfoundations approach in the dynamic capabilities literature. State capability— particularly the capability for problem-driven governance—should be understood as a multiplicative combination of these foundations or building blocks, from which higher-order reflective, collaborative, and data-analytic capabilities emerge.

This article conceptualizes development as a process of ‘good change’, or durable improvements achieved through adaptive problem-solving within specific social contexts. It argues that such results depend less on adopting correct policies than on building capability— the empowered ability of individuals, organizations, and societies to act effectively. Drawing on insights from development economics, organizational theory, and political economy, the article proposes that development unfolds across successive capability frontiers, where progress increasingly depends on locally embedded learning and coordination. The argument is illustrated through a process-tracing analysis of India’s reduction in maternal mortality from the 1980s to the present. The evidence shows that sustained improvements resulted from sequential expansions in system capability rather than the implementation of a single solution. The findings suggest that international development practice should prioritize strengthening capabilities rather than transferring technical interventions.

Development is widely understood as requiring stronger capability, yet there is little agreement about what capability is or how it is built. This paper argues that development is fundamentally a process of building the foundations of capability. Drawing on the capability approach, dynamic capability theory, and the state capability literature, it conceptualizes capability as the empowered ability to turn capacity into performance, and identifies seven mutually reinforcing building blocks that underpin it: contextually actionable know-what, contextually actionable know-how, intrinsic motivation, authorization, institutional navigation, resource mobilization, and strategic time and timing. The paper distinguishes between ordinary capability, which enables reliable execution of established tasks, and adaptive capability, which enables individuals, organizations, and societies to diagnose unfamiliar problems, learn, experiment, and create new ways of working. It argues that development depends particularly on strengthening the foundations of adaptive capability, from which new institutions, routines, and established capabilities emerge. The paper further suggests that these foundations are best developed through experiential, problem-driven learning rather than through training or technical assistance alone. Evidence from participant reflections in Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) programs illustrates how these seven foundations can be strengthened through iterative engagement with real-world problems. The paper concludes that development interventions should be judged not only by the solutions they deliver, but by whether they leave behind stronger foundations for future problem solving and sustained positive change.

Industrial policy initiatives demand a lot of knowledge from policymakers. Knowledge is often limited, however, especially when policies emerge from top-down technical experts or outsiders with limited contextual experience. Such policies are prone to mistakes. These can, however, be avoided by developing policies through collaborative ‘discovery processes’. Establishing organizations to do ‘discovery’ work is challenging, however, especially when challenges are urgent, resources lacking, and corruption concerns rife. In such settings, it may be more practical and effective to build listening and response capabilities into incumbent policy systems through rapid, temporary discovery processes. This paper provides a case narrative of an experiment with this idea, recounting the story of a problem-driven learning and discovery-oriented approach undertaken to reinvigorate a struggling sector in Albania in 2014.

Literature tells us there are many dimensions of public policy success, and different actors in the policy process will likely focus on different dimensions. This paper asks how different actors in the policy process view policy success, and how much their views differ. It finds evidence that actors devising policy plans— designers—view success narrowly, as achieving near-term, programmed goals; whereas other actors involved in advocating for, authorizing, and implementing policies have a broader success perspective, paying more attention to non-program criteria like long-term impact, distributional and endurance success, and intertemporal gains that manifest in the way policies grow capability, political support, stakeholder satisfaction, and process legitimacy. Such finding raises a question about how policy objectives are determined when actors disagree, given that literature also tells us that policies are more likely to succeed when actors agree on what success is and how to achieve it.

Public policy work is hard, especially when one works in developing countries. It is even difficult to define what success looks like, and thus how to manage towards success. Literature helps manage such difficulty, providing studies that define the concept and show how it can be achieved. A core message from such is that success is multi-dimensional, and practitioner need to focus on multiple criteria when doing their policy work. But what dimensions and criteria matter? And do development practitioners really adopt this multi-dimensional view? Tackling such questions, the current paper reviews 45 applied studies from the public policy, project management and development evaluation literatures to see what they identify as key success criteria and if the practical studies (about development evaluation) are in sync with the more academic messages. Reading across all three literatures, I identify 30 potential success criteria in 6 categories or dimensions (program, impact and endurance, capability, political, stakeholder, and process). I find that the development evaluation literature focuses on a narrow set of 7 criteria, mostly in one dimension (program success) as compared to broader perspectives in the other literatures. This suggests that development practitioners have a narrow view on success, which is out of step with academic views on the topic. A conclusion proposes a broader approach for these practitioners.

Officials working on public policies must answer questions like ‘What does policy success mean?’ and ‘How should I pursue policy work in order to achieve success?’ These are difficult questions, but there are ways to respond. One way draws on what I call the program logic of policy success, which suggests that: (i) Success requires efficiently meeting goals that stakeholders view as relevant, (ii) by doing work focused on impacting high-level objectives through programs that deliver promised time-sensitive outputs and outcomes according to a clear, logical plan. I believe this logic dominates the global public policy community, as ‘the way’ officials and organizations should think about and do policy work. This paper tests such belief, showing that officials do think in this way and that this thinking is influenced by common budgeting and evaluation mechanisms. I conclude by asking if this way of thinking poses any concerns, especially if it biases policy organizations to produce some kinds of policy success and not others.