Video transcript: PDIA Hard but Worthwhile

Hello and welcome to the final video that we have of this course. We are amazed that
you’ve made it through 14 modules and hopefully you’ve learned a lot through all of the
hard work that you’ve done in the past few months. We want to thank you for sticking with
us. We want to thank you for working all through it.

We know that most of you if not all of you are working on real jobs at the same time and so
all of this work takes away from the time with your families, maybe it takes away from time
that you have on other things that you would be choosing to do ordinarily. We hope that
you feel that it has been tremendously worthwhile. It gets me to kind of a final comment on
this, which is, this is worthwhile but it’s hard and it’s costly it takes a lot of time.

The team who works with me in the field then we do PDIA generally always comments on
how emotionally demanding it is, how demanding it is on time, how demanding it is on
relationships, even when we are in the field we spending an incredible amount of time
trying to think about the space we have to maneuver. Whether or not the authorizing
structures are as we understand them to be, thinking about how the iterations are going
and where the people are working and whether they aren’t working.

We think that this commitment of emotion, this commitment of time, this commitment of
energy is actually more than what you would find in most job situations, it’s more than
what is required in standard management approaches and standard project approaches in
development where you fly in and you fly and you use tools that allow you to engage in an
arms-length and to keep your heart with yourself and not in the place where you working.

I’d like to say upfront, PDIA is not about that. PDIA is about engagement. PDIA is about
working hard whether you are outside or whether you are the insider; of engaging with the
people in the place, engaging with the problems that are to be solved; iterating again and
again and again in your own mind, in your own team, with the people around you; around
the hardest things that we have to deal with. Learning lessons that are hard to learn
because I’m sure that every single person out there had some assumption at some point
broken or proved incorrect once they iterated or once they pressed a little bit into the
context.

It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy, it takes grit. It’s a word we used about
authorizing environment and the importance of authorizes with grit, well you need to have
grit too. Some people have said can we have a lite version of PDIA, something that’s a little
less demanding. I don’t think so, I don’t think so, and maybe that’s the drawback that means
that some organizations won’t do this. Maybe that means that it will never become the big
consulting model that some people want it to be. I think that this is the grit required to deal
with the complex things that we’re dealing with. It has been interesting because while some
have said can we have an easier model, other people have said this is the first thing that
we’ve seen that helps us deal with this type of problem. We haven’t seen anything like this.
And the grit is required because the problems we are dealing with are that big, that
complex, and that important.
So I want to encourage you as we come to the end of this, to keep going because the first
iteration is just the first iteration. Hopefully many of you in the first iteration learned so
much that you realize that may be your problem statement needs to be addressed again.
That may be needed to go back and think about authority, acceptance, and ability. Maybe
you realize that direction wasn’t demanding enough or maybe it was too demanding and
you need to go back. This is all about going back. It’s about going back, again and again and
again and again, relentlessly, consistently and continually, addressing the problem, tackling
the status quo, so that you can effect change.

Please keep in touch as you do these things and please contact us if you need any
motivation as you move along. You can motivate us too!

Thank you.