The “Decade of Building State Capability” podcast series features interviews with practitioners who reflect on their experience using the PDIA approach and their engagement with Building State Capability over the past 10 years. On today's episode, BSC Director Salimah Samji interviews Andrew Lawson. Andrew is an economist and public finance specialist, who has spent his career working in Developing and Transition countries, helping to improve public policies and public finance management (PFM) systems. He is Technical Director of Fiscus, UK – a consultancy and research company focused on public finance issues, and was previously the Director of the Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure (CAPE) at ODI, London. He has worked for 47 governments across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America and has also undertaken a range of evaluations of capacity building programmes for international organisations, including the EU, the World Bank, the IMF and, more recently the Gates Foundation, for whom he led an evaluation of the application of PDIA techniques to public finance problems in Africa. This was recently published in World Development Perspectives as a joint research paper, with his colleague, Dr. Jamelia Harris. Andrew has a BA (Honours) in Economics from Cambridge University and a Master’s Degree in Development Economics from the University of East Anglia, UK. He is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, and works regularly in these languages.
To learn more about Building State Capability (BSC), visit the website, access the PDIA toolkit, read BSC blog posts, and listen to the podcasts.
Salimah Samji Welcome to the Reflecting on a Decade of Building State Capability Podcast series. On today's podcast, we have Andrew Lawson, who did an independent evaluation of PDIA and our work with CABRI in Africa. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Lawson Thank you very much, Salimah. Really nice to be with you today.
Salimah Samji Great. So let's start I know I just mentioned that we started to work, you did this independent evaluation in 2018, but your first interaction with us was really in 2014 when you read all of the papers that we were doing on escaping capability traps and isomorphic mimicry and PDIA. And what was your sense then?
Andrew Lawson Well, I think my sense then was two things. I mean, I don't know if you or some of your listeners are familiar with Molière's play, The Bourgeois Gentilhomme. So The Bourgeois Gentleman. The story of the play is basically a man who comes into money and realizes that he needs to improve his learning and change how he behaves. And so he employs a tutor, and the tutor teaches him, firstly, prose and poetry. And when the teacher is explaining to him what is prose, he interrupts him. And he said, but I've been speaking prose all my life, and I'm so pleased that I already knew one of your techniques. Obviously, in the French it sounds a little bit better than my description. But the point of it, and when I first read the early articles about PDIA, I sort of felt, well, this is something I've been doing forever. You know, there's nothing new in this. You know, we all know that it's important to work with people to solve their own problems. We all know that if we don't listen to people and understand the context properly, we're not going to get a lasting solution. And most of us also know that our first solution is unlikely to work without adaptation. So I didn't really think it was anything terribly new. And I think I might have told Matt this, you know, in a nice kind of way, or at least I hope it was in a nice kind of way. But then I stopped to think a bit, and my first reflection was, you know, just because something is obvious, it doesn't mean people do it. We all know that a good researcher or a good consultant should listen first. I think that's probably one thing we're taught in qualitative methods. You know, learn how to listen. And yet, how many researchers and consultants do we know that really do not listen? It doesn't always happen automatically. And similarly, in terms of the notion of ownership, I mean, the development community has been talking about ownership for 30 plus years. But that doesn't mean that as a whole it's any better at applying itself to solving the problems that people believe are important for themselves. So I think, number one, it actually makes some sense to say, look, this might sound obvious, but look, number one, we need to listen. Number two, we need to focus on people's own problems. And number three, we need to involve them in the solutions. But the other side of it, which I found interesting as I got more into the literature, was that what I think the team at Harvard had been able to create was a language and a set of processes and an approach to apply PDIA. Which meant that rather than being something general, it was something really quite specific. And they introduced ideas like the authorizing environment. And, you know, some people might say, well, that's just jargon. I mean, at one level it is jargon. But once you give a name to something, it's much easier to conceive of what it is and to conceive of how to improve it. And if you don't give it a name and just talk about something vague, you know, the institutional context or whatever you might want to say, that's not as strong as talking about an authorizing environment. And similarly, you know, I think the techniques to diagnose problems, the use of the five whys, whether it is the five whys or something else, doesn't really matter. But once you have that as part of the skill base, then you're beginning to develop something more than just an idea which people all in a very general sense, share. You're beginning to develop a real technique. And that got me much more interested. And I mean, I can't remember the precise details, but, you know, I was involved in different events in Harvard and in Washington, where people from the Gates Foundation were also there. And then at a certain point, the Gates Foundation said, well, you know, we'd like you to evaluate CABRI's program of application of the PDIA approach. And so I jumped at the opportunity and, you know, I was able to bring together a really good team to work with me. Dr. Jamelia Harris, who now teaches at Warwick, but who was at the time working with me at Fiscus, Gonzalo Alvarez, who is still working here at Fiscus, Alta Folscher from South Africa, who some of you might know. She's done a lot of work on PFM over the years. So it was a great little team that we had. And, you know, knowing CABRI quite well already meant that they were reasonably well disposed to working with me. I say reasonably because no organization likes to be evaluated and they're always going to ask the question, is Andrew going to say something useful or not? You know what I mean? But in truth, as clients go, if I could call them clients, they were about as good as they could be. So it was a very nice setting and a very interesting experience, I think.
Salimah Samji So you start off being a skeptic of what is this PDIA and what's new about this to having the opportunity to evaluate this program in 2018. And just some context for our listeners: In 2017, we collaborated with CABRI in South Africa to develop this Building PFM Capabilities in Africa program using PDIA. And this was a program that we had done things like this in Sri Lanka, in Albania, in Mozambique, and this was just something that we took our learnings and our experiences from other places to really build a program that could work for a particular sector like PFM. And we had run it the first year in 2017, this was really us piloting, testing and training the trainers, the coaches at CABRI on how you would actually do this. And then in 2018, which was the second year we did this with them and our last year, our objective in the second year was, okay, we did this successfully in year one, let's try to do this in two languages and that's the new thing and really stand back. So it was the first year we ran the entire program in English and French so that Francophone Africa could also participate in this program. And we really were standing back in this one and allowing CABRI to lead because the idea was always for them to take this on as their program to continue to do this. So a training of trainer, if you will. So you come in in 2018 when we are launching this program. And I think it would be really helpful to share with our listeners, you know, what was the process of thinking about this evaluation. Again, this is a long seven month program that starts with some online modules. They meet usually in an African city for a framing workshop. They go back to their countries, and that's when the real magic happens where they do the work and then they come back at the end of the seven month period to really have a reflection workshop where they can speak to what they've learned, the progress they've made, etc.
Andrew Lawson Yeah, that's exactly right. It's actually quite cleverly thought through because to try and apply a PDIA program, you know, across six countries with a set of coaches, it needs some structure to it. But just before talking about that, I think the fact that it involved both Francophone and Anglophone countries is quite an important point. I mean, not just because of the language issue, but because behind the language there are also ways of working and ways of thinking. And, whereas, in general, Anglophone academia is happy to be, how would I put it, quite vague in its definition of concepts and quite abstract. French academia demands a degree of rigor. So if you have a concept I was talking just now about the authorizing environment. If you have a concept like that, the French want to see it defined and they want a nice watertight explanation. You can't sort of say to them, oh, you've got to listen. If you're a good listener, you'll be fine. You know, you've got to talk them through how to listen. And that meant that the materials had to speak to these two really quite different ways of thinking. And then again, the application of solutions to problems with working in two very different public administration settings. You know, the French setting is very legal. If you want to get something changed, you need a law or decree law. The Anglophone one tends to rely, as we know, on jurisprudence, so laws aren't so important. You know, you can get quite a lot changed in a public administration system in Anglophone Africa without changing any laws. Whereas you can scarcely even step into the room in a French or ex-Portuguese colony. So I think that's important. But just to say a touch more about the program, it worked around teams of six people in each country who would be taken normally, predominantly from the Ministry of Finance, but from different directorates of the Ministry of Finance and would normally keep one or two others from other sectors depending on the nature of the problem they wanted to solve. And they would each have an authorizing officer who would be, putting it simply, one of their bosses, but someone who wanted a problem solved. So, for example, in Lesotho, the big problem they were having was to do with cash management. That they were continuously running out of cash for expenditure approval, despite the fact that they actually did have cash in some bank accounts. So there were issues of how they were managing that cash and how they were projecting what resources needed and when. The Central African Republic, which was another one of the participants, had a problem of low use of domestically financed investment. So Central African Republic at that time and even now is the country with a degree of conflict. But nevertheless, at the center of government and in the capital, Bangui, there's a normal structure of work and services run normally. But if you want those services to improve, you need a level of public investment. You need small level public investment to build teachers houses, to build aid posts and things like that. And the domestic investment budget covered all of that. And what had happened repeatedly was that it was just not being spent. So they would spend maybe even 10% of an allocation. And that was creating a problem because infrastructure was not being maintained. So that was the particular problem that the C.A.R. wanted to address. Lesotho were looking at cash management, as I described. And then, you know, different countries had different problems. We also had Nigeria involved, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. And each of them had their team of six, their selected problem, their authorizing officer, and they would run through the online training course in PDIA. They would then come into the framing workshop and begin to apply the techniques of diagnosis, trying to work out, well, why have we got this low level of capital investment? Why have we got this cash management problem? And they would apply some of the techniques that the program recommends, such as the five ways. So capital investment is low. Why? Because the Ministry of Finance cuts budgets halfway through the year. Why? Etc., etc.. And only by going through the five whys was it possible to get a solution. I mean, it was quite interesting talking with the team from the Central African Republic. They said to me in French, they said, "mais en vous, les cinq pourquoi nous somme pas suffisent. Il nous en fout sept pourqoui". In other words, you know, five whys is not enough. Our context is so complicated that we need to ask the why question seven times. And I thought, you know, that was just great as an example of taking a technique, really understanding why it was important and making it better. So how did we approach the evaluation? What we wanted to do was to see firstly if actually the problem they had set up was close to being resolved. The program lasts for eight months, which is quite a short time to resolve any significant public administration problem. But we wanted to find evidence or not that the problem was beginning to be solved and that some type of sustainable solution could be implemented into the future. That was one aspect of it, which wasn't straightforward. But we basically attended the framing workshop, we spent a lot of time talking with each of the teams so that we would get to know them. We did country visits in three selected places, so that was Lesotho, Liberia, and the Central African Republic, where I traveled, Bangui. And during those visits we would see how much progress they made, which would be roughly halfway through the eight month period. And then at the end of it, we would go to what was called a closing workshop, which in 2018 was held in Dakar in Senegal, and we would see how well they had been able to find a solution and what they could report. And then we did a follow up visit in the case of Liberia, maybe six months later. We had planned to go back to Bangui as well, but because of problems of civil unrest, it didn't prove possible. But what we did do was have detailed Zoom conversations with the team to see if some of the problems they'd had or glitches, let's say, not problems that they were finding in December had been addressed. So through those three points in time, we were able to get a sense is the problem being solved? In addition to that, we ran a survey of all the participants, 36 of them, at the beginning of the program in the framing workshop, and the same thing again in the closing workshop. And we asked I mean, part of it was to identify what sort of people they were, so what levels of qualification they had, which departments they worked in, how used they were to doing team work, those sorts of things. And then we asked them whether they felt that over the course of the program they had improved their problem solving skills, the team working skills, their presentation skills, and those were the main ones that we were looking at and also the technical skills. We asked if they felt that they had learned something technical, you know, a particular way of applying an IT program or something like that. And I mean, it was striking. 80% of the participants said that they had improved their skills in each of those areas. The figures were slightly different for each of those, but they were all broadly around 80%. And they nearly all attributed it to the program itself. It's actually quite difficult sometimes for people to say, I've learned a lot. Often they think, oh yeah, I already knew that. I've improved slightly. But no, these people were very upfront saying, you know, really, we've never been able to diagnose problems in this way. We've never been as good at managing teams. This is going to be hugely helpful to us. And most of them said that, you know, even if we haven't really solved the problem or if we're not certain that our solution is going to be sustained, we know that we'll keep these skills. And we also, as part of the evaluation process, have some semi-structured interviews with each of the participants to try to double check if that's the word, what was coming through these surveys to make sure that they could speak to what they said they were learning. And again, it was striking, striking. We have some quotations, Jamelia and I, in the article that we recently had published in Development Perspectives, there was no doubt at all that there had been strong learning, that they were going to continue using this in different ways. And more significantly, given, as I said earlier, that it was only eight months, three out of the six countries had made progress, which could be evidence towards solving the problem. And the Central African Republic in particular had increased by the subsequent year levels of spending of the capital budget from around 10% to figures above 50%, you know, which is still not as good as it should have been. But the things that they were introducing were beginning to make a big difference already. And of course, success breeds success. When we're beginning to see that that would work and when the people around them started to see, oh, these guys know what they're doing, they started to apply more extensively the techniques and solutions that they had proposed. So I think the results were very strong and spoke to the quality of the PDIA process, also to the quality of the work that CABRI did in putting it across. And I think their coaches were excellent. We had a slight difference of opinion about the coaching because they wanted a very arm's length coaching process. They said, look, we're here to teach people to solve problems. And one of the ways of learning that is actually to make mistakes. And if people make repeated mistakes, then they're more likely to change. And being of a slightly different disposition, I said, but hold on a minute. You can't make them carry on , fail three, four times, without correcting them. And they said, yes, we do leave it at that. We let them fail until they realize they're failing. And I think, you know, in the end, they proved themselves right that the arm's length coaching was the right way to really instill these techniques and to make them permanent. So that's also interesting because it takes the right kind of person to do that type of coaching. And it's not so straightforward. And I think it was very impressive.
Salimah Samji Yeah, no, on the coaching, I completely agree. You know, one of the things that we are very particular about, I wouldn't say let them fail, definitely not on something high stakes, but that learning and this we've learned over time, is to really have that learning be theirs, they have to actually see that what their first idea was wasn't a good one. So even though when they might suggested and we see this with teams around the world that we have worked with, they may suggest something and we can immediately see it's not a great idea at all. It's totally headed for where you don't want to go. We will not say that. We will say, okay, try. But one of the ways we kind of protect them from failing but allow them to learn is have tight short iterations. Right. What are you going to do in two weeks? Because we're going to come back to you. And sometimes they'll say, we'll do like this research and write a report. We're much more about action. So then we say, all right, two weeks, what are you going to do? And then they're like, oh, we didn't even do this, or we didn't even do that. Or we talked to this person and thought that. It allows them to pivot and reflect on what they did and what they learned. And once they start doing that, that becomes habitual for them. And they realize and I think this one area where we see people, regardless of where they live in the world, struggle with is to identify what a problem is. We're so hardwired to sell solutions rather than solve problems that we often frame problems as a lack of a solution. And so the first time we ask a team what their problem is and we hear that that's not a problem like we can already see and actually this is your problem, we will never tell you that's not a problem. We'll give them these tools to keep asking them. But is that the real problem? If you have this law, sometimes they're like, oh, we don't have a law. Okay, what is the law trying to solve? Right? Just getting them to really see the difference between what is the problem and what is a solution. And we do find that when that light bulb goes off, it's theirs forever. And we've heard this from many people. They tell us that we've ruined them forever because now when they hear things, they're like, that's not a problem. Like, it's a gut reflex. They're like, that's not a problem. But for them to have that spark or that light go off, they have to go through a learning process of their own. And so coaching. But I do agree with you that coaching is an art. It really is. And those who are good at this are able to really nudge and provide these touches without actually doing anything and allowing the team to really have this emergence of skills, ideas, capabilities, etc.
Andrew Lawson Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right about that. And we found a lot of evidence of exactly that. You know, it was working extremely well. I mean, I think the main reflection I had and which we've shared with CABRI since and we continue to interact with them quite closely, is that they might need to think about other models of the types of teams they put together. For two reasons. I mean, everybody working in the public sector is busy and in particular, well, this is my bias, but I would say in particular in the Ministry of Finance, people are even more busy. So let's say that their daytime job, inverted commas, is already taking up so much of their time that if you're asking them to solve an extra problem, like why a capital investment budget is so badly underspent, they won't have very much time to dedicate to that problem. And, you know, one of the things we found and which we tested as part of our evaluation was the amount of time on task, as we call it, and the teams that were most successful with teams that managed one way or another to have at least two meetings a week. And sometimes they would go to extraordinary lengths to do that. The Central African Republic team would always meet on a Saturday morning. So they would dedicate half a morning or more every week to doing something because they hadn't had enough time during the week and they would have one meeting during the week. The Liberia team tended to meet at nighttime and they would have, you know, a couple of meetings a night. But the other teams that weren't able to get quite so much time on task made less progress, as you might expect. And I think one needs to think quite carefully, how can you set up a team so that it will have enough time to dedicate to finding solutions, testing solutions, embedding solutions. And the other aspect, which I think is quite important, is that asking six people to solve what sometimes would be really pretty complicated problems is a lot. I mean, in some ways I think the way that would be more sustainable would be to take let us say, the problem that the Central African Republic had. Ask your initial team of six to set up a series of workstreams and then within each of those workstreams have more teams of six. So you would have a cascading process which would and perhaps you've done this in other places as well. I see you nodding vigorously. And I think that would make a lot of sense to do that. The other point I would raise, and I think we need to deal with it delicately, there are times when you just need some high level expertise. There will be a moment when you're trying to solve the issue of, let's say, why reporting of revenue collections is so inaccurate. And if you haven't got a good I.T. person that can work out exactly why your systems are not talking to each other and how to find a proper integrated solution to reporting, well you're not going to make very much progress in most cases, because in most countries in the world, I.T. collection systems rely on I.T. And, you know, a key part of the problem is that customs has one system and indirect tax has another system, and direct tax has a third, and then it's all broken up by region and that kind of thing. And also, I mean, there's some areas of public finance. You know, if your payroll is late and people are getting paid badly or getting paid wrongly or we have too many ghosts. Again, you need someone who knows about payrolls. And I'm not sure that the PDIA process the way that CABRI were running it, which was much more open, would necessarily allow them to solve some of these more technical problems or some of these deeper problems. But having said that, they themselves have developed the methodology further. They're trying these other things. And in a sense, we're sort of PDIAing PDIA aren't we?
Salimah Samji Absolutely.
Andrew Lawson As we try our approach, you know, we realize, you know, this approach can help in certain circumstances, but not all. We need to adapt it. We need to learn from what we're doing. And, you know, I mean, my sense is that CABRI is certainly doing that, and I'm sure you guys are as well.
Salimah Samji Yeah, no, I think what is really incredible about this experience is, you know, you as an independent person and your team go out and do this evaluation and you come up with insights. We through our own work also and our own experience, come up with realizations that we need to do this. So it's actually really interesting to hear you talk about the teams and we ourselves, you know, at Building State Capability have innovated on how we teach teams to be able to and in 2017 and 2018, we were not there. To your exact point of we're constantly PDIAing ourselves, learning and saying this area doesn't work as well. How can we do this better? So now whenever we work with teams, we actually introduce ways of being able to create internal accountability so that they can have meetings to build psychological safety within teams so that the teams actually feel like they can be open with each other. And they do have this level of combination of both psychological safety and felt accountability to that team and to the problem to be able to do exactly what you're talking about, to meet regularly. Because you're exactly right, these are people in government and I don't think there's not just Ministry of Finance, Andrew, any government department, anywhere in the world, it's a challenge to find the time. They just don't have the time to be focused on one task over a long period of time. But guess what? You need that to be able to work on a problem. But you don't have the time or you don't have the authorization. So how do we think about building that? And as you were saying, I was nodding vigorously with the teams. Exactly. These are complex problems. Six people. First, you need a team. One person cannot solve the problem. And I think everybody's there. But one team of six cannot solve the problem either. And so we use Marshall Ganz analogy of a snowflake that we like to think of, where we have a core team that then builds out exactly to your point of workstreams of building other teams. Where a member of the core team can lead another team that's managing another area because the problem is often too complex, whether it's PFM, education, health, wherever this problem might be, is too complex for that one team to build. And how do you actually build a coalition of others, similar PDIA teams that are working on this so you can invade this space and really start to manage this problem? And even if it's managing authorization, because I know that's another big area that you did find. But what I'm really interested in here is, you know, you have a very strong background in PFM and you've read a lot. You've seen what different methodologies have led to in terms of changes. And what did you find about the specific use of the PDIA approach in the space of public financial management?
Andrew Lawson Well, I mean, I think it goes back to something I said at the beginning about PDIA introducing a language and a set of techniques and a set of processes. So, I mean, I would like to think that I'm a pretty good listener and I've always tried, you know, when I work with governments to say, well, look, you know, let's work together. What's the problem? Talk me through it. And I try to do that in a general kind of way. But when you have some specific tools and you can say, aha, you know, we've got a problem here with authorization, we've got a problem that we don't, you know, our bosses don't understand the problem and are not willing to give us the space to make some changes. And having the specific language for that helps. And it means that you can do something much, much deeper about that. The other aspect of language is, for example, the process of dissemination. Actually, in PDIA you use a slightly different word when you spread to scale. What's the word?
Salimah Samji Scaling by diffusion.
Andrew Lawson That's it. Diffusion. You talk about diffusion. Yeah, which is a better word than dissemination, you know, because dissemination is, you know, maybe me speaking at a podium. But diffusion is when a set of skills diffuse like a river across a public sector, for example. And I think the use of these terms helps to define much more clearly what you're trying to do. That it's not enough just to have a good, honest conversation with a small number of people. You need to know where is the authorizing environment? How far can we go? What's the nature of the solution we can find? Have we really understood our problem going through the five whys or the seven whys as the case might be? And then, you know, once we are pretty confident about our solution working in one area, how do we do the diffusion? And I think the language of PDIA is actually very helpful. And I think it's as true for even much more technical sort of subjects. My brother is an engineer and I often have discussions with him about how economists work and how engineers work. And as you might imagine, we always make fun of each other. And, you know, I always tell him, you know, an engineer can never be a team leader. You'll need an economist to do that, which of course, gets him, frightly, riled up. But what I'm trying to say is I have said to him that, you know, even within engineering, you don't always know the solution and you test in small ways. You do soil samples, you do stress samples, you do structural designs in the small scale, and then you test them on a larger scale. But the process of diffusion is, again, very important. My brother's actually a seismic engineer, so he works in particular on issues related to how to make buildings not quite earthquake proof. This is the interesting thing. But to make them so that if there is an earthquake, they create the least damage possible because it's actually quite difficult to make buildings earthquake proof, but depending on the scale of the earthquake, obviously. But for that process to work, you need certain good practices to be diffused across cities. You know, it's not just within a public sector, it's cities like San Francisco need certain ways of working and etc.. So I think that the language of diffusion, the language of authorizing environments, the language of the five whys is very powerful. And it takes us to another level. And I hope that those organizations that have been maybe more skeptical of PDIA than I was will actually look at this and think, yes, we can learn something from this. There are some problems where you need technical expertise, and your past knowledge of a solution is actually very useful. But even in that context, diagnosing the problem very carefully, making sure that the solution you think is the solution is actually relevant. Listening, looking at your authorizing environment, thinking about how you're going to diffuse that solution, all of that is very helpful. Even if you're looking at something very technical like, I don't know the way in which you set foreign exchange pricing, the way in which you manage Treasury bill auctions, there's issues behind that where the PDIA process can help. And I do hope that through the article that we've done, through the material that Harvard have produced and others, that this will diffuse. You know, because it deserves to, it genuinely deserves to.
Salimah Samji Thank you, Andrew. It's actually been really wonderful to be able to hear your story from starting in 2014 as a skeptic to being excited to take on an evaluation and then learning and really experiencing. I think one of the things that is particularly impressive is that you were able to be part of a PDIA process, right? PDIA is not a workshop and I know some people just do like one week workshop. We don't do that ourselves. Like it's a process. It needs to be several months. And you were able to follow that process to really get to see what this looks like. Any final thoughts or words you want to share with our listeners?
Andrew Lawson Well, I think it's important always to have hope and to trust that there are solutions. You know, because a lot of the countries that I work with have very complicated processes where you're trying to solve a problem and you move one thing and then suddenly something else moves. And it's a little bit like when you have a series of matrices and you've got too many variables and not enough equations, you know? You just can't get to the solution because every time you solve one problem, you create another one somewhere else. And I think, you know, around the world, it's important for people to retain hope. And I think to go back to some extent to basics. And PDIA does have some pretty basic ideas behind it, you know, about how you examine a problem, how you recognized from the beginning that is going to have to be adapted and iterated. That, I think is also very powerful. And I think also I would say to readers, don't be put off by the jargon. The jargon is actually part of the value. If you understand that behind that jargon, there's a concept that helps you to understand what's going on. Then you're using that jargon properly. In exactly the same way sportspeople use jargon, where you have your curveballs in baseball and we have our cricket metaphors and football metaphors. And once we've got the jargon, we actually understand each other much better. So I actually think it's important for people not to be put off by the jargon, but actually to see the value of the jargon. And I would encourage listeners to look at it that way, and I would encourage the skeptics to think again. You know, there's a lot behind this, and I think it can be very helpful to nearly everybody.
Salimah Samji Thank you. What a wonderful way to end with hope and the jargon is not so bad. Thank you very much, Andrew.
Andrew Lawson It's a real pleasure, Salimah. Very nice to speak with you. And all the best for the rest of the podcast series. It sounds really exciting.
Kathryn Lang Thank you for listening to our podcast today. If you liked it, please check out our website bsc.hks.harvard.edu or follow us on social media @HarvardBSC. You can also find links and other information under the description of this podcast.