 So everybody back here with the IHE symposium on capacity in the context of our current and existing challenges. I have with me in a great panel and seminar, Len Pritchett and William Moerwer, as well as Anna San-Lorente from IHE. What we'll do is quickly introduce and then Anna will talk us through the technicalities of the session and how you can all add your questions. We try to answer them in the conversation. And then we go to the presentations of both William and Lance and William is first. But since William is in Uganda in a very remote place, we will use his pre-recorded presentation. But with Lance being in Utah and thank you so much again, Lance for waking up. Well, almost not going to bed being way behind in time, but not in practice and capacity. Lance is agreed to give a shorter version of his presentation and highlighting the most critical aspect of that to be able to engage in this conversation. To start with Lance and introducing him. And of course I will only have a short time with a development economist currently the Rise Research Director at Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Born and raised in Utah where you are now. And I suppose that has got to do with the COVID-19 crisis. Worked for the World Bank for quite a bit of time. And 2006, I think important publication, Let Our People Come, Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility for this from the Centre of Global Development published on how I think this is one of the major pieces of his research. But I find interesting for the conversation of today in how we bring change and build capacity in the context of crisis is as your approach on the isomorphic mimicry how you can translate one to the other which is definitely a misinterpretation and often a failing approach. And I will look forward to also part of that of your reflection. Thanks for joining Lance. William Moore-Away, formerly CEO of the Uganda National Water Sewage Corporation is now executive director of the Global Water Leaders Group. William is partly responsible for one of African water industries great success stories, the turnaround of the Uganda Water and Sewage Corporation. So he's a leader by practice and he will definitely talk us through what that type of leadership means. Also in the context of, you could almost say daily challenges but definitely now in the context of the current crisis. You left the corporation I think in 2011 and working across Africa, bringing your knowledge and capacity to other utilities across with your firm and since 2013 appointed ED of the Global Water Leaders Group, so thank you both for joining. William is, while Lance is in Utah, William is in a remote village in the southwestern part of Uganda. On the top of a double bed, as close to the Wi-Fi as possible. It's amazing here from, I'm sitting at home in Rotterdam. Anna is at home, I too, or at IHE. At IHE, Lance in Utah and William in Uganda. We try to bring this conversation together. So thanks so much for joining. Anna, please talk us through the technicalities before we go to the presentation of William. Sure. Good morning or good day everyone. On the right hand side of your screen, you will see the feature chat which I see that there's already been introduced some messages. There just below is where you can type your message and your questions directed to the speakers. This leads me to let you know that before on top of the chat, there's been a code question on how you can ask direct questions to the speakers and also just above all the messages, you will find a handout that provides further details on how you can engage before, during and after the webinar itself. I would advise you to make use of some engagement on the social media as well by making use the hashtag of CaptiveSim. And with that said, I'm gonna give back the floor to Henk. Thanks so much, Anna, for letting us know. I think what we will try to do in this session too is where both William and Lance see where the most pressing issues and lock-ins are in the way we approach our challenges and difficulties to really move to action. I think the corona crisis more than ever exposes us to a challenge where we fall back to former practices, starts repeating mistakes of the past and making us more vulnerable in that context while knowing it. So it's like, it's not even a rabbit on the road looking into the headlights of a car. It's a rabbit running towards these headlights with almost enjoyable amazing speed. So something is definitely wrong and finding a way out is where we wanna use the capacity of both Lance and William to explore opportunities to bypass from their perspectives. So with that, I'd like to give the floor to William, but doing this, I would like Anna to start the presentation William recorded. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I'd like to thank UNESCO HG Institute for having organized this symposium to discuss the topic that affects all of us, especially in this coronavirus period. Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Water is more critical than ever before. Second day, I'd like to thank UNESCO HG that has trained a big number of water professionals across the globe. Everywhere you go, you are made by NHI alumni. In my company, National Water Uganda, where I used to work, almost half of the engineering section were trained, including their new MD, were trained at UNESCO HG. We appreciate it. One thank you so much for the good job where you're done. Continue. I'm locked down in a remote village in the western part of Uganda where I'm communicating with you from. I'd like to thank Professor Alatz, Dr. Cotton, and all their teams for having invited me to join you in this symposium. Because I would also like to thank my IT team in Kampala, my lovely dear daughter, Lisa, for having made it possible for me to communicate with you. I apologize for any inconveniences that may have been caused. My keynote presentation, about going to delve into theories of change management and managing change in organizations. This is well catered for in the literature and extensively taught at our great institutions like IHA here. I'm rather going to discuss with you live practical examples of people within and outside our sector who have turned around their organizations and touched lives of so many people. I will then share with you the things they have in common. What it takes to change an organization, they predict it for change from my own experience and then I will conclude. Ladies and gentlemen, looking at the symposium program, I note that we have a sector with lots of challenges as you hear from some of the speakers. At the same time, the sector has resources, it has manpower, it has policymakers, it has great scientists, it has educational institutions, and also, at the same time, it has companies, great companies, great organizations that are charged to run and supply water and sanitation services to the population. Gentlemen and ladies, the biggest question however, why is the sector still lagging behind? Why is water service delivery still a problem? By the way, not only in developing countries, but also in some big parts of the developed institutions, of developed countries. I'm only here to say the same and invite you in further discussions. Ladies and gentlemen, let's meet our new treatables. As you can see from this slide, this man is completely troubled, he's stressed. Demands and expectations are coming from all directions. As you can see, politicians, customers, financiers, even animals are demanding his attention. You can imagine what's usually the same. Listen gentlemen, that was how I felt 13 years at the helm of national water. Every time, every moment, I would feel uncomfortable stress. And I know many of you would be different. You have been managing great decisions. You may not be different, you may not feel different like our new treatables. What is happening indeed to the sector? The state of the current situation, the typical performance of our utilities in developing economies, is not making this situation better. Look at the side. No service coverage, intermittent water supply. I've visited many institutions, I've visited many countries. Sometimes it's like a miracle if they can get at least two hours of supply per day. Low operational efficiencies. High, non-revenue, 50-70%. And of course, low collection efficiencies from 40 to 70%. Imagine you are losing 70% of the water, you're only building 40% of it and you're collecting like 30%. What operational efficiency is that? Poor organizational culture. Field corrupt staff. Let's come in, drunkenness. Poor incentive structure. All these are affecting our institutions day by day. As you look from the next slide, most of these utilities are locked up in a spiral of poor performance. It doesn't seem to me. It all starts from low tariffs, low collections. Manager is not being able to be autonomous. Subsidies, high subsidies. The service deteriorates. And of course the systems go down the train. Crisis after crisis. We'll have in hope. Is there any hope for us? Can this sector be turned around? Yes. Water, like any other institution, can be turned around. We only need game changers. We need visionaries. We need people with the will to do it. And it can be done. Let's borrow from a few examples of people who have taken up the challenge and changed the organizations and hence the level of so many people around them. I'll really take focuses. Two within the sector and two outside the sector. Listen here to me. Mr. Mohamed Ali Langotin. And I'm Syrian. At the moment, the richest man in Africa, by the way, in actual fact, the richest black man in the world. With his asset worth of 15 to 20 billion US dollars. After his university at the age of 22, he borrowed only $1,000 from his uncle and started a trading business. And it was doing very well. But later he realized that he had to change his business from mere trading to manufacturing. He supported two sectors. Food sector and the shelter sector. And he has built a vibrant industry that cuts across Africa, mid-race and South America. A region that people would fear to venture into. He has changed the face and art of business down there. With his slogan, I want every household in Africa to enjoy the Langotin product. His vision isn't usually right from the start, was to provide an excellent service and an excellent product to every household in Africa. And he's done it. On the other hand, Steve Jobs, after his second comeback in 1997, the company had co-founded and was going down the drain. He changed his fortunes and turned into the most valuable company on the globe, worth US trillion dollars. With his slogan, every household in America should have a laptop he transformed up into a one-class company it is today. Now let's come to our own sector. Of course, one would say, do we have people who can do it? I've looked in South American territory. I looked Africa. I went to Asia. Yes, there are people who have really done it and done it very well. But we shall take on it to examples. Dr. Silva Moudisha of National Outer Uganda expanded and modernized the National Outer Uganda after taking it over from me in 2011. In his own words, he said, doctor, you've done very well. You've only concentrated on the financial viability of this company. You've actually turned it around. But me, I'm going to expand it. I'm going to make sure that in his own words, every household in all urban centers in Uganda will get reliable pipe water systems. He has expanded the urban water service business from just the 23 towns I was managing to over now 250 towns all across the country. Those who are well acquainted with the African water business will bear me witness. On the Asian side, however, Ek Sonchan of Cambodia, now a minister of infrastructure and water, having been promoted for having done a wonderful job at the water company, has changed non-paying water company to a world-class listed public water institution. One of the first ones of its kind in the water sector, in his own words, he says, nothing is impossible. It can be done. But what are the common features of this turnaround course? What can we learn from them? One, all of them will tell you that there is technological disruption. The world is changing. New technologies are emerging. We cannot use the 19th century products to satisfy the 21st century demands. Nor can we use the 19th century technology to produce the 21st century products. If you are going to succeed, if you want to change your institution, you must look at the technology. The technology is changing. Secondly, the customer demands are becoming more and more higher than ever before. Customers are demanding. They want different goods at different times. So if you want to change, you must look at the customer demands. Thirdly, the stakeholders are demanding for accountability to their investments and the involvement in the business. They need to see vibrant or the entity institutions. They need to see goods and services being given to the people. They need to see the return of the investments that must force you to change your way of doing things. Fourthly, and I think for me, most important, people want to make a name. They want to leave a legacy. As you will know, today's footprint is tomorrow's legacy. Take example, Mr. Dangote. He wanted in his dream, he wanted to see an industrialized Africa before he dies. Steep jobs on the other hand, he wanted to see every household in the world, not only in America, to have at least, if not a laptop, but at least an Apple product in the home. And you can see where he is, I think he must be very, very happy. If you look around yourselves, you will see an Apple product. That was his legacy. Dr. Angishof Uganda, once every urban center in Uganda has piped water systems. And I think he wants to be remembered for that. Exxon Chan of Cambodia wanted to create the first listed company in Asia. And he did it, and he's remembered for that. But what does it take to change these utilities? How do we unlock our potential and then these aiding institutions around this and something like that? One, who must change our identity. Who must change our attitudes. Attitude is everything. There is no way we can sort of the current problems with the same view and constant view. The natural fact, when I was having a discussion with my staff, they wanted to do some policy some three months ago and I was hesitated because you know, as a manager, you have to be a bit conservative. You don't know what's going to happen. One of them put up a hand and said, sir, if you can't change it, at least change your attitude. She took the hand, the policy was adopted. And I think that's done a good job. Two, we must create dreams and big dreams like that. All the four personalities have presented to you had big dreams, had visions. They were looking far ahead. If you want to change this sector, if you want to change the organization, you must look far ahead than you are looking at now. Three, you must be able to put your staff and customers first. This is very, very important. Of course, there is a big debate amongst scientists and practitioners whether the customer first or the staff first. The turnaround gurus will tell you that you need good people around you to create a good customer base that will create the business you want to do. This is a subject we can still discuss further. Four, listen, gentlemen, we must commit ourselves to excellence. Our customers, our stakeholders are becoming more demanding in quantity and the quality of the services we are offering. With the 21st century technological disruption and artificial intelligence, only those who provide excellent services will survive. Listen, gentlemen, of course, you must enjoy what you are doing. I always have a big battle with my staff. I tell them that there's no way you can do what you are not enjoying. You must have fun in your business. In actual fact, you will only succeed if you like what you are doing. And someone also told me that you may not succeed in what you dislike. Again, it's up to you for discussion. Listen, gentlemen, our institutions are full of bureaucratic tendencies. The environment around us is so bureaucratic that the way to succeed in changing organizations lies in how we make them autonomous, accountable, and provide them with incentives and penalties, for example. You will not be surprised that in my 13 years at National Water, my performance incentives were higher all the time than my salary. Also, I was penalized once. I lost myself once in the 13 years, but that meant even all my staff members, the entire company, staff, had to lose their money. That was the day that we will never forget. How would you go home and tell your family that you've been going to work for 30 days with no salary? It never happened again. And I think that was the beginning of the time around. All in all, we used to pay more than $2 billion per annum for incentives only. Listen, gentlemen, as I conclude, we must be obsessed with the way to provide water and sanitation services everywhere we are. I'm happy that I'm discussing with water leaders, policymakers, trainers, and water professionals like you. I'll leave you with this quotation. From one of the greatest sportsmen ever, so many people say, Muhammad Ali, he says, champions are not made in the genes. In other words, change agents like you are not made in your wonderful schools and educational institutions. He continues to say that change agents like champions have something inside them, the desire, the dream, the vision to change things. Yes, they have the skill and the will, but the will must be stronger than the skill. Yes, many of you I know would like to read, maybe to find out where I've got most of the information. Yes, I have, at the end of this, I've given you a few biographies to read. You can read Steve Jobs. You can read the water, I've given you the titles. And also, don't forget my book, Making Public Enterprises, Work. You'll get all the ways we used to change the national transition cooperation in my 13 years. I thank you. Thanks so much, William, for sharing not only your insight from Uganda practice, but also reflections on what is needed to change the curve from both a leadership perspective as well as very practical. I must say that the challenge remains that while we might or might not be obsessed with water and sanitation for everyone everywhere, we still lack way behind as a international global world with over two billion people lacking access to safe drinking water and over four to sanitation. So there's a lot that needs to be done. But before we dive into questions based on your presentations and exploring more, I'd like Lent to give his comments, reflection and presentation right now. So Lent, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Happy to join here. I feel I'm somewhat of an odd duck or maybe a duck out of water because I don't actually know anything about water. I'm not a professional or expert in the water sector. I'm honored to be on a platform with people like William that have had experience in actually turning around corporations. I have a recorded presentation that's available, but I'm going to, in the interest of making sure we have plenty of time for interaction, just try and summarize what I said in 20 minutes and maybe seven minutes. And it's mainly trying to draw lessons across sectors. Two of my areas of research are on how to build state capability and on education and those combine. And so what I mainly want to bring is what are the lessons that I've learned and have been learned from the education sector for that might be relevant for the water sector. And by the education sector, I mainly focus on basic education, kind of K to 12, what people call basic education. And the main lesson to be learned from basic education is that it's very difficult to make a transition from success to success. And what I mean by that is if you have had success in creating one dimension of what you need to do in order to be successful, and in particular in the education sector, that has been that there actually has been a massive, reasonably global progress in expanding the system in terms of the number of children who attend school and the years that they attend school. And that success was brought about mainly through a certain type of organizational and system capacity and that was capacity to do the logistics of expansion. So organizations were created in a mode that was focused on and consistent with things like building exactly the same school in every village of Indonesia and making sure that there was a human resource policy that put a teacher in every school. And that is what we call in our analytical categorization in terms of capability, logistical capability. And by logistical capability, we kind of mean that if everybody just kind of follows some reasonably simple specified set of rules, you can achieve your targets. The challenge in the education sector is that in many countries of the world, the same mechanisms, the same organizational habits, processes, practices that have led to success in the expansion, the physical availability of a school building that a child can attend have not had the same uniform success in providing an actual learning environment. So in some countries of the world, the system has expanded and you actually get high quality education such that children emerge from schools actually with the skills they need. And in other places in the world, the exact same logistical capabilities of expansion have succeeded in expanding the number of years in schooling, but the actual learning content is just abysmally low. And the challenge and what I think the lessons we've learned from our more general research on organizational, what we call organizational capability is that modes and mentalities of capacity building that are in fact well adapted to the logistical challenge of building out a system are completely maladapted to the more subtle implementation needing to elicit voluntary and empowered action by agents around specific performance related purposes. So shifting organization of modality and mentality from capacity for process compliance to capacity for purpose fulfillment has proven very difficult in part because you have been successful and once you have been successful at a certain type of activity, it creates the sort of illusion that there's this generic sense of capacity and doing more of the same will lead to success in the next in very different type of endeavors. So our main emphasis both in our work on building state capability and specifically on education is how do you create a pathway to build new capacities even inside organizations and systems that have been successful at doing first generation tasks with very different kinds of capacities and capabilities. We call that approach problem driven iterative adaptation or PDIA and one of the key elements of PDIA is to recognize that capacity is a specific thing, not a generic thing. One doesn't in fact say, I'm going to acquire some athletic capacity of some generic type and then later decide what sport or activity you're gonna devote that capacity to. Rather you say, here is the actual performance capacity I would like in a specific activity and then when develops a strategy for achieving those specific capacities. So that's in that sense, we want to avoid what we call isomorphic mimicry which is a term that we've adopted from organizational sociologists of isomorphism which is just mimicking what other people have done and creating processes and structures that look like other organizations that have had success. So our emphasis is in order to have success in building the capabilities you need to solve the challenges you're facing. Our approach is that one builds capability by delivering results rather than one builds capacity and then delivers results which takes the notion that capacity is some generic abstract thing that can be developed independent of the tasks. So I think the main, I think a main lesson from the education sector is transforming organizations towards new modalities of building capacity is very difficult and it requires a reorientation away from process compliance as the sole goal of as if achieving some compliance with some set of rules is in fact the objective towards more clearly stated purposes, more adaptive and autonomy to achieve those purposes within organizations which sounds thankfully very much like what William was saying about the way one accomplishes organizational transformation. And so that is I think the main thing we wanna say is that the danger of the continued sort of talk about capacity building is if one assumes that there's a generic set of capacities and that those capacities can be developed independently of the tasks to which those capacity are gonna be developed, one will focus on continued homing in on a mostly isomorphic vision of what organizations should look like rather than focusing in on what are the practices one needs to embody in order to fulfill the purposes that the organization is trying to strive for and the shift from process compliance to purpose driven is a key shift that needs to happen to mostly tackle the more implementation intensive second generation issues beyond the expansion of physical infrastructure but we wanna emphasize that you actually even inside reasonably well functioning organizations much less disaster, quite dysfunctional organizations one needs to have a conscious strategy of building new capabilities to meet these new purposes. So I'll stop there in order to give us time for questions and answers. And I encourage you to look at the slides that I have prepared with great graphics and facts to back up everything I've just said. Thank you very much, Lent. I think although you're not a water duck, as you said you're definitely not the old duck but the experienced one for sure. And it also really helps us especially in the water space where water is so much linked to all other challenges without water, it's women and kids that walk the well so there's social dimensions with poor water quality or no water availability, there's health and hygiene issues water is destructive for our economy our biodiversity and so forth. So the linkages are critically important so a water perspective in itself does not address the challenges you face. What I really like about the two of you together in this panel also in the current context is that copy-paste is a stupid thing to do. Replication and scale as main drivers of success fail and this is what Lent has been not only researching but showing around the world by both state capability programs as well as educational programs is that it's not enough to just build a school and then a thousand that is really about creating an environment based on what you want to achieve and not what you want to put in. And I think in the current COVID response and recovery scale and replication are therefore perhaps the ones we have to be most careful with because this is what we see around the world is that it is everywhere but it is everywhere different and I find it fascinating to see weren't it so dire is that Africa has an average age of a little over 19 Gaza, a little over 17, Europe is way close to 50 where do you see COVID-19 exposed and impacting most that is white male, rich, fat, men. Those are the most vulnerable in the context of the current crisis but the next impact being at economic and on food security is exactly there where the vulnerability to the real pandemic might not be so tough but the rippling effect of this pandemic across the world. So we have to be very careful in what we do and I think Landju really pushed on this. I'd like to bring the two of you together and see if there is a little bit of exchange between both William and Landz is that William takes a human centric approach trying to build cultural change from within the organization and this is what you did in Uganda at the Water Authority but how much do you recognize from what Landz said the moment you started to bring this to other organizations? There is no copy paste. How do you reinvent the approach, the process towards the result and Landz to you, if you hear William's story and saw his presentation, how much indeed feeds back into your finding in the context of state capability as well as educational practices where you say these are the common parts where we can learn from now if we look at the dire situation in the context of water. But William first. Well, thank you very much and really this was important for me to be with you. Yes, I've seen so many questions here but let me first talk where he was. Yes, what you say, there is no copy and paste, you're right. There is no solution for everything and what I said in my presentation from my experience I think we have the solutions. We are ourselves, I saw it when I came to the National Water, the people were there. The infrastructure as you normally call it stupid or stupid was also there. And the money was also flowing but things were not moving. So I think most important, I think and that's what Landz was trying to talk about are the people. So you must have the people. You must have the innovative mind of the characters you have. And of course having them alone is not enough. As someone was asking here on the questions you must be able to incentivize them. I didn't incentivize enough that they are able out of their own to come up with ideas which ideas you can implement and ideas will save destruction. So there are no copy paste answers but we have the people and people must be incentivized. They must be penalized at the same time as you had. I was penalized when I was not able to achieve what I was supposed to achieve and then you will get your answers. So answers are not going to come from the moon but they won't come from the people with it. Landz? Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, you're true. Landz, if you hear William, can you respond? Yeah, I enjoyed William's presentation because one of the, I think almost paradoxical things that we've discovered in thinking about how to build organizational capability is that your first instinct in confronting, I love that in his slides you mentioned drunkenness as one of the sort of challenges you faced inside an organization. So you're facing an organization that's sort of radically out of compliance with the ideal of a well-oiled machine working as an organization. Often people's first instinct is sort of discipline and punish. We need to like crack down on the people who are low performing whereas our approach within problem-driven adaptation is to unleash positive deviation. You need to find the people in the organization who you can there have capacities that are under fulfilled and give them opportunities to unleash their own innovativeness and capabilities. So in a weird way, you need less structure if you have high purposes you're trying to achieve and unleash the existing capacities within the organization towards those purposes and then deal with the dysfunction by drawing the dysfunction towards the purpose-driven practices rather than, and so, which to some extent, you know, I love that Williams kind of have fun. Again, it seems paradoxical you could walk into a dysfunctional organization and have fun because if you perceive it as a just enforcing compliance, that's no fun for anybody. And it almost turns into an anti-staff perspective whereas one of our many kind of metaphors and models is you can't beat a turtle to move. You know, organizations that have survived at low performance levels for a very long time have developed very hard shells that can resist external attack and can resist kind of external pressures and continue. And so if you attempt to move a turtle along by beating it with a stick, you will get tired of beating the turtle long before the turtle gets tired of being beaten and you know, there will be reform episodes and there will be leadership and it will all sort of roll off of the core of the organization whereas unleashing the core of the organization towards a purpose by creating opportunities and incentives for those in the organization who can be purpose driven to unleash their potential is I think a huge part of real organizational reform and it has less to do with management boxes and less to do with rules compliance and much more to identifying problems to which existing capacities can be built by unleashing them. And the turtle wins from the hair anyway, you know, the favor. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. So the incentives there are critically important at the same time, but it's challenging the water world is that we lack behind so massively. A third of the world population lacks access to safe drinking water. Now with the COVID-19 crisis, it's part of a first line of defense so more critically important than ever and the water world really struggles, you know, governmental private sector on how to overcome this massive gap and with sanitation, the gap is even big. So how do we prevent replicating the wrong strategies now because we have an enormous unleashed investment opportunity at trillions of dollars we'll go into infrastructure and before you know it will it will go exactly in the replicate scale copy paste way and building the wrong systems, both organizational as well as real physical. So your insights from both of you actually really could help drive a different approach or perhaps even to say an agenda and since with this conference we're also drafting an agenda that we're going to present next week, it's going to be critically important to help inform those decision makers that in the end do make decisions on these trillions of dollars that either going to be spent in the right approaches projects and organizations or replicating past models for more vulnerability. William. I think most important thing here in our business is not money because money has always been there. And as you say, even in your own presentation the infrastructure, they are there, they are great. You know, monies have been collected, infrastructures have been built but things have not changed. So from my experience, I think it's more of changing the way we are doing things. I mean, we must look at our attitudes today. We must look at our mindsets. Where does it hurt most? What is it we require? And I think with that, we should not be worried so much. I'm worried when people start thinking only about money and forget that their own attitude. I give you an example when I had a problem in my office and I was trying to look for the solution and very many people are bringing all sorts of ideas and I was saying no to almost everything and then one stuff put up hand and said, no, no, please. Yes, I know you may not want to change it but can you please change your way of thinking? And when that happened, everything was okay. She had the day and the system was adopted and there was no problem. Without even additional money I was afraid of. So I think we should more look at the way we are looking at things now, the way we think now, our attitudes towards what we think is happening. Then we get maybe vision leaders, people who are able to look ahead and then come up with solutions that will solve the current problems. But otherwise, I think money and technology alone, those triums and triums, so dollars as we are putting on the table, not work, mindsets. Yeah. Lent? Yeah, total. So I'm partly responding to what William just said and partly responding to the questions that are flowing by. And I think two common question, two questions that have come up a number of times for which I think that our problem-driven iterative adaptation approach to building capability inside organizations have different answers than what you would usually hear. And the first is on leadership. Matt Andrews, who works with and is part of the team on building state capability, did a study of success cases in the developing world where there's a group of academics at Princeton that have accumulated this large body of documented successes across a variety of sectors in the developing world. And one of the things they learned from that is that we often point to a single leader as being kind of a dynamic response. But what we found is that in most of the success cases, when people were interviewed and asked, who was the leader of this reform effort or this change effort, in many of the success cases, we would get a dozen or more different people named as the leader of the reform effort. So it wasn't, there might have been a single visionary creating a space, but in order for the reform to actually happen, one needed to have a whole variety of people that were each looked to as leaders of the reform and that the main characteristic that we found of leadership was creating who people regardless as the leader of a change effort was the person who had made possible their engagement in doing something new and different to address a problem. So who they saw as the leader was not necessarily the person nominally with formal authority, but who they saw as the leader was the person that enabled them to become productively engaged in solving the problem. So I think a notion of leadership, of kind of creating space for others to unleash their potentials rather than leadership necessarily being providing the solution and direction from the top down, I think is a key notion that looks to the capability of the organization as a kind of broad network of engaged people. Before you go to your second, because this, sorry to intervene, but this really resonates again also with your point where you say, and I experienced it myself in the different organizations I led is around the world, but William also is a great showcase. If you focus on where the good dynamics are in your organization, instead of where you try to punish where the negative aspects are, there's a two sides to that. One, you really improve your organization. Second, you credit the ones that are actually willing to change with you instead of that you focus all your attention on where it's not going well. I, you always come across also from a managerial and organizational perspective that there's more time wasted on where it's going wrong than that is spent on the time where things are going right. So this also making sure that you create room, space and capacity say, and I would therefore also say safety in that, that there is the opportunity to do better and create a culture of trust where that opportunity also is used and explored and explored where, making failure is actually a next step to being more successful. That learning capacity is going to be critically important. So thanks for your second point, Lance. I think just that idea of creating safety, I think is an interesting idea. One has to create space for other people to innovate without suffering negative repercussions if they're not immediately successful because oftentimes the compliance culture, and I'm slightly deviating from the second point, but I often hear that organizations are afraid of failure which is completely the total opposite of the truth. The truth is that organizations exist to perpetuate failure without blame. Right, yeah. And unleashing the possibility for people to do positive things without blame in order to create success is actually a very big challenge because oftentimes the existing organizational structures exist to perpetuate failure without individual blame, and no one can have, it can't be the case that the water situation William was describing was one in which the organization was afraid of failure. It was living failure, and yet at the same time was creating an environment in which there was fear of innovation and fear of change, and so creating a positive environment change. The second thing I just wanna mention is that one of the people have asked kind of key factors of success for a PDA like approach. And one of those is to really pay attention to the problem definition stage of creating the space for action. Too often the problem seems so pressing and so obvious that you ignore the fact that you actually need to create consensus around, a consensus up, down, and sideways to your organization around exactly how the problem is being framed. Because only, and again this goes back to things William was saying is this commitment to excellence, this commitment to excellence had to first construct a problem definition in which people agreed on what the performance of the water sector would look like in order that we had a vision of where we were going so that then you could mobilize action around a set of performance oriented rather than compliance oriented objectives. That is often ignored. Oftentimes donors and leaders and people come in assuming that the problem is already sufficiently internally understood in the mindset of people that you can just move ahead to the solution phase. But we often find that in practice you can spend three months, six months a year just building the consensus around the problem definition and that once you've invested in creating a core consensus of the stakeholders or the organization around problem definition then it's much easier to unleash things that can build capability to solve the problem where it's just starting in assuming we know what the problem is and therefore we know what to do and therefore we know what capacities we need often skips that really essential mindset shift of what is in fact our performance orientation which again I think is a really important part of what William was saying was you had this water utility and had these vague and conflicting ideas about what it was doing whereas until you could say here is what excellent performance looks like you really couldn't unleash the potential of anyone. Thanks, Lent. And this is really touching upon the fact that with the challenges seemingly be so single while they're far more complex without investing a lot in really understanding the complexity of them understanding interdependencies and vulnerabilities across a broader spectrum than that they are perceived from you will never get to approaches let alone solutions, let alone organizational or state capabilities that can sustainably work on them. There might be a short-term solution but it is only that will only turn into a band-aid approach that will fix the bleeding for a day but will not deliver success on the longer term. Is this William too? And then we'll have to wrap this up. You touched upon a lot of the cues that are coming in. I can ensure the audience that all questions will be answered offline and feedback to you but a lot of the cues are taken into the comment of William and Lent already. Is this part of understanding the problem really making sure that that is not jumping to conclusions based on a first perception? Is that something that resonates with you too? Yes, of course. Yes, you're right. So many questions are coming in and maybe if you allow me to go quickly through some of them which are very pertinent to someone Ben Berra wanted to know about the rise so much on government funding. Yes, I think in the long run we may have to rise so much on government funding because water, as we say, water is a commercial good but in actual fact it's not 100% commercial so if you want to make it affordable to each and everyone you may have to look for a mix. So we will, I know in the near future we may go for public funding but I think the government funding, our grants and whatever will still be important in the business. Then of course the issue of incentives. Yes, a guy, Professor Guy wanted to know yes, about the incentives. Yes, it's very, very important to have the right incentives. In actual fact, all what we are talking about if we have the good leader and someone also was saying this you may have the good leader fine but you need to get people who are better than the good leader. You need to select people who are better than the good leader. I do agree with that assertion. In actual fact in my case, I think most of my managers or my choice myself were better than me who are highly very good engineers and that's what made things move. So as a leader you must be able to identify the people the people who are actually much, much better than you who know the business even much, much better than you. For you as a leader just give them the vision give them where you want to go where you want to take the institution and the rest those able, able staff can do the job. But of course as Guy says, Professor Guy says you must put the right incentives in place because without those incentives certainly because as I always say in the water business it's not like an NGO, it's not a church organization where people go and work and expect God to say thank you to them. No, people they must take it as a business and if it's a business then the incentives must also be very, very important. And then someone was talking about the targets. Yes, the targets keep on moving. And in my case at National, we didn't have any static targets. I mean every season when you meet the current targets then of course the targets must be renewed, must be higher. Sometimes we'll even double the targets because once you are able to achieve those the targets you have been able to achieve they are not only very important. So we go to next level of targets. So targets, target settings very, very important. It must keep changing the targets. Also of course it must also keep changing the incentives because you cannot pay the same incentives for the same targets you set some time back. So as you improve on the incentives you also improve on the incentives. Yes, of course I do agree with the land that you need to create space for our leaders and for the managers especially to be able to innovate and create the space for new ideas. Of course the ideas are there. And you'll find that in my company in actual fact we did not import any idea at all. The ideas were within the company. You need only to incentivize those characters. You give them what it takes. You allow them. You do away with the bureaucracy. You put them under those performance based targets and you will get what you think. So I think for some of the questions which are coming in I'll be able to respond to them online. And if you are not satisfied please get back to me. I am a vital full time and I'll make sure that at least we give justice to stop because it's very, very important for us. I work in like now seven or eight countries in the whole world and we have the same, same problem. The leadership is number one. Two, of course the will to do the job itself are they willing to do it? How corrupt are they? How corruptible can they be? Can they really move things? Then of course lastly can they get the people without any interference from whichever authorities? And that's what I call the giving the people the autonomy and of course making them accountable so that they can move the sector at will not being forced to do it. Okay, that's all I would say. Yeah, yeah, thanks William. Only because of time I think we have to round up the conversation we're three minutes already past the hour. I must say resonating again what Lent and William said is that if leadership is dedicated to create that safe space environment and build trust the capacity is within your organizations but also of course in the coalitions you build as an organization in the environment you operate and that spillover effect is critically important. We see the same creation of safe spaces in the way we develop our environment. We call them soft spaces. So there's a real opportunity to learn more there on how that learning environment can be capacitated more. I wanna thank the both of you Lent for getting up really early and joining us. I wanna thank William for jumping on off and on the double bed in his house remotely in Uganda. Your presentations touched upon the critical points of leadership and how to move forward currently in the current crisis and with the SDGs lagging behind so much we will need your talent, expertise and capacities in. So thanks so much for joining the community. I wanna thank the audience for being with us and asking so many questions that we try to incorporate in the conversation as much as possible but I can assure you we will redirect the questions to our speakers and to IHE and see how we can get your answers up on the platform again. And I'm inspired again by the conversation that can help us lead to improve our Delft agenda in the course of the next days. Thanks again Lent, thanks again William and thanks so much Anna for supporting us and making sure everything went amazingly well and thanks again to IHE for organizing this show. Anna perhaps do you have last comments for practical? Yes, I'll just share my screen I really fast to be able to share on how the audience can engage in the conversation after we finish this webinar. So as Hank already mentioned the questions that have not been able to be answered during this live session they'll be answered afterwards in the post recording of this webinar itself. This will also allow the participants who were not able to join us due to time zone constraints to engage in the discussion. I would also like to encourage everyone to engage in social media with our hashtag capdevsimp to spread the message that we are collecting during this conference far and wide and invite everyone to contribute to the Delft agenda by following the URL that you can see just down below. You can also find it in the chat. And now I'm gonna give back the floor to you Hank. Yes, thanks Anna, thanks for this. Thanks again for the speakers and the audience Lent. I wish you a great day that started real early. I hope you are able to see an amazing sunrise in Utah. And William and Uganda stay safe, to all of you stay safe and hope to be able to engage with you more. Thanks again. Thank you very much.