APPENDIX B
JOBS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
International development organizations can be terrible innovators. On the front lines of some of the world’s most daunting challenges—large-scale refugee crises, epidemics, environmental disasters—they tend to be startlingly unimaginative in how they approach their work. It’s not for lack of effort or talent. Institutions like Oxfam, Save the Children, and Care attract some of the best and brightest individuals from each generation and keep them working in the field for decades. These folks know their stuff and are committed to making an impact.
Rather, the innovation struggle for international charities reflects common problems found in many large organizations, both public and private: a supply-driven assessment of the environment, problems, and opportunities, as well as an overly structured approach to how they operate. These self-imposed constraints doom the majority of development work to remain uninspired and somewhat ineffective. When they do succeed in innovating, it’s typically due to one-off factors that are seldom replicated. That’s the negative news.
On the positive side, the fix is not difficult and not out of line with how international NGOs and other such actors already define themselves and their social-good missions. Not surprisingly, it involves using Jobs to be Done. Rather than dwelling on the deficiencies of international development groups, we look to illustrations of a better way to work, using these as an example of how these principles apply to the public sector overall.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT
For a glimpse at how a rigorous dissection of jobs, current approaches, success criteria, and obstacles can bear fruit, look to the story of a major lifesaving innovation—Plumpy’Nut. André Briend, the French creator of Plumpy’Nut, was frustrated but determined. By the mid-1990s, he had spent years working in humanitarian crises as a pediatric nutritionist, and he had seen the shortcomings of international response. The standard treatment for severe malnutrition was a substance called F-100—a milk powder developed in the 1980s that was fortified with vitamins and minerals. He knew it failed to accomplish key jobs in the context of a crisis. F-100 was not getting to many of the children most in need, nor was it enabling agencies to extend their efforts far into the field.
In humanitarian emergencies, resources are scarce and erratically obtained. Response centers are often overwhelmed by people. Conditions out in the countryside are dire, and transport to and from logistics hubs is extremely challenging. So the success criteria for any nutritional supplement include providing key nutrients, having very little reliance on other supplies, being ultra simple to administer, and being straightforward to send out to distant locales. Moreover, it has to taste acceptable to the afflicted population.
F-100, the current approach, did little of this. While it did contain nutrients, it had to be constituted with clean water, which is often in short supply in crisis spots. Similarly, charcoal and propane can be limited in these contexts, so any new solution needed to avoid the heating that F-100 required. Another issue was that F-100 had to be consumed almost immediately. That meant there were operational inefficiencies, and the powder couldn’t be sent out far from distribution centers. Furthermore, it required clean vessels to consume the mixture and training to prepare it according to precise criteria. The result was that feeding was mainly confined to inpatient nutrition centers where children might stay for about a month, a hardship for families and a drain on strapped agencies as well. Oftentimes, the neediest children never made it to the centers, and far too many people died as a result.
Briend thought about how to solve for these issues, and he created a chocolate bar. While that addressed F-100’s issues, it ran into its own obstacle: It melted. So he reframed his perspective and watched what his own children did. One of their favorite foods was the hazelnut spread Nutella, and he saw how they could put it on just about anything to make it more enticing. Inspired, he developed Plumpy’Nut, a substance that tasted like peanut butter and was easy for children to quickly get used to. He also knew that peanuts are a staple of the diet in West Africa, where many crises occur, and so it would be readily taken up there. An obstacle to adoption of past solutions, such as shipping in bulgur wheat from North America, was that they had no basis in the local diet and were rejected, even by a hungry population. Plumpy’Nut paste tastes familiar, requires no preparation or training, is highly portable, and has a two-year shelf life.
Since its creation in 1997, Plumpy’Nut has been used by hundreds of thousands of children in places like Niger, South Sudan, and Malawi, with a success rate estimated from 90 to 95 percent. Because it responds to key jobs to be done and adheres to clear success criteria while circumventing obstacles to adoption it has been a runaway success.
KEEP ASKING WHY
Plumpy’Nut was created by a well-trained and experienced specialist. What about the vast majority of people who lack such skills? How can they innovate?
The U.S. military, while it contains many highly qualified individuals, comprises mainly people who lack much development training. As the military has gotten more involved in nation building abroad, international aid agencies have had to think creatively about how young men and women trained for war can become agents of peace. Armed with budgets in the billions, when the U.S. military decides to become involved in an area of operation, it has a huge impact.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) took up the challenge in Afghanistan of figuring out how to make the military more effective nation builders. Working through its Office of Civil-Military Cooperation, it came up with a program that quickly got enlisted men and women working effectively with Afghan communities on development programs, aiming to win the hearts and minds of the people.
The program, called the District Stability Framework, was the brainchild of Dr. James Derleth, a senior stabilization advisor for USAID. Derleth recognized the need to have a simple, replicable process that could be used by both the young private as well as the commanding colonel. At the same time, he was extremely wary of one-size-fits-all efforts in a country as complex as Afghanistan, so military forces would need to tailor their approaches to local communities. To add complication, the military was being asked to play a noncombative role in an often hostile country, and troops were not typically coached in the art of conversation.
Derleth framed the approach succinctly: “Act like a three-year-old and ask ‘why, why, why?’” Starting from four simple questions that anyone could base a discussion around, soldiers would probe on the “why” in order to understand the true needs in a district. This approach uncovered jobs in a streamlined fashion. Instead of having long, rambling conversations as many development workers do or fielding surveys that can have no follow-up, the military was uncovering what jobs people wanted to get done. For example, a conversation about the need for water and demands for a well evolved into what people wanted to get done with the water—crop irrigation, human consumption, use for animals—and that opened up a new set of solutions that previously would not be available by focusing on just building that well. The tools enabled even a 20-year-old private to have a meaningful, productive conversation leading directly to activity.
FLEXIBILITY WITHIN STRUCTURE
Aid and development organizations cannot be limitlessly flexible and responsive. While the vast majority of money spent on these purposes goes to good ends, the tiny fraction of projects that go awry generate oceans of bad publicity. As in a large corporation, aid agencies must have rules, structure, and accountability so that disasters are avoided. Creativity cannot be endless.
Within those constraints, Jobs to be Done opens up degrees of freedom. Rather than issuing extensive guidelines about precisely what solutions should be supplied to communities, the Jobs framework enables organizations to ask the right questions in a rigorous and repeatable way. Solutions can then be mapped to very specific findings. If it works for an entity as large as the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the approach can provide major benefits to smaller groups as well.
This sort of discipline also helps organizations become more innovative. While they are frequently told to embrace innovation, nonprofit and public agencies can struggle to do so when their funding is tied tightly to purse masters’ programming guidelines. The funders can bolster innovation by giving tightly defined briefs about jobs to address without becoming overly narrow in the solutions they seek. For their part, recipient organizations can use Jobs to be Done to get closer to their end customers (or “stakeholders,” as they’re often termed), providing a structured and scalable means of gaining input from the field that opens avenues to new solutions by framing the challenges holistically and in great detail. The method helps groups go beyond superficial programming and into meeting deeper needs.
The Jobs Roadmap provides a well-defined process to go from broad mandates to creative yet robust initiatives. That is precisely what nonprofit and governmental groups require so that they avoid missteps while aiding the right people in the right ways.