LAD Training Programs

Courses Offered

LAD's training programs are typically five days in length and held in partnership with a local public policy school, think tank, or other academic institution. In addition to general leadership instruction, LAD also offers courses tailored to touch upon the issues and dilemmas relevant to your specific country. Descriptions of each of our courses can be found below in addition to biographies of our faculty. To inquire about arranging a LAD program in your country, please contact us.

The Role of Public Policy in Private Sector Development

This is a four or five-day intensive program for a small number of mid- and high-level government officials and business leaders, exploring how government can encourage and enable the private sector to play a larger, more constructive role as a force for economic growth and development. The process includes small team interactions, with case studies drawn from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Major themes are 1) Industry promotion, 2) Investment promotion, 3) Public-private partnerships in infrastructure, and 4) Access to finance.

This program is designed to reinforce and illustrate three critically important hypotheses about the role of public policy in private-sector development:

Public policy matters! The performance of the private sector and its role as either a catalyst or an obstacle to economic growth is closely connected to how well or badly government policies are designed and implemented.
The public officials responsible for enhancing private sector participation must acquire a range of analytical skills to be effective. But policy reform is not like engineering or other technical fields where there is a clear optimal solution to a problem. Designing and implementing meaningful policy reform requires a broader, more interdisciplinary knowledge of economics, politics, local history, and culture, combined with a sense of how to set priorities, sequence actions, and build coalitions.
Successful policy outcomes that encourage and strengthen private sector participation are contingent upon the capacity of government officials and business leaders to understand and appreciate the interests, motivations, and objectives of their counterparts.

Teaching in the class is done largely through the “case method,” a technique of teaching and learning through the analysis of actual events that have occurred.

The cases in this course highlight both the political challenges and analytical tasks encountered by government officials in different countries who are responsible for formulating policies and programs designed to encourage a larger, more constructive private sector role in the local economy, such as improving consumer credit information in China, eliminating corruption in the Indonesian customs service by contracting out critically important services to a private firm or restructuring a public water and sewerage authority in India. Each case is presented from the point of view of a practitioner — usually a government official — who played a central role in the policy-making process. Participants assume the role of the principal analyst/decision maker, who must thoroughly analyze the problem, identify and assess the issues, and make a defensible decision on whether to proceed and, if so, how. Where possible, a large percentage of cases are drawn from the country or region where the course is being held.

Group projects addressing policy issues that are currently confronting governments in the region where the course is being held are an additional important part of the course. Ideas for group projects are selected by the class participants themselves. After deciding on a project topic, each group spends part of each day working on that topic and applying that day’s material to refine their proposal and strategy. Each group presents their proposal on the final day of the course.

Course Duration: Four or five days

Course Faculty: Francis Fukuyama, Roger Leeds, Mary Hilderbrand, Michael Bennon

Countries where this course has been offered: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czechia, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kurdistan, Moldova, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine

Public Policy for Infrastructure

This training program addresses the challenges faced by public sector leaders as they foster economic growth through infrastructure development in politically charged environments. It uses case studies on how public sector policies and procurement practices for infrastructure can help the private sector be a constructive force for economic growth and development.

A driving principle of the LAD infrastructure module is that infrastructure project shaping and coalition building are not like engineering or other technical fields that have discrete skills and clear, optimal solutions. Instead, successful managers must be politically aware and weigh a broad range of factors that influence project outcomes. They must have a solid grasp of country-specific economic, financial, political, and cultural realities. Most importantly, they must have a sense of how to set priorities, sequence actions, and build coalitions.

This course provides participants with an analytical framework to build these leadership abilities and operate effectively under adverse conditions. Major themes are:

Providing public goods
Bypassing bureaucratic obstacles
Facilitating private investment
Strengthening the state as an economic catalyst

Rather than a single “template” or “roadmap” for infrastructure, the discussion of each challenge is organized around a “checklist” of frequent barriers, a set of warning signs that a particular barrier may be a serious impediment to a proposed infrastructure initiative, and a set of strategic options for trying to overcome those barriers. The importance of local and policy sector context in “diagnosing” specific infrastructure challenges and in choosing strategies to address them is emphasized throughout the course.

The format of the course includes three major components:

Intended Learning Outcomes

After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:

Understand major challenges to public policy for infrastructure
Anticipate and diagnose barriers that are likely to arise for specific alternatives
Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies for addressing infrastructure challenges

Course Duration: Generally five days

Course Faculty: Francis Fukuyama, Roger Leeds, Michael Bennon

Countries where this course has been offered: Ethiopia, Japan, Kenya, MENA (Middle East North Africa for women), North Macedonia, United States

Strategic Management of Policy Reform

Government efforts at policy reform in the developing world have often come up short. Some initiatives have been announced with great fanfare but failed to make it through complex and sometimes opaque policymaking processes. Other reform initiatives have developed problems during policy implementation, such as exceeding planned budgets, falling behind overly ambitious schedules, developing coordination issues between government agencies or different levels of government, or facing resistance from the “frontline workers” who are actually delivering the program. Other reform initiatives have fallen victim to rent-seeking by politicians or bureaucrats. Still, other policy innovations have had promising results in early “pilots” that were not duplicated when they were rolled out on a wider basis.

This course examines why policy reform initiatives often have disappointing results and tries to give policymakers and policy implementers tools that can be useful in anticipating, addressing, and overcoming challenges that they are likely to encounter in trying to bring about policy reforms.

The course is organized around a common set of five challenges that policymakers encounter in most policy reform initiatives:

Building coalitions of support among stakeholders implementing policy reform
Changing the behavior of target populations (businesses, individuals, and/or frontline workers)
Building state capacity
Scaling up and avoiding mission drift in reforms

Rather than a single “template” or “roadmap” for policy reform, the discussion of each challenge is organized around a “checklist” of frequent barriers to reform, a set of warning signs that a particular barrier may be a serious impediment to a proposed reform initiative, and a set of strategic options for trying to overcome those barriers. The importance of local and policy sector context in “diagnosing” specific reform challenges and choosing strategies to address them is emphasized throughout the course.

The format of the course includes three major components:

Intended Learning Outcomes

After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:

Understand major challenges to policy reform
Anticipate and diagnose barriers that are likely to arise for specific reform alternatives
Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies for addressing reform challenges

Course Duration: Generally five days.

Course Faculty: Francis Fukuyama, Kent Weaver, Jen Tobin

Countries where this course has been offered: Georgia, India, Montenegro, Tunisia, Ukraine, United States (World Bank headquarters)

Promoting Behavior Change

Why do parents in many developing countries sometimes fail to send their children to school, even when there is no charge for school attendance? Why do people continue to begin to smoke, even in countries where there are well-organized anti-smoking programs, including ghastly pictures on cigarette packages prominently displaying the ill effects of smoking? Why do parents sometimes resist immunization and other public health campaigns? Why is corruption a bigger problem in Indonesia than in Singapore? Why are violations of labor and environmental standards much higher in some countries than others? Why is the informal sector of the economy so large in many developing countries? Why are gender ratios at birth highly skewed in some Asian societies but not in others? Why do commercial sex workers and their clients frequently fail to use condoms, even though the risks of unprotected sex are so high?

What all of these questions have in common is that they concern why citizens and businesses fail to comply with requests or demands made (though frequently not enforced) by governments for specific behaviors and/or act in ways that seem contrary to their self-interest. This workshop course draws upon insights from social psychology, behavioral economics, law, political science, and anthropology to understand barriers to behavior change. We also investigate strategies that policy designers and implementers can use to change behavior and increase compliance. These include social marketing campaigns, incentive approaches, choice architecture, efforts to address resource barriers to compliance, and stepped-up monitoring and enforcement. Political constraints on the choice of strategies are also addressed. The course relies heavily on case materials to address compliance problems in a variety of policy sectors and countries, with cases tailored to the country and region where it is taking place.

The course can be tailored to include group projects that address current behavior management issues confronting governments in specific countries. Governments are encouraged to send diverse teams of staff to work on developing strategic responses to specific behavioral problems facing particular government agencies.

Intended Learning Outcomes

After the completion of the course, participants will be able to:
Understand major barriers to compliance with government policy and behavior change.
Develop and implement a research strategy to investigate barriers to compliance, including quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method strategies.
Assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific strategies to address compliance problems

Topics for individual Sessions May Include:

Prospect Theory, Behavioral Economics, and Cognitive and Informational Barriers to Compliance
Choice Architecture Strategies for Behavior Change
Incentivizing, Monitoring, Enforcing, and Measuring Compliance
Framing & Social Marketing
Beliefs, Norms, and Peer Effects
Resources and Target Autonomy as Barriers to Compliance
Changing the Behavior of Business
Integrating Multiple Strategies to Improve Compliance
Strategies for Obtaining Complex and Ongoing Compliance
Targeting Program Interventions and Using Secondary Targets
Piloting and Evaluating Behavioral Interventions
A Behavioral Approach to Combatting Corruption
The Politics of Compliance and Enforcement Regimes
Sustaining and Scaling Up Behavioral Interventions

Course Duration: Two to five days, depending on the depth and breadth clients seek and whether group projects are included.

Course Faculty: Kent Weaver, Anat Gofen

Countries where this course has been offered: Australia, Brunei, France, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Lithuania, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United States

Case Teaching and Case Study Writing for Public Policy

This workshop course is designed to develop skills that faculty in policy-focused universities and training institutions can use both to develop interactive and participant-centered teaching styles and to help faculty develop skills in case writing. It can be offered in multiple formats, with differing degrees of emphasis on case teaching and case writing.

In multi-day formats that include both case teaching and case writing, the first two days mainly involve "how to" lessons on both teaching and writing, interspersed with activities where the participants work in teams to do things like prepare case teaching plans and class openings that they present to all of the participants. The initial emphasis is on case teaching since before participants can write a successful case, they must understand how learning in a case-oriented classroom takes place. The workshop includes case discussions on several existing cases, combined with a “post-mortem” of what worked and what did not in both the written case and the case discussion. We discuss core teaching strategies, including the development of time management plans, whiteboard management plans, how to pose opening questions, “cold-calling” versus “warm calling,” and how to close a case discussion class with “Take-Aways.”

In discussing case writing, the course addresses issues such as how to decide on a case theme and learning objectives, what material should be included and left out (or relegated to appendices), and how to build participant engagement into the way a case is written. Later workshop sessions will include topics such as how to write multi-player simulation exercises that have students play roles of participants in the policy situation.

Beginning on the first day of multi-day case writing workshops, participants spend some time working on cases of their own choosing, and it is expected that many of the participants will come to the workshop with very rough drafts of potential cases. By the middle of Day 3, the emphasis shifts more to the cases that they are working on preparing themselves. On the final day, participants will have an opportunity to present preliminary versions of their cases and get feedback from the entire group.

Topics for Individual Sessions:

Introduction to Case Teaching and Participant-Centered Learning
Leading a Participant-Oriented Discussion 1: Opening and closing class sessions, whiteboard, and time management plans
Leading a Participant-Oriented Discussion 2: Encouraging classroom participation with class votes, stakeholder matrices, and other techniques
Using Simulations and Role-Plays in Case Discussions
Using Alternative Materials (e.g., journal articles, newspaper articles, and primary documents) in Case Teaching
Multi-Case Discussions in the Classroom
Managing Diversity in Participants
Group Activity: Preparing a Case Discussion
Introduction to Case Writing: Case Structure and Style
Refining Case Writing Skills: Preparing a Teaching Note

Course Duration: One or two days (case teaching only) to five days (case writing and case teaching). When case writing is included, participants are expected to come to the course with case ideas and outlines. The last two days of the course are spent primarily working on and refining case plans and presenting draft cases. The workshop can also be done in a split format, with three days of introductory sessions followed by a break of a month or more, concluding with another two-day session in which participants present more polished versions of cases that they have written.

Course Faculty: Mary Hilderbrand, Kent Weaver, Blair Cameron

Countries where this course has been offered: Brazil, Georgia, India, Japan, Singapore, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States