In Practice
During my time with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of my responsibilities was to collaborate with market teams to source new private sector investment in Central America as part of the Call to Action for Northern Central America, a flagship White House initiative.
Early on, I noticed a pattern. Market teams kept proposing companies to partner with, and leadership kept rejecting them, each time for a seemingly different reason. The initiative was at risk of missing its targets, and the White House was watching closely. I knew something had to change.
The first thing I did was sit down one-on-one with leadership to understand what was actually driving rejections. What I found was that the real issue was companies' human rights records and the risk that a lack of rigorous diligence could result in an unsavory company joining the initiative, only to cause problems once it was too late. I needed a way to structure how new companies were proposed, so that market teams had a clear filter they could apply to decide who made the cut before taking companies to leadership. I built that filter around the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, drafted as a policy framework that market teams could apply consistently across every company proposed for the initiative. I then piloted and iterated on it with them until it was as light as possible while still getting leadership the analysis they needed to decide who made the cut.
Once in place, market teams were able to apply a single, well-defined framework on their own, and leadership knew what to expect with every proposal that came through. Decisions got faster and more consistent, and we saw an immediate increase in the number and quality of companies proposed and accepted into the initiative, unlocking $5B in investment from 50 companies across the region.
What I took from that experience is that failures in executing policy rarely come down to disagreement about what the policy should be. More often, it's about getting people to say out loud what they care about and then translating that into something scalable that removes as much of the friction as possible. I've carried that lesson into my current role at a large humanitarian nonprofit, asking targeted questions of both leadership and colleagues at the working level to understand what matters most to them before translating what I learn into something that can scale across more than 40 countries, each with its own culture, language, regulations, and unwritten rules for getting things done.