Article by Giulio Quaggiotto: “…So when RIL – Red de Innovación Local, a South American nonprofit that connects more than 10,000 public servants across 800 cities in 30 countries, set out to improve how municipalities build strategy, its founder, Delfina Irazusta, knew the challenge would not be technical; it would be cultural.
To tackle it, she took the old idiom “eat your own dog food” to heart. She decided that her team would first try out a new strategy process for itself before bringing it to municipalities. This way, they would have the street credentials from having done the work, and they would be in a better position to provide advice on implementation.
The experiment centered on PortalRIL, RIL’s AI-powered platform trained on over a decade of local government knowledge. But as Stefaan Verhulst has observed, “The most consequential failures in data-driven policymaking and AI deployment often stem not from poor models or inadequate datasets but from poorly framed questions.”
Starting With Inquiry
It is for this reason that RIL team members were asked to start their strategy process in a rather unconventional manner, through a “Questions Tree,” or a structured reflection process guided by questions focusing on 3 different levels:
- Organisation-wide issues
- Individual questions on each member’s role
- Team level questions.
This team exercise produced a collaborative document summarizing the key questions informing RIL’s strategy going forward…(More)”.
