Opening Remarks by ADB and Fletcher team

We kick off with an updated just-in-time overview of the current situation of climate crisis and ADB’s potential for transformative leadership globally. We will review the current crisis and implications for Asia and the Pacific, including scientific warnings and economic prospects in an era of climate change. This session is a level-setting review of the challenge at hand: our ambitions, gaps in implementation, and the fundamental theory of change for climate action, including key milestones in energy, land use, and policies.

By Rachel Kyte

The accelerating tangible costs of climate change and opening of new frontiers in policy research and practice are enabling synergies between climate action and economic prosperity. Drawing on their experiences with the Obama and Biden administrations, Kelly Sims Gallagher and Gina McCarthy will trace how generations of climate policy in the United States - such as the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act - fit the policy environment of their time while building on earlier lessons learned. We will explore how climate policy has moved on from being framed purely as an economic cost, and is now discussed using a richer vocabulary including co-benefits (e.g. job creation, green industrialization), multiple-objective problem-solving (e.g. local & regional development, fiscal diversification), and new economic models (e.g. China development model vs. new American development model).

By Kelly Sims Gallagher & Gina McCarthy

An effective strategic plan begins by visualizing the outcome you want to achieve. In this interactive brainstorming session, we ask you to think big about what the future could look like. What does success look like for Asia and the Pacific? What does success look like for DMCs? What does success look like for ADB and its work?

Conducted in 2 breakout groups:
JCC260: Country Engagement Teams (Vulnerability, Markets, Strategy), with Kelly Sims Gallagher
JCC 265: Cross-Sectoral Teams (Nature, Energy, Finance) with Rachel Kyte

Facilitated by Rachel Kyte & Kelly Sims Gallagher

Following lunch with your Envision Team, we take a moment to collectively agree on how we will work together as a community this week. The Envision Program is a rare opportunity to focus our attention on the challenge facing our planet and to reckon with the profound impact that ADB can have in supporting DMCs and the world. How do we ensure that we make the most of this week? How do we use our time together to think outside the box, bring out the best in each other, and generate new, transformative approaches?

Facilitated by Alnoor Ebrahim & Kelly Sims Gallagher

This is an interactive session with pre-reading. Come prepared to debate and challenge one another!

Complete Pre-Reading for this Session
(Case Study: No Trust in Miracles)

Leaders’ attempts to transform their organizations fail more often than they succeed. What differentiates failure from success? What are the capabilities and mindsets that leaders need in order to guide their people into the unknown -- in a direction that is unfamiliar, uncertain, and intended to change established ways of working?

Using the case study method, this session will examine a case study of a leader attempting transformational change in her organization. Our collective task is to uncover the core challenges facing this leader at various levels— personal, interpersonal, team, organizational, and societal—and to identify possible solutions.  At first, the context of this case may seem very different from your own organizational setting. But on closer reflection, you will discover concepts and approaches that help you find your own approach to key questions:

• What is the “adaptive” work of leadership in addressing complex challenges? How is this different from our conventional models of good leadership?
• What does it mean to work “across silos” in a large organization? How can leaders enable this work?
• Are there foundational steps to transformational change that might apply across different organizational settings?

Read the case study closely and come prepared to speak about the following questions. You will be asked to share your views, and no summary will be provided!

1. What are the top 3 challenges facing De Lille?
2. How has she addressed each challenge?
3. What are her main strengths as a leader? What does she do well?
4. What do you see as her main weaknesses? Why?
5. Can you relate to De Lille? Do you see any of her in yourself?

Instructor: Alnoor Ebrahim

The SilkLab is a nature-based solutions research lab creating a wide range of materials using silk. Structural proteins are nature’s building blocks, conferring stiffness, structure, and function to ordinarily soft biological materials. Such proteins are polymorphic which allows us to control the end material format through self-assembly. These biomaterials provide a unique opportunity by being simultaneously “technological” (e.g. mechanically robust, micro- and nanostructured, high-performing) and “biological” (e.g. living, adaptable, bio-functional) making them ideally suited for applications at the interface between these two domains. Our goal at The Silklab is to provide innovation for new advanced material processing and manufacturing based on sustainable carbon-neutral technologies, and imagine a new class of applications for living materials that operate seamlessly at the interface between the biological and technological worlds. Our themes are transdisciplinary, with work that spans materials science, micro/nanotechnology, sensing, wearables, biomedical devices, optics and photonics, and design and art.

Site Visit Structure:

Lecture followed by Tour:
Vulnerability, Markets, and Strategy Teams

Tour followed by Lecture:
Nature, Energy, and Finance Teams

Instructor: Fio Omenetto

Site Visit: The Engine, MIT

The most urgent problems hold the biggest opportunities. The Engine invests in remarkable founders to create positive global change.

Meeting the challenges of a changing climate requires new materials and processes for how we produce, move, store and use energy. Our companies are working to mitigate the most severe consequences of climate change while building the backbone of our economy for decades to come.

We encourage you to read The Engine's 2022 Impact Report in advance of our site visit.

Speakers: Michael Kearney & Monique Guimond

Highlighting an example of a Public/Private Market Transformation program, Mass Solar Loan was a residential solar finance program run by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) from 2015-2020. This program focused on support to engage local banks and credit unions in the residential solar finance market, with a particular emphasis on expanding access to financing for underserved residents, including low-moderate income consumers and those with limited credit. This session will include an overview of program design and goals, a summary of key results, and ample opportunity for Q&A around how the program focused on transformative impact.

By Kelsey Read

With the world getting hotter and hotter, managing extreme heat is perhaps one of the most urgent and tangible challenges facing ADB’s clients. Financing adaptation to extreme heat is also puts urgency into the discussions on how to finance adaptation and resilience.

We will explore current best practice in managing extreme heat – where often the first movers are city leaders. What are the lessons to be learned as ADB’s region sees heat wave after heat wave, and where the wet bulb number has gone beyond safe limits on a repeated basis this year.

And what is the current state of play in discussions on how to finance adaptation. How are insurers and others with capacity taking on board climate data and interpreting it in their financial and credit decision making. What does the leading edge of analysis mean for how ADB advises its clients, grows its private sector development work, and manages its own investments.

By Rachel Kyte 

Keynote Guests: Stacy Swann, Kathy Baughman McLoed 

By Rachel Kyte featuring a conversation with Mark Carney 

We are pleased to host Mark Carney, Chair of Brookfield Asset Management and Head of Transition Investing, for a virtual conversation about the power of private finance in transforming the potential of climate finance, including an analysis of carbon markets as a tool for climate action. Kyte and Carney will hold a conversation over Zoom, followed by an interactive Q&A.

Carney is a long-time and well-known advocate for sustainability, specifically with regard to the management and reduction of climate risks, and is currently the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Co-Chair for the Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero.

He is also an external member of the Board of Stripe, a member of the Global Advisory Board of PIMCO, the Group of Thirty, Harvard University, Rideau Hall Foundation, Bilderberg, the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics the Hoffman Institute for Global Business and Society at INSEAD, Cultivo, as well as Senior counsellor of the MacroAdvisory Partners, Advisor of the Watershed, and Chair of Chatham House.

In your first hands-on Envisioning Session with your team, we invite you to explore how the day's themes and insights apply to your team's area of focus. What does effective private sector participation look like in this priority area? What are the specific opportunities for private sector intervention when it comes to this priority area? Are there opportunities to take “big bets” on certain countries? What are currently the biggest barriers to private sector cooperation, mobilization, leveraging/crowding, in this priority area, when it comes to ADB’s current operations?

Teams should organize their time to allow for big picture reflection, blue-sky brainstorming and ideation, and targeted scoping of a potential pilot initiative.

Facilitated by Rachel Kyte

This double-session provides a toolkit for (1) engaging with DMC clients on a strategic level and (2) designing effective policy-based lending alongside other instruments. Following our discussion on Monday about the synergy of climate action and economic development, how do we utilize policy effectively to facilitate this growth in a developing country context? How can ADB work effectively with DMC partners/clients to create policy pipelines for low-carbon climate resilient development, including clean energy markets, circular economies, etc.?

Overview: Over two 90-minute sessions, we will explore how we identify climate-and-economic policy gaps and incoherence in Asia, and our experience with grounding these analyses in national policy-maker priorities. In both sessions, we lay out our initial assumptions - about national priorities, and how climate and economic policy are linked - and re-visit them as we discuss our findings.  Both sessions begin with presentations on our method and selected case studies, followed by role-playing exercises to illustrate how policymakers at the country level can effectively engage in re-thinking climate and development. We conclude each session with thematic break-out group discussions.

Session I: We introduce our Policy Gap Analysis method, which inventories currently implemented climate policies - including those with direct as well as indirect emissions impacts - and uses a combination of systems dynamics modeling and expert elicitation to examine whether these policies align with national climate and economic goals. From the China case study, we will examine how this approach assisted the government in clarifying the additional policy types, sectoral coverage and underlying implementation strategies needed to fulfill the country’s NDC commitments even while aligning with national development goals. From the India case study, we will examine understand how policymakers came to appreciate the potential economic gains from emission reduction beyond NDC commitments, laying the ground for more ambitious short-term and mid-century goals. In breakout groups, we will discuss how to understand country goals and transform them, and synergistic approaches to mitigation, adaptation, poverty alleviation and development.

By Kelly Sims Gallagher

Part II (See Session I for overview)

Session II: We introduce our Policy Alignment framework, and how countries choose to strategically align or misalign types of policy – innovation, regulatory, fiscal, industrial etc. – to reconcile objectives as diverse as energy efficiency, inflation reduction, promoting domestic manufacturing, and increasing foreign direct investment. Through comparative case studies of the development of electric vehicle sector, we will explore how governments align, misalign, and occasionally deliberately misalign their policy instruments to achieve their goals. In breakout groups, we will discuss the need for/role of diverse policy types beyond carbon pricing to achieve both socio-economic and environmental goals, and how policy-based lending can connect climate and economic objectives while minimizing incoherence.

By Kelly Sims Gallagher 

Government spending on clean energy transition has risen to $1.2 trillion globally in recent years and is expected to rise to $2 trillion annually by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. The needed buildout of new clean energy infrastructure opens the possibility for pursuing a more inclusive and just distribution of energy services and pricing and purposeful design for resilience, circularity, and sustainability. Promoting a just energy transition must involves providing adequate funding for communities hardest hit by the impact of climate change, including historically disadvantaged communities as well as economic redevelopment for fossil fuel communities whose economies are negatively impacted by the shift to lower carbon forms of energy. Energy and climate expert Amy Myers Jaffe will explore the critical issues related to global financing the just energy transition and draw on successful paradigms that have been tried in the United States and other pathbreakers.

By Amy Jaffe

This session has pre-reading!

Complete Pre-Reading for this Session
(Measuring Social Impact, Intro & Ch 1)

A central challenge facing organizational transformation efforts is how to assess impact. How will you know if the One ADB, as The Climate Bank of Asia and the Pacific, is successful? Yet, as we will explore in this session, there is an even bigger challenge: How will you figure out what’s working and what isn’t, in order to continuously learn and improve? This is the challenge of “measuring strategically.”

Meaningful metrics are essential to good strategy – not only for tracking progress, but also for clarifying goals, causal hypotheses, and making mid-course corrections.  However, complex organizations commonly face a pathology of measurement: they often use metrics and scorecards primarily for purposes of reporting and compliance rather than for improving strategic decision making and implementation.

This session will apply the key components of strategy (value proposition, theory of change, accountability) to your Envision Team challenge to help you examine robust strategic approaches and pathways to achieve your goals.

We will differentiate between four different types of strategies—niche, integrated, emergent, and ecosystem—each of which requires different internal capabilities for measurement and learning. These insights will enable you to “measure strategically” by developing metrics and scorecards that are in the service of your strategy. Crucially, you will identify uncertainties in your ToCs — interventions that you are unsure of —as an opportunity for deeper learning.

Instructor: Alnoor Ebrahim

Building on the day’s sessions, you will work in your Envision Teams to:

• Clarify your team’s end goals, both in terms of impact and the quality of DMC partnership.
• Draw out a Theory of Change that integrates country-level policies with sector-level programs and projects in order to achieve the above goals.
• Identify a small number of high-level metrics (1-5), not only for assessing progress towards your goals, but also for identifying areas of improvement.

In addition, you will look inward at your team’s internal capabilities to:

• Identify what new capabilities and resources you will need to build (or strengthen) in order to execute this strategy.
• Brainstorm the challenges you are most likely to face in implementing a DMC partnership strategy, and what support or skills you will need to address those challenges.

Dean Gallagher and Professor Ebrahim will circulate among the teams to address questions and offer support.

Facilitated by Alnoor Ebrahim & Kelly Sims Gallagher

In the context of growing climate risks ranging from hurricanes to sea level rise, the challenge is to communicate complex scientific and policy concepts in such a way that is easily understood by those affected, and also yields changes in outlook and behavior.

This highly interactive session will use game-based methods to bring the complexity of climate risk analysis and adaptation strategy to life. Keeping important issues such as equity, gender, and power in mind, the Climate Risk Game will harness the tools of communication to help you gain an embodied, informed level of preparedness for the future.

By: Janot Mendler de Suarez

We are pleased to host Lawrence H. Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, for a Zoom conversation with Rachel Kyte.

During the past two decades, Summers has served in a series of senior policy positions, including Vice President of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank, Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, Director of the National Economic Council for the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2011, and Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2001.

Kyte and Summers will hold a conversation over Zoom, followed by an interactive Q&A, to engage in a strategic conversation about the next horizon for multilateral development finance and how MDBs can respond in an era of climate change.

Summers is looking forward to engaging with your questions, and we encourage you to bring your ideas and perspectives to the discussion.

A Keynote Conversation between Lawrence H. Summers and Rachel Kyte

This session has pre-reading! 

Complete Pre-Reading for this session
(Harvard Business Case: Englishnization at Rakuten) -- Please use the exclusive link to register your name and receive access to this case. If you have already obtained the case and cannot locate your file, please approach one of the facilitators to assist you.  

In this session, we will deepen our exploration of transformation by looking more closely at the challenges of “alignment” in large complex organizations. We will dive into four foundational components that must be aligned—critical tasks, people, culture, and formal systems—in order for an organization to deliver on its mission.

When an organization undertakes a major strategic shift, these four building blocks are often thrown into disarray: staff and managers become confused about what is expected of them (critical tasks), they worry about whether they have the right skills for the new work (people), whether to embrace or resist new ways of working (culture), and how to create new routines for assessing performance and making decisions (formal systems).

We will unpack this challenge through a case study of Rakuten, a Japanese multinational e-commerce firm. We will take a critical look at an ambitious transformation effort intended to make Rakuten not only the world’s leading internet services company, but also to break down the linguistic and cultural boundaries in Japanese society. The first year of the effort led to a decline in productivity, conflicting views among managers and staff, and much internal confusion. We will examine Rakuten’s response to this turmoil, what it learned, and how it adapted in order to re-align the organization.

We will then work in teams to identify insights for ADB’s transformation and organizational alignment, while also drawing upon lessons from the leadership literature.

Please come prepared to discuss the following questions; we will launch immediately into a discussion:

1. Is “Englishnization” a good idea for Rakuten? Why is Mikitani doing this?
2. What is Mikitani’s strategy for executing this transformation? Is it a good strategy?
3. Analyze the survey results in Exhibit 3. How are staff experiencing the new mandate? How does this compare to the current climate at ADB?
4. What do you think will determine whether managers and staff embrace or reject the new mandate and new way of working at Rakuten? At ADB?
5. What 1 or 2 actions can you take to help your teams embrace the changes at ADB?

Instructor: Alnoor Ebrahim

You will continue working in your Envision Teams in order to integrate your learning across the program.

You will create two whiteboards depicting:

• Your “external” strategy with the DMCs – including your ultimate goals, your pathway for getting there (ToC), key hypothesis to be tested, key metrics, and expectations of DMC partnerships.
• The “internal” capabilities required within the new ADB to execute your strategy – including key changes to organizational alignment (people, culture, critical tasks, formal systems), what capabilities you will need to build or strengthen, how you will work across silos, and so on.

Facilitated by Alnoor Ebrahim

Envision Teams set up for Friday's Ideas Forum. Teams are welcome to stay later than 5:30 if they so choose.

Throughout the week, you and your teammates have explored a grand challenge of climate action. For the Ideas Forum, you are asked to prepare your whiteboards for presentation. During the Ideas Forum, you will be free to walk around among each other's Team Stations and exchange ideas.

The focus of this forum is to highlight the ideas that are exciting and worth pursuing. You will be given post-its, which you can use to share support and positive feedback about the ideas that you encounter. We ask that you use this opportunity to amplify the ideas that inspire you, and to share the ways in which other's ideas might intersect with or your own.

We also invite you to share your support as an ally or source of support: Let your colleagues know which areas you could help them with, and when they should reach out to you for support.

As the rate of technological, social, and environmental disruptions keeps increasing, the capacity to co-sense and co-create the future has emerged as an essential leadership capacity across sectors. This session on transformational leadership introduces core practices for catalyzing profound systems change. Against the backdrop of global challenges, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) faces a defining question: How can individuals, holding substantial institutional power, effectuate meaningful steps to drive teams, organizations, and Asia itself towards ambitious goals, particularly concerning climate change? Dr. Scharmer's insights will highlight specific listening and leadership practices to addressing the challenges and charting innovative pathways for ADB's role in climate-resilient development.

By Otto Scharmer

Having completed an intensive week of collective learning, this session is an opportunity to reflect on your personal personal next steps as a leader in your roles. We will discuss the transition from collective to personal accountability, set individual goals, and reflect on how to personally implement your learning in practice. This is also an opportunity to consider what makes your work meaningful to you, and how you can align your role in the NOM with your own personal values and motivations.

At the beginning of the week, we asked you to think big about what the future could look like. What does success look like for Asia and the Pacific? What does success look like for DMCs? What does success look like for ADB and its work? Now we return to that conversation to see how your vision has changed.

Conducted in 2 breakout groups:
JCC260: Country Engagement Teams (Vulnerability, Markets, Strategy), with Kelly Sims Gallagher
JCC 265: Cross-Sectoral Teams (Nature, Energy, Finance) with Rachel Kyte

Facilitated by Rachel Kyte & Kelly Sims Gallagher