What I did

As a consultant to the World Bank, I co-designed and co-delivered the Systems Change Lab in Panama and a technical deep dive webinar on Leverage Points, working as part of a three-person expert team.

Designing the learning experience was as much a craft challenge as a content one. I shaped how systems thinking and futures practices could land practically and meaningfully for the more than 60 senior policymakers and practitioners in the room.

For the systems thinking component, we built the sessions around the iceberg model as a way of helping participants see beyond surface patterns and question the mental models shaping their decisions. For futures, we combined horizon scanning, trends analysis, and scenario building with dynamic, play-based activities, deliberately designed to make the learning stick. Participants rated our sessions the highest of the programme, highlighting the balance of theory and practice.

Facilitating to a large, multilingual audience of public servants from across Latin America and the Caribbean required holding a lot at once: managing group energy, creating psychological safety for honest reflection, and keeping the work grounded without losing its ambition. Being a public servant myself was a genuine asset here. I could empathise with the pressures in the room (the constraints, the trade-offs, the gap between policy intent and delivery reality) and that shared understanding shifted the dynamic from training to peer exchange.

I also co-delivered a webinar on Leverage Points as part of the technical deep dive series. For this, we developed our own framework to simplify and make the concept accessible in practice, translating what can be a dense theoretical idea into something participants could apply to their own health system contexts.