Run the Room

I - Identify the path

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In high school, I won the National Debating Championship. Embarrassingly, long past high school, I still believed the work was perfecting the argument.

Tighter evidence. Stronger framing. Better answers to the hard questions.

Then I watched a weaker ideas get adopted. And I started to realize that the work was actually being in the right rooms at the right moments.

Institutional adoption doesn't happen in response to good ideas. It happens at specific moments.

Whatever your field, there are windows. A multilateral financing instrument being drafted. A national sector plan under design. A new minister in their first hundred days. A major retender that locks in priorities for years.

Miss these windows and you wait another cycle.

So how do you get in the right rooms at the right time?

The third phase of DRIVE is Identify the path — and it's five moves:

Assess winnability. Which contexts have political will, an open window, partner density, and momentum?

Map timing windows. Financing cycles, political cycles, operational triggers

Map the decision chain. Who decides, who influences the decider, who can block. The formal decision-maker may not be the real one.

Define the first win. The smallest foothold that creates momentum.

Try this:

Map the next three institutional windows relevant to your standard. For each one: what document is being drafted, who owns it, and what would you need to have ready to influence it?

🌿 Timing is not luck. It's research. Make it easy to say yes at the right moment.

This is part of a 5-part series on D-R-I-V-E: the way to move standards from concept to institutional adoption.

If you know someone whose work is stuck waiting for the "right moment," forward this to them.

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