McKinsey Quarterly 2023 Number 1

Dipo Faloyin on correcting the African narrative In a conversation with McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti, the senior editor at VICE challenges readers to reconsider the enduring, monolithic perception of the African continent as a place of devastation and poverty to one of achievement and possibility. Marina Nitze on navigating red tape with ease The former chief technology officer of the US Department of Veterans Affairs talks with McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti about strategies for breaking

What do you mean by “engage with the continent as it actually exists . . . not with an idea”? If you ask most people to picture Africa, they’ll think only of two ideas: one is poverty, and the second is safari. But this is a region of 1.4 billion people and over 2,000 languages. African countries can represent anything, from stories of great triumph

and success to stories of great pain. When you start to better understand the region, history, and context, you start to build a far more realistic reality of what it means to be Nigerian or Rwandan, or to be from Zimbabwe, South Africa, or Algeria. From around the 1890s [when Africa started being referred to as the “dark continent”] to now, there has been a singular vision of Africa as a place where people don’t hold their destinies in their own hands. That isn’t the case.

Can you explain your tips for hacking bureaucracy, starting with, “Be the queen on the chessboard”? In chess, the queen can go forward, backward, and diagonal, unlike other pieces. When you’re trying to fix a process, I encourage you to be like the queen and go everywhere that you need to go to fix it.

I watched a state welfare officer process foster-parent applications.

The woman was filling out a carbon copy form to request an applicant’s driving record. I asked, “Why are you filling out this old form?” She said, “It’s because the people at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] live in the 19th century. They’re still using this old paper process.” Because I’m the queen on the chessboard, I went to the DMV and asked how they process those forms. To my surprise, the woman at the DMV pulled up an electronic request system. I asked, “Where does the carbon copy paper fit in?” She said, “You must have been at child welfare. They live in the 19th century.” By figuring this out, we were able to remove a cumbersome part of the process.

down bureaucratic silos and spotting inefficiencies.

121