ADAPT: Adoption-Driven Adaptive Planning for Transformation
Today I’m sharing a working paper introducing ADAPT (Adoption-Driven Adaptive Planning for Transformation), a communications readiness framework for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
Over the past twenty years I’ve seen a pattern repeating across my work with NGOs, within the advertising sector, and most recently the public sector. You’ve see it too.
Communications teams are expected to be agile, informed, and responsive – often under intense constraints of time, budget, and political context.
And in the digital era, those constraints have only intensified.
“Digital” is often interpreted as cheap, or even free, which can lead to the assumption that strategic communications planning isn’t necessary.
But when national digital systems are involved – digital identity, payments, health records, social protection – communications isn’t optional.
It is part of the infrastructure. And it requires digital culture change at a national level.
What is ADAPT?
ADAPT is an attempt to formalise the planning process many experienced practitioners carry in their heads:
- How do you design communications when trust is fragile?
- What happens when timelines compress from 12 months to 2 weeks?
- How do you adapt when a campaign suddenly encounters political opposition or a security incident?
- How do you plan when your team consists of two people and a smartphone?
The framework proposes:
- a communications readiness diagnostic
- a shape model that adapts strategy to real-world constraints
- a channel × message layer planning matrix
- and a scaling methodology for compressing or expanding communications plans.
An interactive, diagnostic tool
This is very much a working draft for peer review.
I would particularly welcome feedback from practitioners working across the DPI ecosystem – including colleagues working with CDPI, GovStack, UNDP, the World Bank, Co-Develop, and others involved in digital public infrastructure implementation.
I’m especially interested in collaboration around:
• refining or evolving the communications shapes (they may ultimately become archetypes)
• developing meaningful adoption and trust metrics
• improving the diagnostic logic and decision rules
• testing the framework in real country implementations.
This paper is simply a starting point.
Every successful DPI system eventually discovers that adoption is not only a technical challenge. It is a human one.
If communications is going to be treated as a foundational layer of DPI, we need shared methodologies that practitioners across countries can actually use.
I would be grateful for thoughts, critiques, and collaborators.
Introducing ADAPT: A Communications Framework for DPI
ADAPT is a diagnostic tool + planning framework, designed to help navigate the real constraints of digital transformation: trust, time, literacy, and resources.
This is a working draft released for peer review.