The David Gergen Summer Fellowship Program is a highly competitive program that supports trailblazing public service and leadership opportunities, enabling a select number of HKS students to gain meaningful, practical, hands-on experience and develop important networks through summer internships in government or nonprofit service.
By Lukasz Kolodziej
The most valuable leadership lesson often emerges not from moments of crisis management but from the deliberate construction of systems that prevent crises altogether. During my summer placement at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Digital Hub, I discovered that sustainable impact in complex institutional environments requires a fundamental shift from individual problem-solving to building organizational capacity.
This experience, working across Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Western Balkans, and the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, revealed how the most effective leaders operate not only as problem-solvers but also as architects of institutional resilience.
I spent hours building what my colleagues jokingly called my “obsessive list”—a single place where nothing could get lost—because I had watched too many requests disappear into email chains, leaving clients unaware of potential help they could receive in cyber resilience.
"The Kennedy School’s emphasis on adaptive leadership proved practical. My work helped the team stop treating cybersecurity as purely technical and reframe it as adaptive—changing how the institution gathers information, makes decisions, and coordinates."
Lukasz Kolodziej MPA 2026
I took what my supervisor later called the “boring route,” tackling the messy, unglamorous work that nobody wanted to own but everyone needed. I built a simple intake questionnaire so we’d be prepared to ask the right questions straight away on any potential investment, regardless of its origin and nature. Moreover, I drew up a decision tree that sorted requests by risk level, business characteristics, and business development potential. I also created templates so the procured consultants would produce comparable analysis assessments, aligning with widely used and recognized cybersecurity standards.
The Kennedy School’s emphasis on adaptive leadership proved practical. My work helped the team stop treating cybersecurity as purely technical and reframe it as adaptive—changing how the institution gathers information, makes decisions, and coordinates. That shift powered two concrete wins:
- Standardized assessment protocol. Before, consultants used divergent methods; cross-country comparisons were apples-to-oranges. We built shared criteria: infrastructure capacity, regulatory environment, budget parameters, timeline, and institutional readiness. Every request landed on the same grid. Specialists spotted repeatable patterns and analysts could focus on higher-value work.
- Knowledge retention by design. Institutional memory had lived in inboxes and individual heads. With my supervisors’ blessing, I moved it into systems, including a unified project register that is automatically tagged by region, assigned to the right person, and tracked through standardized milestones. Instead of playing email tag to figure out who was handling what, we now had clear ownership and everyone could see progress in real time. Operations could scale without lowering standards because knowledge accumulated in the organization, not just in relationships.
What I cherished most was getting to see the whole picture—where the team was struggling and what wasn’t working—and then actually fixing it in real time. Watching my systems take hold while I was still there to refine them felt incredible. I learned to read the room differently, including discerning who really made decisions versus who had a title and which conversations happened in meetings versus what happened over coffee. With confidence from my supervisors, I stopped waiting for permission to lead and started just leading—quietly, but with more conviction than I’d ever felt before.
Reflecting on this summer, I think that CPL’s Leadership Development Cohort shows up here too. Peer coaching and after-action reviews trained two muscles in me: humility and discipline that map to Level 5 leadership. I took the slower path so the team can move faster every time after. I believe that this is compounding leadership.
I am grateful to the Center for Public Leadership’s Gergen Fellowship for making this work possible; to the late David Gergen, whose bipartisan, open-minded focus on the common good remains a north star, for the standard his name sets; to the Harvard Kennedy School Office of Career Advancement for opening the right doors at the right time; and to Roi Yarom, Associate Director for Cybersecurity at EBRD’s Digital Hub, whose judgment, patience, and professionalism raised the quality of my work every day.
David Gergen Summer Fellowship Program
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