Strategie und Strategic Leadership in der britischen Verwaltung waren die Themen unseres Gesprächs mit Sean Lusk, Head of Strategy / Programmes, von der National School of Government in London. In Aufbau, Anlage und Ausprägung ihrer Strategiefähigkeit gilt die britische Verwaltung im Bereich des Senior Civil Service als international führend. Der zweite Teil des Gesprächs mit dem Titel “Building organizations with a bias towards the future…” erscheint am 17. August 2010.

DSM: Sean, you are Head of Strategy / Programmes at the National School of Government in the UK. Strategic leadership is playing a major role in the Senior Civil Service training schemes and the founding of the Centre for Strategic Leadership made this even more prom-inent. Why is this the case? Has there been a lack of strategic thinking before?

Sean Lusk: The initial prompt for running training programmes in strategic thinking was the introduction by the Head of the Civil Service of the ‘Professional Skills for Government’ competence framework in 2003. However, when we began to run these programmes our students told us two things: First, you must link strategic thinking approaches to policy-making and to strategies to ensure that delivery takes place. We therefore re-designed our programmes to ensure that they offered this ‘line of sight’. Second, please give us good examples and case studies of strategies that have worked, and explain to us why they were successful. When we turned to the many thousands of strategy publications we found that very few carried examples from the public sector; this resulted in our programme of research and the ‘strategy exchange’ website (www.nationalschool.gov.uk/strategyexchange) .

The ‘Centre for Strategic Leadership’ ran primarily programmes in leadership development, but these programmes tended to focus too much on the development of leaders as individuals and not enough on the development of leaders as people who are able to achieve desired outcomes (or ‘results’) in the context of the public service system. Strategy is always about the identification and achievement of those desired outcomes.

The UK tends to talk quite a lot about strategy, but it is questionable how strategic most officials or politicians really are compared to those in some European countries. We have found that the question of appetite to work strategically is crucial. However, we tend to recruit into the civil service for ‘problem solving’ skills; these skills are important for any government, but they tend, by definition, to be reactive skills. Strategic skills are what help us to understand the dilemmas facing society, to anticipate and prepare for change and to set goals and create a vision of a desired future. Our system of government does not recognize or reward these kinds of skills on the whole, and this makes it a struggle to increase strategic capability.

DSM: You currently writing a book on Strategy in Government, what are from your point of view the differences between strategy in the public and the private sector?

Sean Lusk: There are some important differences, and these are, on the whole, poorly understood. Governments can learn much from the best private sector practice, for instance in building organizational resilience, in understanding future operating conditions, in tracking developing futures through leading indicators. But there are three significant differences that are rarely if ever written about:

Profit: What is the public sector equivalent of profit? One of the great difficulties in the public sphere is that it often far from obvious what we are working to achieve. This is one of the reasons that strategy is so important. In the private sector it is always clear – profit is the overriding objective, for without profit nothing else can happen. This is, of course, too crude a description. Considerations like shareholder value, long term sustainability, innovation and the development of new markets, products and services are all important to private businesses. But ultimately there is a very good test of whether a strategy is working or not in the private sector: has it added to the bottom line? In the public sector, what is the equivalent test? Value for money is important, but it is hardly what government exists to achieve – some of the least effective administrations are among the most efficient (Oklahoma and West Virginia in the US, for instance). The nearest equivalent is probably Mark Moore’s work on public value, but public value is still quite a complex definition of the ‘public bottom line’.

Competition: Most work on private sector strategy – most notably Michael Porter’s – focuses on gaining competitive advantage over other businesses. This is on the whole an unhelpful way of viewing strategy in the public sphere. There is an argument to suggest that nations are in competition with one another, and it is true that nations compete for trade, for resources, for land and for people. At its most extreme this behaviour manifests itself as war – rules-based systems help to prevent such conflict. However, the notion of competition does not help us to tackle major strategic challenges like food shortages, water shortages or climate change. Competition does not necessarily help us to achieve security or the preservation of rules-based systems, either. This suggests that governments have a role that is quite distinctive from private businesses. We have introduced the principles of competition and choice into the provision of many public services, based on the notion that in a competitive market the quality of goods will tend to increase and the price will tend to fall, driven by the urge of providers to gain competitive advantage. However the evidence for the success of this approach is quite mixed. Indeed, those health systems with the greatest level of choice also appear to be those that have the greatest cost. This is not to suggest that multiplicity of provision is unwise, but it is to suggest that simple mimickry of the private market in the provision of civic goods like education, health, transport, social housing and so on may also be unwise. The duty of governments is to create the conditions that are most likely to achieve desired outcomes.

Creating a different future: This is the most important difference of all between the private and public worlds of strategy. It is not the role of a private sector business to change the future (though many do, obliquely, like Apple, or Google, or the railway companies of the 1830s). It is, however, the job of governments to change the future for the better for their citizens. The nature of that future, and the extent of the role governments themselves will play in securing that change is a matter of political debate. But people do expect their governments to work to make life better, not only for them as individuals, but for their fellow citizens, too. This is why clarity of strategic vision is so important for governments, and why it matters so much when this is lacking. It is also why organizational strategy for a department or agency is relatively unimportant. The continued existence of the organization is, or may be, irrelevant to achievement of the desired outcomes. This is a major difference between public and private strategy, for private strategy is fundamentally about the continuation of the business itself (including through mergers and acquisitions).

DSM: What is, if there is one single one, the best example of a strategic working government you know and why? What are the key factors of success?

Sean Lusk: There isn’t a single example. Finland, Estonia, Singapore and the US States of Oregon and Virginia have all achieved impressive results using strategic approaches. While the Scottish Government has not achieved such strong results – perhaps because of the difficulties of working during a severe economic downturn – they have adopted a strongly strategic approach. The key has been a good understanding of potential futures, a willingness to change, clarity of outcomes above all else, a willingness to engage the system as a whole (not simply to deliver services), and transparency and constant evaluation of results.

DSM: Strategic thinking and planning in German public sector debates is very often dis-cussed in very tool-orientated way which means as soon as technocratic way of looking at it – who has the best tool is able to steer particularly good. Would you agree? Or should there be more to it, e.g. guidance by some “strategy-orientated mind set”?

Sean Lusk: Tools can be very useful – but they can also be very dangerous (think of a rifle). Too often people want the tools to use as a substitute for the thinking, whereas the tools exist to help people think through complex issues in a strategic way. So while I believe that the most commonly used tools – for instance scenario-building – are powerful and valuable, I am always worried that people will use the tools in ways that are ultimately of little value or even quite damaging. One difficulty is the extent to which even intelligent people seem to want to ‘switch off’ their thinking and ‘tick a few boxes’. This is the wrong approach to any methodology, but it is all too common. Another difficulty is the degree to which organiza-tions bring in consultants to apply the tools, to write their strategies. But an organization can no more buy in someone else to do its thinking than we can pay someone to decide when we are hungry: this consultancy dependency can infantilise. Yet another difficulty is the failure to apply the work that the tools have created. It is so common to find a beautifully produced set of scenarios that have not been used to test organizational policies or to build resilience to thrive in different futures. They have simply been left on a shelf.

There are many good tools and toolkits available – mostly free to use and available on the web. But I still find plenty of officials and consultants who are busily writing new toolkits or methodolgies. This is because the rewards are for process and production, not for use and result.

Strategy in the public domain can never be a purely technocratic exercise, because the act of government is not a technocratic exercise, and certainly not in a democracy. Strategy-making must involve citizens and it must involve politicians.