Lesen Sie heute in der DSM-Interviewserie den zweiten Teil unseres Gesprächs mit Sean Lusk, Head of Strategy / Programmes, von der National School of Government in London. In diesem Teil des Gesprächs ging es um Maßnahmen zur Stärkung der Strategiefähigkeit in Organisation sowie die Möglichkeiten zum Aufbau einer zukunftsfähigen Verwaltung.

DSM: If you were a newly appointed head of a department, e.g. a permanent secretary, what would be your first steps to make the organization working more strategically?

Sean Lusk: I would ensure that it was an organization that was clear about what it existed to achieve in the world. I would want it to be able to express this in no more than one or two short sentences. I would also want it to have ‘line of sight’ from that clear mission through its activities and resources to the work of individuals. If that mission was not clear I would undertake a process that engaged everyone in the organisation in shaping the mission, so that everyone understood it and felt motivated by it. I would put budgets against desired outcomes.

There are also three simple things I would do to encourage strategic behaviour: First, I would ensure that every member of staff spent at least one day a month ‘in the field’ – whatever the relevant field was, and afterwards wrote a letter of thanks to the people he or she had spent the day with; second, I would ensure that the performance reporting cycle reported on real achievements, however small, rather than exclusively on process. For instance, annual reports would give examples of three families who had better quality of life because of some action the official had taken – not necessarily in that year, but in previous years, too; third, I would ensure that challenge was encouraged and rewarded throughout the organization – for instance by setting up a ‘shadow board’ to seriously question me and my senior colleagues.

DSM: Winston Churchill once said, ‘first we shape the architecture then the architecture shapes us’. What would this mean for the creation of a more strategic and forward thinking (organizational) architectures of government administrations?

Sean Lusk: One would need to build an organization with a ‘bias towards the future’, in contrast to many parts of the Civil Service, which has a bias to the present. (Note – present, not past – this is a common misapprehension – that the Civil Service is ‘old fashioned’, but it is often reluctant to learn from the past – it tends to be very stuck in the ‘lens of now’.). An or-ganization that is biased towards the future would have the following characteristics:

• A strong sense of its mission and purpose
• Clearly identified desired outcomes
• Good metrics to determine whether those outcomes were being achieved
• High levels of transparency
• Genuine staff engagement – reward for results, not for conformity
• ‘Institutionalised challenge’ – people who disagree with the chosen line would be lis-tened to and given opportunities to test their theories out
• Outward looking – with citizen engagement
• Politically aware and politically engaged

DSM: In spring John Kay published a little book on Obliquity. Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. Everybody concerned with public administration will immediately think of Charles Lindblom’s famous article on “Muddling Through”. And indeed, there is a whole chapter on this in Kay’s book. Kay emphasizes the re-emergence of muddling through in contrast to the ever more evidence-based government trend one can observe and which seems the only appropriate reaction to the Measuring the World point of view. Does this lead strategy in the public sector into a dilemma? Or should rather be a the strategic ap-proach making these paradoxes work in the interest of public value or the public interest? What does this mean for the future profile of public sector leaders in a connected world?

Sean Lusk: Kay’s book is very interesting. But I think he overlooks the vital distinction between private and public sector organizations. He is right to argue for obliquity in both sectors. In the public sector, one of the common mistakes made is to define the organisation’s purpose and its social mission as the same. For instance ‘ We will provide the best education (or health, or police etc) service in the world’. But the point of public organisations is not the services they provide, but in the change they are able to help bring about, of which services is only one element. In health, for instance, the way people eat, drink and take exercise will have far more significant impacts on public health than anything the NHS does. So I would argue for obliquity, but for slightly different reasons than Kay.

Lindblom’s Muddling Through is also very important, and a recognition of the reality of how and why policy is made in the way it is. I would also argue that Germany has – on the whole very successfully – adopted a Lindblomiam approach to strategy and policy by choice. But I am not convinced that descriptions of ‘how things are’ are quite the same as arguments for ‘how things must be’, still less for ‘how things might be’. Lindblom is insightful and interesting. But governments do not always behave in a Linblomiam way. Roosevelt didn’t in 1933-5, the Marshall plan was strategic, the Beveridge plan in the UK was strategic. These were great achievements. They took imagination – and that is something that can be sacrificed in the narrow ‘evidence based view’ of the world. Ian McGilchrist argues that the left brain has come to dominate the right brain in the western world over the last 250 years. This has brought us many advantages, as we apply reason to solving problems. But the balance, McGilchrist argues, needs to be redressed, because we must also be open to uncertainty, to embrace doubt, for through doubt lies imagination and the creation of new and better futures.

DSM: In the end of the interviews we always ask the three following questions: What comes into your mind when you think of the word strategy? What comes into your mind when you think of the word innovation? And, what comes into your mind when you think of the word networking?

Sean Lusk: All three of these words are heavily overused and misused.

Strategy is the process that helps us to understand what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. It is also the activity that enables us to achieve those goals and, because the future is uncertain, all strategies are dynamic – they change as they work.

Innovation is doing familiar things in different ways, doing new things in familiar ways and doing new things in new ways. Government agonizes about why it is not innovative, but the answer rests mainly in the nature of bureaucracy – which tends to concern itself more with process than with results. If we were able to create a government system that was concerned above all else with results then we would have more innovation. But we would also have more failure, more unfairness and more scandal in achieving those results. It would be a relief to have a more honest and adult discussion about innovation than is usual.

Networking is what humans do – or should do. We are social beings. But effective net-working requires curiosity – a desire to learn from others and a willingness to share one’s own learning. The context of government, with its formality of role, its processes and its tendency to reward those who hoard information and therefore power, can be a constraint on networking. Nevertheless, the most effective people are almost always the ones with the most effective networks!