7/4/2025 ☼ not-knowing ☼ uncertainty ☼ strategy ☼ efficiency
At a recent UNDP event on increasing government efficiency and digitalization, I spoke to representatives across a country’s government about how public institutions can — and should — navigate an increasingly uncertain world.
tl;dr: We should not be trying to build hyper-efficient public sector organisations that spend their time making rigid, non-adaptable, long-term plans. What the public sector needs is efficacy (not just efficiency) and non-wasteful slack that can adapt and be redeployed as situations change.
Why? Because the future is always unpredictable and uncertain (not just risky) — and as the world becomes more interconnected and interdependent, that uncertainty will increase as well. Uncertainty messes up conventional long-term planning.
An example: When we think about digitalizing government services today, we assume citizens will access them via the internet on smartphones. That’s now a more than reasonable assumption, especially in the developing world. But if we had been making a 25-year government digitalization plan in 2000, would we have built it around the assumption of widespread mobile internet and smartphones? Unlikely … because the first popular smartphone (the first iPhone) wasn’t announced until 2007.
(A 25-year strategic plan from 2000 would also not have been built around a 3-year long global pandemic, the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, a global tariff war, or the abrupt global withdrawal of US foreign aid. And yet here we are.)
The hidden problem with rigid long-term planning is that it implicitly assumes that future scenarios can be predicted and planned for. Unfortunately, many of the biggest disruptions affecting governance and policy aren’t accurately quantifiable risks that we can anticipate and optimize for. Instead, they are emergent, unquantifiable uncertainties we must be prepared to adapt to and take advantage of.
This is connected to another problem. Whenever I’ve consulted for governments or NGOs, I always find that the strategy work is being thought of as strategic planning — with an emphasis on the planning rather than the strategy. But planning isn’t strategy. Planning is the important and difficult task of deciding what actions to take, in what order, to achieve chosen outcomes. Real strategy is about making principled decisions about what outcomes to select in the face of uncertainty about what the right decision is.
I can understand why planning gets mistaken for strategy.
Planning is a comforting way to approach unknown futures. Planning feels nice and structured. It’s filled with “best practices” gathered from other countries or sectors which can be followed. Planning gives teams of people lots of work to do. Data must be gathered, trends modeled, outcomes projected, roadmaps detailed. All this planning work makes it easy to pretend that uncomfortable decisions filled with uncertainty are being made.1
Strategy is about choosing between fundamentally different futures or success definitions. These choices are never objectively or provably “right” or “wrong.” Instead they reflect inherently subjective values and priorities. Making strategic choices explicitly is uncomfortable because there’s no objectively correct choice.
Consider a city setting its transportation infrastructure policy to increase mobility. Resources are limited, so it chooses to develop a strategic plan that focuses on building an extensive network of roads and highways. This, after all, is what cities all over one of the most economically powerful nations in the world have done, so it probably counts as a planning “best practice,” right?
As the network of roads in and around the city grows, more people buy and use private vehicles to get around, and since they have cars anyway they don’t mind living ever further out from the core to get a bit more space, and shopping/working out there (as long as there’s easy parking). The city’s urban structure gradually becomes geographically diffuse. Housing is increasingly separated from retail/commercial areas, all oriented around parking availability. (Whisper: “Suburbia.”)
Is increasing mobility and creating a low-density city of large-ish suburban homes and parking-heavy stripmalls and commercial plazas a successful outcome? Would it be preferable to instead have a dense, vibrant, mixed-use city with an extensive public transit network, few suburbs, and very few cars? There is no correct answer to these questions. Strategy questions never have objectively correct answers, so they are contentious, and uncomfortable. These are the questions that should be asked first, before planning begins.
If strategy questions are asked first — and the answer is, “Yes, we 💕 dense, vibrant, mixed-use, few cars, great transit!” — the planning changes to focus on building an extensive, high-quality public transit network. Mobility rises, and property near transit points becomes increasingly valuable. Urban structure becomes increasingly dense. Relatively few people use cars. Housing, retail, and commercial activity becomes more and more intermingled.
A low-density, car-centric city is as valid a strategic choice as a dense, vibrant, transit-centric city. You can’t prioritize both at once without unlimited resources. Strategy requires committing to one subjective definition of success. Only after this commitment can effective planning begin.
The distinction between strategy and planning is particularly crucial when it comes to efficiency in public institutions. The rhetoric of efficiency is currently all-pervasive. It is almost always borrowed from private-sector ideas of management, propounded by people who made a lot of money in the private sector. But a government is not a private-sector company and cannot be run like one.
An organisation built around efficiency is optimised for a particular configuration of its operating environment. By design, such an organisation is planned with as little slack/redundancy as possible. It is well-run for as long as its operating environment doesn’t change. When the environment changes, it falls apart because it has no slack to fall back on.
Business history is literally full of businesses that disappear when their environments change, to be replaced by new businesses better able to respond to the changed environment. But governments and other institutions with obligations to the public must operate across much longer time horizons. We don’t want governments collapsing and being replaced. (Important note: A government is not the same things as a political party that’s in power.)
This means that governments and public sector institutions must be built to be ready for their operating environments to change unpredictably over long periods of time. This requires resilience and efficacy. This is why resilience and efficacy should matter more than efficiency in public institutions.
Strategy is a way of thinking about and deciding what effectiveness looks like. To be resilient and effective requires the right kind of slack (which efficiency tries to root out and get rid of). Not all slack is created equal. Some slack is dead weight and should be disposed of. The right kind of slack is totipotent: It can be redirected and repurposed when conditions shift. The right kind of slack is also connected to environmental sensing functions that continually scan for emergent change and redeploy the slack accordingly.
Public sector organisations need to be built around useful, redeployable slack. It should go without saying that they should try their best to cut away wasteful, dead-weight slack but leave the right kind of slack alone.
Public sector organisations need to ask real strategic questions (not just do strategic planning), and be designed around useful, redeployable slack that makes them effective and resilient (not just designed for brittle, short-run efficiency).
This way of thinking runs counter to the conventional planning model of building and locking in 20 (or 30, or 50) year plans. Instead, it calls for intelligently and rigorously structured short-term experimentation. Running pilot projects designed to test policies in real conditions before scaling them up (or killing them). It means designing legislation with built-in expiration mechanisms rather than assuming static rules will remain relevant indefinitely.
And it means setting goals in ways that recognize that definitions of success will necessarily change. Goals for distant and uncertain futures must be defined in terms of detectable signals of movement toward or away from successful outcomes, not in terms of ostensibly rigorous quantitative targets (“KPIs”) which rapidly go out of date.
Governments today face environments that are shifting quickly in ways no one can fully predict. The right response is to build public institutions that can sense change and respond dynamically. That means making hard strategic choices upfront, structuring slack for adaptability, and resisting the illusion that rigorously rigid plans and efficiency alone create long-term success.
Get in touch if these ideas resonate with you, or if you want to implement these ideas in your organisation. I’d love to chat.
I’ve been working on turning discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk.
I’m not saying that planning work is easy or trivial. Planning work is difficult and vital, but it must come after strategy work. Investing a lot in planning without doing strategy first is like doing a lot of time-consuming research and buying expensive train tickets without having decided on where you’re going.↩︎