10/9/2025 ☼ strategy ☼ public sector ☼ risk ☼ uncertainty ☼ parametric
tl;dr: After over a decade teaching strategy in private and public sector settings, I’ve developed a new public sector strategy course that flips the conventional wisdom. Instead of borrowing failing private sector concepts, my approach recognises that public sector organisations — with their complex stakeholder environments, wicked problems, and indefinite time horizons — require fundamentally different ways of thinking about and doing strategy which should inform how private sector strategy is done. The course also teaches using parametric cases that can be fully customised for particular teaching contexts and specific content, making strategy education more relevant and engaging for busy public servants worldwide.
I’ve spent over a decade teaching strategy across universities and corporations, to undergraduates, PhD students, executive MBA students, and to teams in national governments and multilateral organisations. Across all these different public- and private-sector contexts I’ve noticed something troubling. Public sector strategy borrows heavily from private sector concepts and assumptions. But private sector strategy is not only clearly inappropriate for public sector demands, it is also failing as our world becomes more uncertain rather than merely risky and externalities begin to bite.
Here’s my thesis for developing a new public sector strategy course: The unique challenges that public sector organisations worldwide face, the ones they must learn to handle strategically, require a fundamentally different approach compared to private sector strategy.
So I’m building a short strategy training course that does this. The course takes the public sector seriously and doesn’t simply ape how the private sector thinks and operates. It is aimed at mid- and senior-level public servants in governments and multilaterals, so it is designed to fit twelve weeks of material into 90-minute chunks spread over multiple weeks that accommodate busy schedules.
The course consists of four parts, each focusing specifically on rethinking what strategy means and tailoring it to the unique challenges and opportunities the public sector faces.
The next three parts form approximately equal portions of the course:
The public sector is always one of the largest organisations in any country — and it is often both highly decentralised and also hierarchical. Decentralised organisations are flexible and resilient, but hard to coordinate. Hierarchies have clear lines of authority, but are rigid and fragile. Decentralised hierarchies have the disadvantages of both and few of the advantages of either. In particular, they usually suffer from serious coordination problems.
In a world that is increasingly uncertain (not just risky), and for enormous public sector organisations, command-and-control from the centre simply doesn’t work. Public sector entities need autonomy to respond when things change fast and unpredictably, but they also need to act with colliding with other parts of the public sector. Properly done, strategy is a way to communicate and coordinate effectively across a decentralised hierarchy, allowing its different parts to take action independently and interdependently without colliding with each other.
But public sector strategy is often not properly done. When public sector strategy is poor, coordination breaks down and bad things happen.
For instance, various parts of a national government permit less-expensive (and more flammable) building material in order to comply with cost-cutting measures, fail to update and enforce use of fire-safe building materials, or reduce construction oversight and emergency fire services provision as part of a cost-cutting and deregulatory stance. A public housing conflagration and tragedy ensues.
Or, over a longer time horizon, various parts of a desert city’s government encourage car-centric urbanism and extensive road construction, fail to invest in enough stormwater infrastructure, and permit rapid construction that dramatically reduces ground permeability. Increasingly frequent disruptive flooding after heavy rains ensues.
One way to view these two examples — and the many, many others like them — is as avoidable coordination failures. They are avoidable because they are failures of public sector strategy. Could we avoid them by changing how public sector strategy is conceived and executed? I say yes, and this is why we need better approaches to public sector strategy — approaches that understand that tradeoffs always matter and must be made explicit, and that strategy is principally a way of coordinating actions across decentralised hierarchies.
To work properly, public sector strategy must avoid two common errors. The first is a conceptual error, and the second is a source error.
How we conceptualise strategy today is to focus largely on planning and setting shared objectives. This is wrong. Strategic planning is important and difficult, but it is not strategy and can only come after strategy. It is also relatively easy for different parts of an organisation to agree on shared objectives — what’s hard is that constituencies might share objectives but almost always disagree on what tradeoffs they’re willing to make to achieve those shared objectives. Negotiating tradeoffs is much more important than agreeing on shared objectives.
Where we get our public sector strategy ideas from is also wrong. Much of the foundations of strategy theory come out of research on organisations that were successful … industrial corporations in post-WW2 America, the only one of the big developed nations not devastated by the war and able to take advantage of an enormous global reconstruction effort. Much of how we think about strategy today reflects how the private sector thinks about strategy as conditioned by what worked during that specific time in history.
Private sector strategy gets to serv very few stakeholders (like shareholders/owners), limit itself to a small number of valid outcomes (like profitability, sales, or growth), avoid tackling wicked problems, and maintain short time horizons (a few quarters or a few years).
Public sector strategy, on the other hand, must serve all stakeholders (even those not yet born), value diverse outcomes, address wicked problems, and work toward indefinite time horizons.
Does it make sense to apply what worked for 1950s, American, industrial corporations to public sector organisations of the present, most of which are not operating in the United States?
The gulf between how public sector strategy is taught now and what it needs to be is enormous. This makes the coordination function of public sector strategy harder — even as this function becomes ever more important as the world becomes more uncertain, not just more risky.
This course offers participants a simple but not simplistic way to think about and execute strategy. The definition I use throughout is this: Strategy is about making reasoned, subjective arguments for decisions about acceptable trade-off configurations while pursuing desired outcomes.
The content isn’t the only thing different about this course. The mode, format, and teaching approach are explicitly different too. The course consists of very short 25-45 minute lectures about specific content units, each followed by 60-75 minute case discussions in groups. These short modules are designed to accommodate busy public servants. In particular, the type of cases used is an innovation in itself. They’re what I call parametric cases: Teaching cases completely customised to the context of the participants in taking the class and to the specific piece of content being taught.
There are good reasons for teaching practical, applied knowledge using the case method. The complexity of cases partly simulates real-world decision situations. Active learning happens through analysis and debate of case information. When you do case discussion in group settings with cases representing multiple perspectives and stakeholders, you force students to integrate multiple perspectives, take different positions, and develop judgment and decision-making skills. In short: students are much more engaged when they are taught with cases that they perceive to be more relevant, concrete, and true to life.
But for these benefits to accrue, cases need to closely match the focal concepts being taught, exclude irrelevant information, feel realistic and local, and be recent. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case.
Most traditional cases are highly tied to specific geographical contexts, specific focal companies or organisations, and specific times when cases were written. Cases usually take a long time to write, are written to be broadly usable for teaching multiple concepts, and are often focused on North American or European organisations or contexts.
This is why the many benefits of case method teaching are rarely fully realised with traditional cases. But parametric cases customised to specific content, particular locations where students are being taught, and present time would solve this problem.
After many months of intensive experimentation, I’ve developed a way to reliably generate parametric cases that can be customised to specific geographies and timeperiods while mapping closely to specific content being taught.
This breakthrough makes it possible to create cases that are simultaneously pedagogically focused, contextually relevant, and temporally current — a combination that traditional case development methods struggle to achieve.
Parametric cases also improve teaching because they can be so closely mapped to specific content that each case becomes short enough to read in 10-15 minutes. This makes it possible for this public strategy course to be run without requiring pre-reading, as the case can be read in class.
I’ve now taught beta versions of modules in this course twice using test parametric cases. The beta testers included public servants from state and national governments, public utilities, and public sector training institutes.
The feedback I’ve gotten is that these parametric cases and this general approach to teaching public sector strategy both resonate deeply. In particular:
I’ll present a 90-minute module from this public strategy course on September 17, 0900-1030 Singapore time (GMT +8), as part of the Protocol School run by the Ethereum Foundation’s Summer of Protocols research programme (which has also funded much of this development work). This session is not open to the public but we can accommodate a few people — email me if you’re interested.
Just a few days after that, I’ll teach the same module with a few modifications and a re-customised parametric case as part of a course on foresight and strategy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.
Starting in mid-November, I’ll run the full course with open enrolment, with a schedule designed to make it as easy as possible for working public servants to take a class that introduces them to a simple but powerful and very pragmatic approach to strategy, one tailored in content and delivery to their specific needs.
If your organisation is interested in commissioning a customised course delivery, including parametric cases entirely tailored to your organisation context and specific pedagogical concerns, please get in touch.
For the last few years, I’ve been wrestling with the practical challenges of meaning-making in our increasingly AI-saturated world, developing frameworks for how humans can work effectively alongside these powerful tools while preserving the meaning-making work that is the irreplaceably human part of the reasoning we do. I’ve published this as a short series of essays on meaning-making as a valuable but overlooked lens for understanding and using AI tools
I’ve also 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.