A course on public sector strategy

5/6/2025 ☼ strategy ☼ public sector ☼ uncertainty ☼ tradeoffs ☼ coordination

As I wrote previously, I’m building a course on public sector strategy for public servants. I’ve been hard at work setting up the course structure but I also wanted to more fully articulate its underlying logic and motivation.

The structure of an intensive public strategy course.

Public strategy isn’t good enough right now

Public sector organisations are failing at strategy. Not because they lack smart people or good intentions, but because they’re using the wrong tools for the job. They’re trying to solve fundamentally different problems with strategy frameworks borrowed wholesale from the private sector — frameworks that were never designed for the unique challenges governments face.

This isn’t a minor efficiency problem. It’s a structural flaw that makes public sector organisations more rigid, more fragile, and less capable of serving the public mandate when it matters most. And it’s getting worse as the world becomes increasingly uncertain.

Overcrowded transit in Singapore due to coordination problems between different parts of government.

The public sector coordination problem

Public sector organisations face a coordination challenge that private companies simply don’t have. They are necessarily both decentralised and hierarchical at the same time.

They must be decentralised because they’re huge — often the largest organisations in their respective contexts — and must operate across vast geographic areas with diverse local needs. They are hierarchical because they’re often old organisations that have gradually routinised and solidified hierarchical ways of working.

So public sector organisations are usually decentralised hierarchies. They combine the costly coordination problems of decentralised organisations with the rigidity and fragility of hierarchical ones.

The coordination problem of decentralised hierarchies.

Most public sector organisations handle this coordination challenge poorly. The result is predictable: Bureaucratic rigidity that can’t adapt to changing circumstances, fragility that collapses under unexpected pressure, and ineffectiveness that undermines public trust.

When done properly, strategy is a protocol that directly addresses these coordination problems. Good strategy makes public sector organisations better coordinated, less rigid, and less fragile. It makes them better at serving public mandates. But for the public sector to do strategy properly, it must avoid both conceptual errors and source errors.

Conceptual and source errors in how the public sector thinks about strategy.

Planning fallacy and an obsession with goals over tradeoffs

The first conceptual error in public sector strategy is that strategy is confused with planning. Planning focuses on how to allocate resources and sequence actions to achieve known goals — planning is hard, but it isn’t strategy and must come after strategy.

Strategy is about making reasoned decisions about what goals to pursue in an uncertain world where there are no objectively correct goals to pursue. This is hard in a different way from planning, because it requires interrogating subjective values.

This distinction isn’t academic hairsplitting. When public sector organisations treat strategy as planning, they stop making the inevitably difficult decisions about what goals to pursue in a resource-constrained world.

The second conceptual error compounds the first: public sector strategy typically focuses only on goals without interrogating tradeoffs. Goals are easy to state; desirable outcomes are difficult to argue with. But stating goals without explicitly acknowledging what tradeoffs are (and aren’t) acceptable in pursuing those goals is counterproductive when resources — whether time, money, attention, or anything else — are limited.

This is because every strategic choice involves tradeoffs. Optimising for one stakeholder group may disadvantage others. Pursuing short-term gains may compromise long-term sustainability. When public sector strategy ignores these tradeoffs, it becomes disconnected from operational reality and political feasibility.

The private sector trap

But there’s a deeper problem, and it lies in where public sector organizations source their strategic frameworks. They usually borrow them uncritically, from the private sector. This seems superficially reasonable. Private sector strategy has produced impressive results in corporate contexts. But borrowing from private sector strategy is a mistake based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what public sector strategy needs to accomplish.

Private sector strategy was developed to solve private sector problems. Its intellectual foundations were laid using management research conducted on US industrial and manufacturing corporations during the post-World War II economic boom — a very specific context of rapid growth, clear market signals, and relatively predictable operating environments.

Where private sector strategy comes from.

Because of how, where, and when it came into being, private sector strategy operates on short time horizons, typically measured in years. It prioritizes shareholders as the primary stakeholder group. It values efficiency and profit maximization as desirable outcomes. And crucially, it can choose to avoid tackling problems that are too complex, uncertain, or unprofitable. These limitations of private sector strategy commonly lead to bad outcomes.

One example illustrated below is the 2015 Samarco Mariana tailings dam failure in Brazil, allegedly caused by cost-cutting and efficiency-driven substandard maintenance and monitoring by the Samarco mine’s owners, Vale and BHP Billiton. The dam failure released tens of millions of cubic metres of toxic mining wastewater, which destroyed downstream villages, killed 19 people, and polluted nearly 700km of river and a large expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

A village destroyed in the Samarco dam disaster.

There are too many examples of such failures of private sector strategy to list. It goes without saying that public sector strategy should not do any of these things.

The public sector should work to indefinite time horizons. It should serve the needs of all stakeholders (including those not yet born), not just the most powerful or profitable ones. It should value effectiveness and maintain non-wasteful slack as a way to remain resilient when facing unexpected challenges. And it mustn’t choose to avoid wicked problems — complex, open-ended issues with no clear solution, where attempts to solve them often create new problems and where stakeholders may disagree on the problem itself, but which must nonetheless be addressed.

What private strategy can be — and what public strategy must be.

When public sector organizations try to apply private sector strategic frameworks to these fundamentally different challenges, the frameworks don’t just fail — they can actively make the problems worse. They create false precision where nuanced judgment is needed. They optimise for metrics that don’t capture public value. They result in plans that collapse when they encounter the complexity and uncertainty that characterize most important public challenges.

The uncertainty imperative

This mismatch between private sector frameworks and public sector realities becomes even more problematic in our current strategic environment, where public sector unknowns are increasingly uncertain instead of being simply risky.

Uncertainty and risk are both about unknowns, but they are fundamentally different.

Risk is when you know enough about what you don’t know to quantify it both accurately and precisely. Risk feels manageable because it can be calculated. You can run cost-benefit analyses, compute expected values, and make decisions based on quantified probabilities. Risk is comforting because it feels like control over the unknown.

Uncertainty is fundamentally different. Uncertainty is when you don’t know what you don’t know. True uncertainty cannot be quantified because you lack the information necessary for accurate probability estimates. The past provides poor guidance for navigating true uncertainty because, by definition, you’re facing situations without clear precedent.

How uncertainty and risk are fundamentally different.

This distinction matters enormously for public sector strategy because the challenges governments face are increasingly characterized by true uncertainty rather than manageable risk. Climate change and extreme weather events. Geopolitical disruptions. Pandemics and public health crises. Financial system contagions and supply chain breakdowns. Each of these has produced unexpected disruptions in the past decade that existing risk management frameworks failed to anticipate or address effectively.

True uncertainty makes the coordination problems of decentralized hierarchies significantly harder. It’s difficult to coordinate action when you can’t predict what you’re coordinating toward. It’s difficult to maintain organisational coherence when the operating environment shifts in unpredictable ways.

Yet most public sector strategy continues to treat uncertainty as if it were risk — something that can be managed with better data, more sophisticated models, and more detailed planning. This approach not only fails to address true uncertainty but actually makes organizations less capable of responding effectively when unexpected events occur.

A different approach

What public sector organisations need is an approach to strategy tailored specifically to their unique requirements: Indefinite time horizons, obligations to serve all stakeholders, multiple definitions of valued outcomes, mandates to tackle wicked problems, and operating environments characterized by increasing uncertainty.

This requires understanding strategy not as planning or goal-setting, but as the practice of making reasoned subjective arguments and decisions about acceptable tradeoff configurations when pursuing desired outcomes. Good public sector strategy explicitly acknowledges that the future is unpredictable, that every choice involves tradeoffs, and that different stakeholders will legitimately define success in different ways.

This approach to strategy doesn’t eliminate the coordination challenges of decentralized hierarchies, but it provides a framework for managing them more effectively. It builds organizational capacity to adapt as circumstances change rather than optimizing for efficiency in executing predetermined plans. It acknowledges the inherent uncertainty in public sector operating environments rather than pretending that better analysis can eliminate it.

Most importantly, it recognizes that public sector strategy serves a mandate that is fundamentally different from private sector profit maximization. Citizens deserve public sector organisations that can respond effectively to complex, uncertain challenges. They deserve strategy that acknowledges tradeoffs explicitly, rather than making promises that cannot be kept. They deserve a public sector with the capacity to serve public needs over indefinite time horizons rather than optimizing for short-term metrics.

The path forward

Public sector leaders who recognize the limitations of current strategic approaches face a practical question: What does effective public sector strategy actually look like in practice?

In my view, the answer involves thinking through four interconnected elements.

Establishing a proper foundation and orientation to public sector strategy,
Learning how to make strategic goals and tradeoffs explicit,
Understanding what makes resources and constraints strategic, and
Designing strategic actions and implementation approaches.

Each of these elements requires specific tools and frameworks designed for public sector contexts rather than borrowed uncritically from private sector applications. Each requires building organizational capabilities that most public sector organisations currently lack.

For mid-to-senior level public servants with the responsibility for leadership and strategy, this represents both an intellectual challenge and a practical imperative. The intellectual challenge lies in unlearning strategic approaches that seem intuitive but are fundamentally mismatched to public sector realities. The practical imperative lies in developing new capabilities that are essential for effective public service in an uncertain world.

In my view, this isn’t optional professional development. It’s an increasingly vital competency for public sector leadership. Countries face increasingly complex challenges that require sophisticated strategic thinking from their public sector organisations. A public sector that continues to rely on outdated strategic frameworks will continue to disappoint the people they serve.

This is why the public sector needs an approach to strategy designed specifically for public sector challenges — strategy that acknowledges uncertainty rather than pretending it away, that makes tradeoffs explicit rather than hiding them, and that builds adaptive capacity rather than optimizing for false efficiency.

Public sector leaders who master this approach won’t just be better strategists. They’ll be better public servants, capable of fulfilling their democratic mandate in a complex and uncertain world.

I’ll be making this short course on public sector strategy available as both a hybrid asynchronous/synchronous online cohort-based programme and an in-person intensive 3-5 day programme. If you’re interested in having your public sector organisation (broadly conceived) be a beta-tester, let me know.

I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools.

And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can design themselves to be good at working in uncertainty by clearly distinguishing it from risk.