The public sector needs a better way to do strategy (and I’m building one)

8/5/2025 ☼ strategy ☼ public sector ☼ uncertainty

I’ve been working with governments and international organisations for nearly a decade. In that time, I’ve observed a persistent problem in how the public sector thinks about and does strategy.

Dedicated public servants step into strategic leadership roles and are given strategy frameworks and concepts that feel … off.

Why do these conventional ways of doing strategy feel off in the public sector? Because the commonplace strategic frameworks originate from empirical studies conducted many decades ago in the global North and West. They are rarely good fits for the very different conditions that hold today, especially in the global South and East.

Worse, these strategy frameworks are always inherited from the private sector, lightly filtered through the business schools and policy schools that senior public servants attend. The logic of business strategy should not be applied to public sector strategy because the private sector faces fundamentally different strategy challenges compared to the public sector.

The private sector can choose their stakeholders (usually shareholders and managers); the public sector is obliged to serve all stakeholders. The private sector is about playing zero-sum games against competitors; the public sector should be playing non-zero-sum games with all stakeholders. The private sector makes decisions on multi-year horizons; the public sector must think about consequences into the indefinite future. The private sector can ignore wicked problems; the public sector is often the last resort for addressing wicked problems.

So, I spent part of last year talking to public sector employees and public servants in 4 governments, and to 3 providers of public sector training. I wanted to understand what was already on offer in the world. Turns out, there’s a gap in the market and I’ve been working on building an outline of a 5-day strategy course for public servants that fills that gap by:

Addressing the realities of making strategy for the public sector (not the private sector),
Emphasising practical applications of public sector strategy-making (not just abstract theory), and
Leaning into the idea of strategy as tool for choosing direction and coordinating action across a massively decentralised set of hierarchies (which governments invariably are).

I’m lucky to have support in building out the course content from the Ethereum Foundation’s Summer of Protocols research programme, and MOD and the University of South Australia (where I’ll be a visiting research fellow this June).

I plan to test pieces of the course in public as they get built. 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.