The first weeks of the 47th presidential administration have brought a new paradigm of government efficiency.
Armed with blunt tools and best intentions, the current strategy is focused on a desire to cut costs and an expectation that the system of government will eventually normalize. As cuts are being announced in real time, we’re also seeing the gravity of these decisions as unintended consequences materialize. This is often the case when dealing with wicked problems.
The federal leaders who inherit this new reality face dilemmas with difficult tradeoff decisions. Without specific guidance from Congress or Agency leadership, I see a handful of obvious dilemmas for those charged with executing these programs:
How will I allocate my limited funds across multiple competing laws or policies?
Is it better to have partial implementation of all policies, or is it better to fully comply with one to the detriment of another?
Is it better to try and do more with less, having the remaining employees to dig in and work overtime to get the job done?
Or is it better to scale back our services to match the allocated resources?
For each of these dilemmas, Federal leaders will need to weigh both short term and long-term thinking to stabilize their government service and position it for sustained success.
Some leaders are inclined to focus on immediate operational needs in the current environment. Sole focus on the short-term can be thought of as ‘damage control’ which can also lead to deferred infrastructure maintenance, stringing along obsolete technologies, or not investing in the skills needed by the workforce to execute emerging missions. The consequence creates a downward spiral of performance to be passed forward to the next generation of leaders.
Three Horizons of Focus
Good Government — even in turbulent times — should always be adapting to the emerging needs of government's customers and the emerging requirements levied by Congress. By leveraging both short-term and long-term thinking and continuing to invest in key capabilities, federal leaders can stabilize their government service and position it for sustained success.
- Execute your current mission (70% of your time);
- Improve and evolve productivity and performance (20% of your time); and,
- Prepare for the future (10% of your time).
Taking the Next Right Steps
I am advising clients to take these actions, which are in line with maintaining three horizons of focus:
Focus on productivity and efficiency in executing your current mission
Protect and strengthen your focus on every part of your current operations that is clearly aligned to statutory and legislative requirements and demonstrably delivers what your customers need for the outcomes they are trying to achieve. Be results-driven in how you apply your individual and organizational business acumen to doing and managing the operational tasks and activities in your service delivery. If you are seeing signs your team or your organization are overwhelmed, implement a queue (or backlog) for anything that emerges, and prioritize how you use your fixed capacity according to urgency and importance.
Understand and document clearly how your human, financial, and technology resources create the current level of service performance
Describe your program’s business/mission model and articulate the outcomes in terms of the specific resources needed to produce them. Employ a service catalog to develop zero-based budgets needed to accomplish the mission. When faced with future questions about reducing their operating budget, leaders will now be able to clearly present options around either: reducing the services available or degrading the service levels associated with the available services. Likewise, when presented with an opportunity to scale a new service to meet demand, leaders will be able to confidently defend their budget requests.
Take the opportunity to validate your service design
For every service and customer segment, there are very real and relevant considerations of utility, warranty, and experience: this means meeting the basic intent of the service, delivering it in a way that complies with all applicable laws and regulations, and doing so in a way that gives the citizen customer a true sense of equal dignity and respect, thereby continuing to build trust. Sunset anything that’s not value-added, is non-core, or is otherwise irrelevant to delivering the outcomes your customers need. Where you need legislative or regulatory relief, seize the opportunity to make the case.
Preserve your team’s ability to respond boldly to new insights and lead the transition to the known future
The best way to reliably and sustainably improve and evolve your program’s productivity and performance is to make sure you protect the time, space, and expertise to understand the next horizon, chart a path for your program to get there, and lead the people and manage the work through that change. Proactively seek out performance data and customer feedback to help pinpoint unmet needs.
Look over the horizon at multiple possible future environments for your program
When you come up for air, review those same performance metrics and customer feedback channels to understand longer term trends in customer behavior and latent demands. Project forward current agency, national, and international policies to envision how the world could be and the future operating environment where you’ll need to thrive. For each of the futures, ask: How might customers’ views and needs evolve? How might we reimagine our service design or service delivery? Where responses to these questions overlap for multiple futures, seek out improvements and partnerships needed to be positioned to translate vision into action.
Final Thoughts
Even if the cuts to your service were made by individuals who were not attuned to the serious, longer-range implications of the cuts, your agency’s mission is of great importance to our country and to the American people whom you serve. Your actions over the next 12 months will impact government service delivery for the next 10 years. And by keeping both a short- and long-range focus as you navigate the turbulence right now, you can make sure that impact is as positive as possible.