Must the urgent always be the enemy of the important?
Why strategy matters now more than ever

29 June 2010

The fiscal crisis should help us to focus on the important. The Government wants the public to be involved in a fundamental reassessment of the public services that we need, and to come forward with suggestions for how those services should be delivered. That suggests a fresh look at what we as a nation think of as our priorities; it also suggests a concern for the long term. We cannot know what our priorities are without understanding what will be important not only today but in two, five and ten years’ time. To understand how different the world will be in 2020 (let alone beyond) we need to take a strategic approach. If we make choices based on the realities of 2010, we will not only achieve the wrong results in 2015 and 2020, but we will find that we have – once again - wasted a lot of money along the way.

How to get it wrong

If we allow our focus to be solely the balancing of the books there is a strong chance that we will all end up worse off. While very few would disagree that we need to balance those books, we must remember that we are balancing them for purposes that lie beyond the elimination of the deficit. Governments exist to achieve civic goods for their people – better health, safe communities, warm homes, a secure natural environment. The nature of these goods and the degree to which government needs to be directly involved in their production is – rightly – a matter of political choice. But it is possible to have efficient government that is profoundly ineffective. In other words, it is possible for governments to operate without deficits and yet achieve very little for their people. In the USA, the states with the lowest deficits (at zero) include Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia. But these states are also ranked lowest of the fifty on many of the most important indicators of outcomes (or results) achieved for their citizens. Government is not only about efficiency. In Europe, the UK ranks behind only Ireland and Greece in the size of our deficit in percentage terms at 11.5%. The good news is that the two nations with the smallest deficits, at 0.5% and 1.7% are Sweden and Estonia. Both nations score well in international benchmarks as good places to live, demonstrating that nations and their governments can have both efficiency and effectiveness if they make the right choices and keep an eye on the future. Efficiency is a necessary precondition for sustained effectiveness, but alone it is not enough.

There are two main dangers as we drive for much needed efficiency: firstly, that we lose sight of the real goals that we have, whether in the fields of public health, economic performance, energy security or education. Secondly - and more importantly – that in our efforts to reduce the deficit we make decisions seen solely through the ‘lens of now’ and therefore fail to pay enough attention to the major risks that face us in the coming decade: scarcity of energy, of land, of housing, of food; the public health challenges associated with obesity and excessive alcohol consumption; the multiple uncertainties we face as a nation with an aged population living in an era of climate change.

What are the prospects for getting it right?

The Coalition Government’s programme has got us off to a good start. It has largely avoided the risks associated with such agreements, which at their worst are an aggregation of unaligned activities, a fixation on what is going to be spent and how the spend will be counted instead of what a government wants to achieve. How money is spent is, of course, vital – but the money must follow the priorities, not the other way around. The programme for government sets out a series of desired outcomes, or goals, and a number of activities intended to achieve those goals. Politicians are people with a particular interest in the future. Why else would they enter politics? Most politicians have a belief in change for the better. The pressure of events, of parliamentary and media scrutiny and of the very system of administration we have created can all conspire to squeeze out that future-focused desire for change. Having a clear, coherent yet adaptable strategy is the best way to ensure that government shapes events rather than simply reacts to them.

A strategic approach, particularly in disputed and difficult territory, always requires a focus on the ‘why’ at least as strongly as the ‘how’. If you know why, you can often work out how for yourself. The Mayan people have a proverb: ‘Do not put your ideas together. Put your purposes together. Then agree. Then decide.’ We, like the Mayans, are at the point where we must assemble our purposes before we count our spears.

We could be entering the age of strategy. If we are to ensure that the urgent is not the enemy of the important we have to make it so.

Sean Lusk is head of the National School of Government’s strategy team.

sean.lusk@nationalschool.gsi.gov.uk