Do Strategy Maps Work in Government? - Part I

Over the past several years, I have been working with numerous large and small City, County, and State governments and related entities.  Most of the work has entailed consultative support to mature their methodologies from "Results Oriented" models to more Balanced Scorecard-based models, to support better strategy deployment, ensure appropriate outcome measurement and bottom-line effectiveness of the management system, as well as the automation of existing business plans into ActiveStrategy Enterprise software.

Without a doubt, there is tremendous ‘cultural’ focus on outcomes.  Everyone talks about them, most are trying to measure them, and the political bodies publicize them.  It is obvious to me that the era of defining the role of government in terms of the outcomes it produces is here.  Citizens expect it, government employees strive for it.

Unfortunately, I see a lot getting "lost in translation," a great deal of business-as-usual, and little direct linkage between the outcomes articulated in vision statements and the selection of internal activities .

One tool proven highly successful in the private sector is the strategy map. A seemingly simple visual representation of a strategic plan, though chock full of carefully chosen interrelated activities and causal relationships, it is a great device through which to achieve management consensus on the exact elements of a strategy, to help articulate what will not be done to adhere to the strategy, and to support management’s duty to communicate the strategic plan throughout the organization.  (I recommend reading Michael Porter's  HBR article entitled, "What is Strategy?")

So, why isn’t it used more in the public sector? In Part 1, I'm going to take a step back and look at some of the forces impacting governmental organizations. Because large and small governments tend to be so different, there are different forces impacting each.

Large Governments

Large governments, i.e. 10,000+ employees, tend to be run by large councils, commissions, or other elected bodies.  By design, each of these elected officials comes with an agenda for his or her district or region, resulting in a long and diverse list of desired strategic outcomes. 

Though these large organizations would seem to have ample resources, their budgets must cover vast amounts of services. In addition, many large governments must periodically contend with drastic budget cuts (e.g., Florida’s recent property tax roll-back).  Because they are expected to deliver so much to so many stakeholders, large governments end up having relatively limited resources.

So they end up with far too many strategic outcomes or priorities (as defined by the elected officials) and far too little organizational capability to execute them within a given election cycle. 

Like all organizations, governments must whittle the number of desired outcomes in any given strategic plan down to the "critical few" in order to be able to deliver any of them at a level of quality acceptable to citizens. 

However, the tough reality is that elected officials are often unable to back down on their support of key outcome issues. Though the officials may understand the need to focus, they fear that the public may not.  In the end, this is part of the reason why governments tend to get stuck in a cycle of over-promising on outcome goals and persistently under-achieving.

Strategy maps show how a collection of activities interrelate in a cause-and-effect manner to impact desired outcomes.  The maps only cognitively work if the outcomes are narrowed to a select and focused few (and if they are all driving toward a related set of outcomes).  The varied and numerous outcomes typically delineated by political bodies often have no interrelationship intended or otherwise.  They are islands floating in the sea of citizen purveyance.  Thus, a strategy map has no context in such a situation.

Small Governments

Some smaller governments are able to avoid this scenario because they tend to be run by city councils or county commissioners acting more like true strategic planners. These smaller groups often speak with one voice and with a more long-term view (vs. a short election cycle). In my opinion, this is really nothing more than a side benefit of their small size, very similar to what occurs in the private sector. 

So, strategy maps can typically be deployed in a smaller governments more easily. Identifying the "critical few" is not necessarily as difficult for smaller governments, as they often have fewer political stakeholders to please when making their tough choices.  So as not to sound completely naïve, I know this is not always the case; competing political forces can certainly do damage in any small government.

Watch for a continuation of this article in my next post.