What Owalo's office should do to make a difference

Eliud Owalo, the Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of performance. [File, Standard]

New year comes with the annual ritual for organisations – performance reviews and setting up of new targets. In government, this is led by Eliud Owalo, the Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of performance. From his speeches and social media posts, he is the right man for the job.

In addition to staff-based appraisals, Mr Owalo needs to embrace a government-wide, dynamic performance that includes strategic and agile approaches. The approach is known as “strategic agility”. If properly implemented, it is an important framework in reforming the public sector to act and ‘think’ differently and be ready for future eventualities.

Doz and Kosonen in their 2008 book, 'Fast Strategy: How Strategic Agility Will Help You Stay Ahead of the Game', refers to “strategic” as vision-driven, long-term and “agility” as the ability of an organisation to proactively identify and respond to emerging challenges in policy. It is the ability to act and think differently, by keeping an organisation on the leading edge.

The authors point out that the desire to achieve strategic agility has been an age-old dilemma from the times of strategic management. However, it is the private sector that has led in embracing strategic agility as a way of thriving, and often a means of survival through continuous change. While the public sector has been concerned with service continuity, and long-term mandates, private sector has shorter mandates, quick to embrace change and adapt faster to rapid technological change, changing economic circumstances and mitigating competition from related economies, arising from  liberalisation and globalisation.

The government requires strategic agility for rapid and complex change to address the needs of an informed population, besides meeting international obligations. In previous decades, the public sector was shielded from such pressures because it was concerned with moderate long-term economic growth, which generated sufficient productivity gains for continuous expansion of the role of government. Despite the presence of long-term objectives such as Vision 2030, the government requires short-term goals that run the span of five years – the political period.

In some instances, short-term goals are an opposite shift from those set by the previous government and why strategic agility is needed. While governments change, the public sector does not. If it was addressing economic goals towards the East, another regime may adopt West-facing economic ones. Only a strategic agility public sector can weather such changing storms efficiently.

Equally, the public sector has transformed in a few decades to become a massive service provider. The public sector has become a big organisation, where the state and citizens now interact on a daily basis. Such large administrative structure becomes difficult to reinvent and adapt itself, particularly in keeping pace with technological advancements that offer new opportunities to define the relationship between the state, on the one hand, and citizens and businesses on the other.

The government is confronted by the silo ministerial boundaries which calls for a whole-of-government response. For instance, response to climate change may need coming together of ministries of Environment, Interior, Trade, Energy and Foreign Affairs. Security challenges may require a joint approach by the ministries of Interior, Defence, Office of the DPP and intelligence agencies.

Ms Serebwa is an administrator, University of Embu