Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

CHAPTER FIVE: STRATEGY, RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND THEVACANT MIDDLE GROUNDIntroductionMuch is said and written about the need for more strategic thinking and strategic leadershipin public and private sector organisations whenever their performance is under review. Aplethora of courses and seminars aim to teach people how to be strategic. Officials bemoanthe fact that the urgent always supersedes the important, (usually followed by genuinelyexpressed desires to have time to think).In some respects, these concerns reflect the pace of life more generally. Technology plays anenormously positive role in modern daily life in making information available, and keepingpeople “in touch”. It also drives a relentless 24 hour, seven days a week news cycle withmedia outlets competing for the latest snippet with which to feed the appetite of continuousnews channels and on line reporting.Writing in The Age, in April 2010, Professor Glyn Davis AC noted:Australian public servants are so overwhelmed by day-to-day demands they do nothave sufficient time to think about the most important policy problems facing thegovernment. That is to say, the public service needs to spend more time working onstrategy.But why is strategic thinking not a priority already? Perhaps because the balancebetween responsive policymaking and creative policymaking is skewed in favour ofbeing responsive – reacting to the urgent. 247There is, however, only so much public servants can do to manage these pressures. In part,this amounts to “controlling what you can control”, being clear about priorities, andgenuinely balancing work and family life. Indeed, this is a real strength of the ACT PublicService (ACTPS), and one which its staff value highly. In part, the response to thesepressures relies on resourcing and capacity and exercising the discipline of allocating time.If public services are to continue to support governments in an increasingly mobile andconnected world, with ever increasing expectations of responsiveness, they will need to getbetter at using technology to their advantage, at managing expectations of what can – andcrucially what cannot – be done. They will, in short, need to be innovative in developing newways of working. Some of these approaches might be very simple: why, for example, shouldan email seeking information from a Minister be responded to in a formal letter, clearedthrough departmental hierarchies, and the response posted some weeks after it was received?Of course officials need to be conscious of the dividing line between responsiveness to theneeds of the government of the day and engaging in partisan political activity. Information247 Davis, G. (2010) “Beyond the Horizon” The Age, 6 April.Strategy, Resource Allocation and the Vacant Middle Ground: 204