2023-2025 Government Top 5 Transformation Insights: Agency Leadership and CIOs Insights for Future-Ready Strategy Playbook

The world's business challenges are changing rapidly, and Federal Agencies with their contractors supporting business/mission must be better prepared for the Future-Ready Strategy Playbook, starting now!

2022 was the year for new executive lenses on disruptive strategic and transformation research, especially UCLA Emeritus Professor Rumelt's with "The Crux."?There are familiar strategic themes with Dr. Rumelt's corporations and other leading university teams' research studies. Today, many large global and US corporations, Federal Civilian, and Defense agencies should adopt a future-ready strategic playbook. Currently, most CY-2023 playbooks are poorly done, with financial assumptions and outcomes that often can't be executed for their vision, plans, and goals. Simply put, many commercial and agency strategy playbooks need to be updated, using corporate board goals that fail to deliver.?

In addition, other research found a trend that initial agency and corporation executive and organizational leadership teams changed dramatically after a reshaped "transformation path" or once in place, especially for legacy Agency Directors, CFOs, CIOs, COOs, and Core Program Directors.?

Finally, the agency workforce must be resilient and future-ready with collaboration, talent skilling, and flexibility.

Imperative Three, our final segment, explores the latest future-ready research from universities focusing on Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and UCLA and how it can reset new agency innovation strategy and approach—specifically, rethinking outdated transformation strategy playbooks, reshaping agency organizational leadership and its program teams with innovators, right innovation transformation pathway, and power of the future-ready leadership and workforce to execute change.

Imperative Three — Future-Ready Agency business/mission innovations playbooks for executives' success dive into the last five critical innovation opportunity areas:?

1. Challenge-Driven Strategic Planning and Playbook?

2. Organizational Leadership Reset

3. Reset Organizational Transformation Advisors: Good, Bad, and Ugly

4. Four Pathways for Future Ready Organization Transformation

5. Reshape Leadership and Workforce: Talent, Collaboration, Skills, and Flexibility

Here's what the agency's leadership needs to know -

1. Challenge-Driven Strategic Planning and Playbook?

With the strategic planning support for outside advisors and consultants, too many agency leadership teams yearly continue to depend on incremental refreshed high-quality Strategic MS PowerPoint Decks for future outcomes, usually failing to deliver as promised!

Most large corporations and agencies leverage global outside consulting teams for advice and support with amazing pitch MS PowerPoint Briefings for transformation goals, expected outcomes, and next steps. In most cases, agency executives usually vote for quick approval, and it's done. Why? The leadership team was pre-briefed on the agency's future focus of known enterprise business-as-usual goal setting, expected financial forecasting, cost savings, and efficiency metrics.?

Most agency strategic plans continue to be a repeat of high-level goals with assumptions and targeting financial results, scorecards, with a financial dashboard without validated data. The longer the executive planning drags out, usually in a planning group too large, you can see more pet projects, weeds, and wishful thinking rolled into it. Lastly, leadership must clearly address agency policies and regulations barriers with timely courses of action for significate success and progress.?

Today, agency executive teams can only succeed if they are influential thinkers and practical, innovative strategists. They should have the following:?

? Prominent successful transformation experience as agency or commercial CEOs/COOs/CIOs, Agency Directors, and DoD Flag Officers?

? Rapid delivery of products/services success focusing on "major challenges" with decisive actions executed. Think like rapid novel "Dream Teams" ?–?Covid-19 Private-Govt Partnerships or?SpaceX-Agencies.

Agency Strategic Leadership Challenge-Based Readiness

In the first standup step, agency strategic leadership teams need to be ideally 12 up to 15 best-pick executives to avoid "Group-think" and "20th Century-think" time killers. Training executives and leadership teams on common innovation/transformation language is usually essential. Listen at any leadership meetings. Why? More misuse of the terminology adds further confusion, such as the wrong understanding of the agency's primary core services, platforms, ecosystems, and partnerships.

The next step, since leadership needs to rethink the agency's strategic planning readiness, the agency director will need a Strategic Challenge-based Planning Readiness deck. This readiness deck includes what is now expected, refocusing on the agency's primary critical challenges, or?"The CRUX,"?and addressable as emerging research calls?Addressable Strategic Challenge?(ASC). The agency director should use internal and external sources to plan primary challenges and opportunities. Also, provide clear agency examples to be ready with your ASC list discussions for "why it's critical." The agency director should go last on their challenges to avoid "Me Too" thinking.

In the meeting working steps, using the short-listed ASCs, craft an agency strategy playbook including ASCs for transformation(s.) The last meetings must cluster challenges to include urgent, simultaneous synergy, critical ASCs consolidated by discarding low-impact, non-priorities, and challenge distractions to sidetrack the primary challenges.?

In addition, it must address all the policies, funding sources, core services platforms, ops performance, and customer services delivery by essential action steps.?

Once core/priority challenges for the plan are finalized, then the leadership team will need to address which agency transformation paths to adopt. MIT's 2022 newer Future-Ready Four Pathways?offer valuable guidance for agency leadership to consider:

Pathway 1: Silos and Spaghetti?– current baseline of solos service-driven, complex systems and processes

Pathway 2: Integrated Experiences–integrated CX, strong designs/UX, and mobile

Pathway 3: Industrialized?– plug-and-play services, service enable the core platform(s)

Pathway 4: Future Ready–simultaneous integration, TX, agile/modular, dynamic partners/ecosystems, and strategic data asset.

Today, most agencies are leaving?Pathway 1?with numerous transformations to?Pathway 2: Integrated Experience - Customer First?approach?for?a costly support O&M model by combining newer systems and platforms for improved services and citizen experiences.?3: Industrialized. The ideal agency state uses core service platforms for quick task services to?Pathway 4: Future-Ready, achieved by one or combining?Pathways 2 and 3?or Alternate Stairs using incremental, modular steps approach is a more conservative approach to Pathway 4. When agency transformations are projected to take years and way too long,?Pathway 4?can stand up a?New Business Unit.?A new Business Unit will require "dream teams" and have an urgent business or mission mandate driver for speed to delivery. Both pathways to achieving a Future-Ready state are challenging but achievable with strong agency leadership, outside support, and an innovation-focused workforce.?

Once the agency selects its pathway option, it requires executive support for expected "organizational explosions" to remove barriers for rapid pathway service changes.?MIT's CISR identifies four critical types to be addressed by agency leadership:?

1. Changing decisions rights - accountability
2. Developing new ways of working - changing culture and future work
3. Creating a platform(s) mindset - "think agency core service platforms"
4. Performing organizational surgery - removel of complexities and FTEs for multichannel and total citizen experience.

Note:?Don't make this plan into a financial forecasting and budgeting exercise. Execution rollout by component and program can tailor their existing planning frameworks and tools for alignment with the expected Agency Strategy Playbook results.?

Next, components and programs may experiment with small pilot projects to be a more successful playbook for agile results to test the "challenges" feasibility of adoption once the strategy is set. These pilot projects will help identify any other challenges and potential risks and provide valuable insights that senior leaders can be used to improve the agency's primary strategy alignment.

Finally, agencies may adopt Rumelt's Strategy Foundry methodology with tools and structures if the agency has a long track record of enormous transformation failures.

Leadership Takeaways:

Pre-Planning

1. Identify 12-15 innovative executives picks to cover the agency's challenges

2. Craft a short session on executive innovation transformation common language?

3. Craft a working session on executive transformation challenges, pathways, and organization explosions

4. Craft a short reset session on Agency Strategy Planning Readiness Deck.

Execution

1. Capture the critical leadership ASCs from internal and outsiders

2. Identity challenges to the agency's underlining primary (crux) challenge(s)

3. Execute Directors' kickoff meeting solicit confidential inputs from its leaders on ASC?

4. Keep battle rhythm on workout ASC planning meetings grouping filtering top ASCs?with Future-Ready Pathway

5. Craft agency strategy and execution playbook workshop with a communications strategy.?

2. Organizational Leadership Reset?

Agencies are essential in ensuring the delivery of quality services to the public. However, despite their critical role, they are often plagued by poor leadership, outdated practices, and organizational change program failures. The lack of innovation in agencies has been a concern for a long time. Still, with the emergence of new technology and societal changes, it has become even more pressing to address this issue to help agencies reset their organizational transformation leadership and be successful in innovation transformations. The reasons for these agency failures are varied, but some of the most common include:

? Lack of Clarity:?Organizational transformation programs are initiated without clearly understanding what is important, what needs to be changed, and why. This lack of clarity makes measuring progress and identifying improvement areas difficult.

? Resistance to Change:?Organizational transformation requires change, which can be challenging for people. Many employees resist change and may actively resist efforts to transform the organization.?

? Poor Communication:?Communication is critical in any organizational change program. When communication is poor, leaders and employees may not understand why the change is necessary, leading to confusion, resistance, and working the wrong challenges.?

? Lack of Proven Leadership:?Leadership is essential in any organizational transformation. Without deep and experienced leadership, workforce guidance becomes ineffective for results.

Despite these challenges, there are proven strategies and consulting guardrails that agencies can employ to ensure successful organizational transformation. By leveraging the latest research and use cases from leading corporations and universities, agencies can develop evidence-based strategies that are more likely to succeed and drive meaningful change.?

Agency strategic organizational planning needs a reset a comprehensive workforce transformation action plan. It includes:

? A clear and compelling vision provides direction and purpose for organizational transformation. Leadership should articulate an inspiring, meaningful, and easily understood vision by everyone in the organization.

? A culture of innovation encourages experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from failure. Leaders should create an environment that fosters innovation by empowering employees to generate new ideas and providing the necessary resources to turn those ideas into reality.

? A talent management playbook attracting, developing, and retaining the right people to drive organizational success. Agencies should invest in talent management by hiring and developing employees with the skills and competencies needed to succeed in a rapidly changing environment.

? A reshaped measuring and monitoring progress tool is critical to ensuring that the agency is on track to achieving its goals. Leaders should establish clear metrics for success and regularly assess progress against those metrics. Accurate analytics and metrics enable leadership to make necessary adjustments and course-correct as needed to ensure that the organization's transformation stays on track.

Executive Takeaways

1.?Develop a Clear and Compelling Vision with motivation and commitment

2. Prioritize Leadership Development, including common challenges-readiness

3. Craft a Culture of Innovation Awareness and Support Plan?

4. Reset Talent Management Pipeline Plan

5. Reshape a Measure and Monitor Progress Dashboard.

3. Reset Organizational Transformation Advisors: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Most corporations and agencies have turned to large global consulting firms to help them with their organizational transformation programs. These firms provide expertise, guidance, and support to help agencies navigate the complexities of change. Agency contractor research must include consulting firms with deep and primary core services in government organization transformations - not a "side/non-core solution or one with the other 100 service solutions.

However, despite the millions of dollars invested in these programs, many still need to produce the desired results. Trending reasons for these $100M-plus failures are varied, but some of the most commonly reported include the following:

1. One of the significant challenges in working with consulting firms is ensuring that their work aligns with the agency's goals and objectives. To address this challenge, agencies should clearly define the objectives and outcomes they expect to achieve from the consulting contract. Contracts include the expected specific deliverables, milestones, and performance metrics the consulting firm must meet to demonstrate progress toward achieving the desired "primary core services" outcomes.
2. Agencies should use Performance-Based Contracts, including payments for superior primary work products, to have "skin in the game." Your Contracting Officer can pull the plug faster to make them go away! By setting clear expectations in the contract upfront, agencies can better manage the consulting firm's work and hold their leadership accountable for delivering on their commitments.
3. Effective governance and oversight are critical to ensuring that consulting engagements stay on track and deliver the desired results. Agencies should establish strong governance structures that define roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes for the consulting engagement. They should also assign a dedicated team to manage the engagement and provide regular oversight and monitoring to ensure the consulting firm meets expectations. This team should be empowered to make decisions and take corrective action as needed to keep the engagement on track.
4. Agencies should reset their monitoring and evaluation process to be more robust and track the consulting firm's performance and progress toward achieving the desired outcomes. This process can include regular check-ins, progress reports, and independent evaluations of the consulting firm's work. By monitoring performance and evaluating results, agencies can identify essential areas for improvement and take corrective action to ensure that the consulting engagement is successful.
5. Not all partnerships are created equal. To build successful partnerships, agencies should prioritize partnering with contractors that share their vision and values and proven transformation success that can bring unique skills and capabilities to the table. Lastly, Agencies should consider including 8a, Small and Mid-size subcontractors that use agile, lean, and emerging practices for advanced rapid processes and services to augment your prime contractor.

Executive Takeaways:

1.?Clearly Define Objectives and Outcomes with Performance-Based Contracts

2. Establish Strong Governance and Oversight with Timely Reviews

3. Monitor and Evaluate Performance Everywhere

4. Develop a robust Partnership Strategy including 8a and SME Contractors

4. Four Pathways for Future-Ready Organization Transformation?

Today's agencies face digital and workforce disruptions while the organization must transform to deliver quality core business/mission services to anticipate citizens' needs and seize new service opportunities.?

However, the organizational transformation challenges lie in understanding how to capture real value effectively instead of adding more workforce tools and reshuffling people, consolidating offices and their services. MIT's research drives four pathways to be "future-ready" to capture your foundational digital value. These efforts create the foundation value framework to apply organization transformation execution paths for:

1.?Citizen Experience Delight?– easy and streamlined support now and in the future

2.?Operational Efficiencies?– leaning-out operations, saving costs, and employee work experience with AI analytics and automation

3.?Business or Core Platform Models?– collapsing silos and spaghetti legacy systems/services

4.?Workforce Enablement?– discussed in Section 4 for a more comprehensive reset with a leadership and workforce playbook.

Applying your new Agency's Challenge-Driven Strategic Playbook offers both your vision and playbook for top priorities for challenges for leadership to execute, motivate with purpose workforce, and internal and external communications to deliver value for your organizational transformation and prime contractor.?

As the Agency's Challenge-Driven Strategic Playbook is rolled to components, departments, and core programs, each leadership team must evaluate its maturity level for its agency's non-common service capabilities and operational gaps to deliver on the strategic playbook with its funding priorities.

5. Reshape Leadership and Workforce: Talent, Collaboration, Skills, and Flexibility

Agency organizational transformation requires a shift in leadership and workforce practices that focus on hiring the right talent, embracing collaboration and partnerships, developing workforce readiness, and providing flexibility. This section will discuss the importance of leadership readiness and workforce readiness for agencies.

Leadership Readiness?

Leadership talent and experience are crucial for organizational transformation in agencies. Hiring the right executives who are innovative and have a track record of success in driving change is a challenge. Rotations and mentoring programs can help rising leaders gain exposure to different agency parts and develop new skills.?

Executive mentors can provide guidance and support to help employees navigate the primary challenges of organizational transformation. Agencies also require innovators and trailblazers who have successfully navigated similar changes in other organizations to provide guidance and support to agencies.?

Partnerships with vendors and experts can provide valuable expertise and support to help agencies implement new technologies and approaches.

Workforce Readiness?

Workforce readiness involves collaboration value, talent skilling, and flexibility. Collaboration is essential for addressing complex policy challenges, and agencies should foster collaboration with contractors and partnerships with stakeholders, including the private sector, academic institutions, and research organizations.?

Talent skilling involves equipping the agency workforce with the necessary skills and competencies to support implementing data-driven policies and adopting new AI-enabled technologies and services.?

Workforce flexibility provides value and agency benefits outcomes, including work and career satisfaction, resilience, and physical and mental benefits.

Executive Takeaways:

1. Hire and develop serial innovators and trailblazers

2. Foster collaboration and partnerships with stakeholders, including the private sector, academic institutions, and research organizations

3. Build strong and supportive contractor ecosystems that enable innovation and support the development of new technologies and solutions

4. Focus on attracting and retaining technology talent and providing opportunities for growth and professional development

5. Prioritize employee flexibility and well-being.

Thinking Forward

This year, each agency's leadership team must be willing to embrace rapid change for challenges and transformation frameworks to be fully future-ready for their subsequent agency transformations.

Leading research institutions continue to offer valuable guidance for agency leadership to evaluate different options, with MIT's 2022 Future-Ready Four Pathways being particularly relevant. At the same time, most agencies are currently transitioning to a costly Pathway 2: Integrated Experience. Pathway 3: Industrialized or using a conservative combination of incremental, modular steps approach both are better for the ultimate goal to achieve?Pathway 4: Future-Ready, including a new Business Unit approach which is challenging but achievable with solid leadership and an innovation-focused workforce.

Utilizing a combination of experienced outside advisors, including an independent assessment advisor, to support their strategic challenge-based playbook can also be beneficial and is recommended for agencies. Agencies must continue urgent transformations and keep up with the novel Future-Ready frameworks and pathways to evaluate and adopt.

Selected References for more insights

CDC,"Work Flexibility and Worker Well-being: Evidence from the United States," Tapas K Ray, PhD, and Regina Pana-Cryan, PhD, March 11, 2022.

Harvard Business Review: AI and Machine Learning, "Innovating in Uncertain Times: Lessons from 2022', Chris Howard, December 20, 2022.

Harvard Business Review, MIT "The Four Pathways To Capture Digial Value," Werner, Stephanie L, et al, 2022.

MIT CISR, "Update On The Four Pathways To Future Ready,"?Stephanie L Woerner and Peter Weill, February 18, 2021

MIT Press, "The Work Of The Future: Building Btter Jobs In An Age Of Intelligent Machines," Auto, David, et al., 2021.

MIT Sloan: IDEAS MADE TO MATTER, ANALYTICS:?"Try this data framework for analytics advantage,"?Beth Stackpole, January 23, 2023.

Portfolio Penguin, "Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts," Hoyne, Neil, 2022.

Positive Psychology,"Resilience in the Workplace: How to Be Resilient at Work," Craig, Heather, Scientifically reviewed by?Anna Katharina Schaffner, Ph.D., February 6, 2023.

PublicAffairs; Hachette Book Group, "The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists," Richard P. Rumelt, 2022.

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Copyright @ 2023, STEVE HAWALD CEO CIO ADVISORY LLC and Board-CXO Research Insights + Vision? Newsletter?.?DISCLAIMER: These articles are entirely the author's opinion without financial payments and engagements.