Francis Wade | Staying in your lane is killing your legacy

Everyone says focus on your knitting; don’t stray outside your mandate. But the best government leaders – the ones who will be remembered 20 years from now – are doing the exact opposite.

Imagine yourself leading a ministry. Your organisations, agencies and departments hit every KPI. The cabinet routinely praises your quarterly reports.

But, ask citizens what’s changed, they’ll point to the same unsolved problems that were there five years ago, such as potholes. ‘We are still filling them ourselves. It only takes a little cement!’

However, you know the real difficulty. A pothole is easy to fix. But it’s very hard to implement a systematic solution to a hurricane-season problem. Why? The challenge lies in the very institutions that touch the prevention, detection and repair of potholes. How so?

Unfortunately, this particular issue does not respect organisational charts. It sits on a boundary.

Paradoxically, the real enemy of progress might be “faithful failure”. This is the tendency for leaders in a bureaucracy to stay in their lane and optimise their KPIs. They are a success – in a limited sense.

Yet, they achieve little headway and rarely inspire others. While they earn their pay cheque, their legacy evaporates because the results that matter don’t fall under their complete control. In fact, these challenges exist at the edges of their authority. On the boundaries.

These are the hardest problems. Crime. Economic Growth. Potholes. Hurricane resilience. They remain unsolved because government systems reward manageable, mediocre ambitions, which are easier to oversee.

Fortunately, some public sector leaders have discovered something different.

The CSBG case study

The Citizen’s Security Business Group was established as a governing body. Chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Dr Horace Chang, it acts as a subcommittee of Cabinet. In its quarterly meetings, it enforces collaboration with and accountability from ONSA, or the Office of the National Security Adviser, Citizen’s Security Secretariat, permanent secretaries, JDF, JCF, MOCA, JSIF, HEART/NSTA Trust, PIOJ and others.

This might sound unwieldy. Impossible.

But part of the invisible glue that keeps things, and drives down crime, lies within the ONSA. While its affiliates aren’t well-known, they are no strangers to government. Many have held senior positions in multiple ministries.

To get the job done, they pull on a network of technocrats who don’t work together on a regular basis.

For example, this team and others of like mind would see beyond the blame-game triggered by stubborn potholes. Instead, they can appreciate the underlying hard problem that spans organisational boundaries. Its solution won’t follow a hierarchy, or mandate.

It demands the use of personal, trusted relationships built over decades.

Here’s what groups like the CSBG do differently:

• Start with the challenge at a high level. Get stakeholder agreement on the final outcome.

Diagnose to craft a testable, shared strategic hypothesis (see my October 26 Sunday Gleaner column).

Create broad ownership. Few believe that the police alone can fix our crime problem. Nip problems like teenage criminality in the bud by engaging multiple institutions, example, education.

• Use data and technology. Surgically target certain areas and measure them using the latest tools, following the CSBG’s example.

Above all, this approach takes a fundamental mindset shift. It requires courage to commit oneself to citizen outcomes that can’t easily be mapped to short-term results your organisation can control.

Starting moves

Your three starting moves are:

1. Reframe your success metric: Stop asking: ‘Did I hit my KPIs?’ Start asking: ‘What citizen outcome am I actually after – and who else must I involve?’

2. Build one strategic relationship this quarter: Identify a permanent secretary or agency head whose work intersects with your biggest bottleneck.

To get their attention, don’t ask for a meeting about collaborating. Instead, bring something new to the table that builds trust: ‘Can I show you data on [specific problem] that affects both our agencies?’

3. Test one boundary-spanning hypothesis: Pick one problem that requires cross-agency partnership. Then, design a small, 90-day pilot with clear metrics.

Secure explicit permission from your leadership to ‘test and learn’ across boundaries they may guard carefully. For example: ‘Can we reduce youth recidivism by 15 per cent if education, justice, and correctional services coordinate case management for 20 teenagers?’

Remember, 20 years from now, no one will recall that you hit your targets in Q3 2025/26. Instead, they’ll remember whether Kingston’s murder rate dropped, whether more youths found jobs, whether communities felt resilient to hurricanes.

The choice, therefore, is to stay in your lane and deliver pedestrian results, or to step across lines and build something that lasts.

The question isn’t if you can collaborate across silos. It’s whether you’re willing to be remembered for more than hitting targets.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To search past columns on productivity, strategy and business processes, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com