We use this framework to ensure the three key factors that affect organisational performance (and the interactions between them) are addressed pragmatically and prudently.

When Hurricane Katrina engulfed New Orleans in the summer of 2005, the deaths, injuries, and damage to property that resulted were stark reminders of the cost to all of us when government at any level—federal, state, or local—does not perform as well as it should. The year before, the 9/11 Commission found that government’s failures to anticipate and respond to the terrorist attacks on that date were “symptoms of the government’s broader inability to adapt how it manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century.” Although many public servants performed heroically, these horrific events and their aftermaths dramatize the need for high performance from government agencies both in dealing with life-and-death situations and in preventing crises from ever reaching that point.

This is a truth easily overlooked when the private sector is making impressive gains in productivity and discovering market solutions to large social needs. In reality, high-performing government agencies do resemble well-run companies. Both have worthy goals; well-designed, rational processes; strict accountability; and effective leaders. But the profound differences in their purposes, their cultures, and the contexts within which they operate conjure up quite different obstacles. The greatest challenge in bringing about successful change and significant, sustained performance improvement in the public sphere is not so much identifying solutions, which are mostly straightforward, as working around four unique obstacles. Read the whole HBR article here.

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