Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi: Strategic Coherence

6/1/2025

In December 2024, I was commissioned to write a short analysis for a local private sector client. With their permission, I’m now sharing it more broadly. The analysis itself remains unchanged from that original version, but the format has been adapted to speak to a wider audience. In comparing the challenges facing Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom, I hope to contribute to a more grounded conversation about public service reform in the year ahead.

In the United Kingdom, the public service finds itself stretched across five fundamental fronts.

The first is the long shadow cast by austerity. Years of restrained public spending have created a deep capability deficit. Departments are being asked to deliver increasingly complex services without the necessary people, resources, or institutional knowledge. The result is slow but steady erosion, what those on the ground describe to me as institutional attrition.

Second, digital transformation has lost momentum. The early leadership through the Government Digital Service in the 2010s has not carried through. Legacy systems persist in critical parts of government. There is an urgent need to modernise core infrastructure while maintaining continuity of service: a difficult balance made worse by the growing competition with the private sector for digital expertise and the rise of the AI spin-doctors and misinformation merchants.

The third pressure point is demographic. An ageing workforce, combined with poor retention and recruitment in specialist areas, is creating what many have labelled an expertise exodus. Public service careers, once seen as purposeful and secure, no longer offer the same appeal, particularly when compared to the flexibility and pay offered elsewhere.

Fourth, the administrative demands of post-Brexit regulatory divergence continue to mount. Departments must now design and administer frameworks that replace, mirror, or depart from former European Union laws, often with limited clarity about the long-term direction. This is producing what could be called implementation friction: which I refer to in my work as a grinding slowdown in effective delivery.

Fifth, the public service is being asked to embed net zero and climate resilience into all aspects of its work. The scale of the transformation required is immense. Yet there is no single strategy for implementation, and capability is thinly spread. The result, again, is fragmentation.

At the core of these challenges lies a deeper strategic problem. Civil service departments are pursuing divergent goals without effective coordination. Environmental policy collides with devolution delivery. Digital reform efforts crash into siloed autonomy. From the outside, the system appears active. On the inside, officials tell me that it feels stuck.

That feeling of struckness is not unique. In Aotearoa New Zealand, we face our own version of these challenges.

The first is a continued reliance on false economies: cost-cutting measures that achieve little and often backfire. Budgets have been recently been trimmed, but little structural or operational efficiency has been gained. Instead, capability has been hollowed out. What’s likely in the coming year is a cost boomerang: by that I mean where earlier savings reappear as larger costs in the form of service failure, organisational churn, emergency interventions and rehiring of former staff as contractors.

Secondly, efforts to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi are being undermined by institutional confusion. Bicultural governance maturity is possible: but not without clarity, accountability and devolution. Instead, the system often reaches for symbolism and performance in place of substance and effectiveness. Karakia is not a substitute for robust policy design or efficiency analysis.

Third, regional service delivery is faltering. Geographic equity: ensuring people receive consistent public services no matter where they live, is once again in question. We are witnessing the return of postcode-driven service variation, a problem thought to have been addressed decades ago but now re-emerging as under pressure because of the cost-cutting exercises in 2024.

Fourth, climate adaptation is being dangerously deferred. Major vulnerabilities exist across our infrastructure networks, particularly in coastal and flood-prone communities. Despite this, central government appears unwilling or unprepared to lead a strategic, coordinated adaptation effort.

Fifth, digital inclusion remains unrealised. Legacy systems continue to dominate. Registers and regulatory functions are fragmented. The potential of digital services to improve equity and access is significant, but the current approach lacks coherence, funding and follow-through. This is not a criticism of the officials involved in this work, but rather of the unwillingness of successive governments to make the necessary all-of-government investments in these areas. Also, ideological positioning appears to have overtaken practical delivery. The Ministry of Regulation, in particular, is focused more on asserting its narrative than delivering any regulatory burden relief.

In both countries – the United Kingdom and Aotearoa New Zealand – the biggest shared challenge is the absence of strategic coherence. In the UK, the size and complexity of the system leads to strategic drift: where departments slowly move away from central objectives through a series of uncoordinated decisions. These drifts are often hard to detect until delivery failures start to emerge.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the effects are more immediate. Our system is compact and highly connected. Strategic changes travel quickly across agencies and sectors. That closeness, while potentially a strength, also makes us vulnerable to what I call strategic whiplash: rapid shifts in political direction that ripple instantly through departments and programmes. Entire workstreams can be paused, redirected, or discarded overnight. Consultation processes are restarted. Staff are redeployed. Months of groundwork is lost. This isn’t agility. It’s instability.

Our scale should be an advantage. But without coherence, it becomes a liability. Every pivot creates overhead, whether it is new project teams, new planning cycles or and new reporting obligations. While the previous change is still incomplete. The result is burnout, inefficiency and systemic fatigue, and most importantly costs sunk in projects that now drift until they are finally turned off.

And still, the political and policy discourse proceeds as if everything is aligned. As if new strategies can simply be launched and trusted to work. What we’re really seeing, in both countries, is that idea i mention above: implementation fiction. This is where public strategies are pronounced without any meaningful assessment of whether the system can deliver them.

This is where the whakataukī speaks clearly: Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi. With your food basket and mine, the people will thrive. True coherence does not mean sameness. It means alignment. It means each part of the system contributing what it can toward a shared goal, and doing so deliberately, not by accident.

In 2025, coherence is no longer optional. It is the foundation. Without it, even the best ideas will fail, not for lack of merit, but for lack of alignment, capacity, and patience.

Coherence is the work now. It is my word for 2025