Jackson Nickerson - Tackling Wicked Government Problems: A Practical Guide for Developing Enterprise Leaders

JACKSON NICKERSON AND RONALD SANDERS

Do any of the following scenarios sound familiar?

In the midst of a hurricane, communications and organizational breakdowns force a Coast Guard officer to step in and try to coordinate the disaster relief efforts of an alphabet soup of federal, state, and local agencies. The National Guard, a host of nongovernmental agencies like the Red Cross, and even citizen volunteers are all trying to do what is right but according to their own and often conflicting rules of engagement. And the only ones the officer actually commands are the relatively few uniformed Coasties who report directly to her.

The Defense Department designates a senior federal executive as its official representative to an interagency task force charged with helping find work for thousands of veterans discharged at the end of more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He finds himself at the table with departments as diverse as Labor, Veterans Affairs, Education, and even the Small Business Administration, and he realizes that they do not even speak the same bureaucratic dialects, let alone see the challenge the same way.

A CIA station chief somewhere in the Middle East looks at a critical piece of intelligence just handed to her by one of her case officers. It includes an obscure reference to an individual just returning from the United States on a tourist visa, and she needs to know exactly what he did (and whom he visited) while in Detroit. Distant in both geography and authority, she finds herself quickly needing to mobilize FBI agents in the Midwest to investigate.

During a routine plant inspection, an Agriculture Department inspector finds a tainted piece of meat and evidence that it may be part of a larger shipment imported from the Far East several weeks ago. The rest of the shipment already is en route to processing plants and grocery stores all over the southeastern United States. Furthermore, indications suggest there is more meat from the supplier due to arrive in port in a few days. Investigating the current shipment requires a rapid response from not only several units within the Department of Agriculture but also from Customs and Border Protection agents at the port. His last experience with Customs and Border Protection was anything but rapid, requiring several hours on the phone.

These vignettes represent a growing reality in todays federal government. More and more of the challenges that government leaders facefrom the drama of disaster to matters of meat inspectionextend beyond their narrowly authorized and specialized missions. In todays rapidly changing and chaotic world, the problems that government must address are increasingly complex, cross-jurisdictional, amorphous, and difficult to solvewhat is commonly referred to as wicked problems.

We argue that wicked problems ultimately require enterprise solutions. Enterprise here refers to the resources and capabilities found in the constellation of public and private organizations that must act in concert if they are to successfully address cross-cutting national and international challenges. Such entities include federal, state, and local government agencies; tribal governments; private and not-for-profit organizations; and even international organizations like the United Nations, Interpol, and the International Monetary Fund.

Wicked challenges may be strategic and long-term, like global climate change, or they may be operational, like food safety and counterterrorism. In any case, while the contours and composition of the enterprise may vary depending on the situation, there is one common denominator: an enterprise consists of multiple organizations, each semiautonomous or independent, but with at least some overlapping common goal or interest in tackling a wicked problem.

The American public looks to the federal government to successfully respond to and resolve wicked problems, especially those that span the enterprise. Yet the current federal organizational structure is not well designed to provide such enterprise-wide responses; indeed, it may never be perfectly structured to deal with such problems if its operating environment continues to change rapidly and unpredictably. Given the size of the federal government and the substantial political and legal hurdles for redesigning and modifying structures and authorities, attempts to reconfigure the government, while needed, always will greatly lag behind these environmental changes. Organizational change may be a necessary response to environmental shifts, but with substantial inertia slowing such processes, structural responses always will be insufficient for providing enterprise-wide solutions to wicked problems.

If structural solutions are not sufficient, how then can the federal government respond to and resolve wicked problems? We argue that these challenges, both fleeting and enduring, require a new kind of leader and a new kind of leadership development approach. These challenges require a type of leader who understands that tackling wicked government problems requires building and drawing upon a network of critical organizational and individual actors, no matter where they may reside. They require a type of leader who can encourage and facilitate collaboration by leveraging shared values and interests to achieve a resolution that is greater than the sum of individual actions. We call individuals who are imbued with or have developed such abilities enterprise leaders, and they are increasingly in demand.

Given the constraints of existing management authorities, governmental structures, and historical approaches to leadership development, many of todays government leaders simply are ill equipped to tackle wicked government problems. Put plainly, the government needs to substantially increase the number of enterprise leaders in its ranks, and to do so, it needs to change its paradigm for developing such leaders.

Recognizing that developing a new leadership paradigm is itself a wicked government problem, we reached out to a set of enterprise-wide actorsgovernment executives, academics, think tanks, thought leaders, and consultantsto assemble a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and broadly experienced network of individuals with overlapping interests. Sponsored by Brookings Executive Education and Booz Allen Hamilton, we held a symposium at the Brookings Institution in March 2012 to discuss the issues of enterprise leadership and leading through collaborative networks. Participants were subsequently invited to write chapters to contribute to this edited volume.

The purpose of this book is to heighten recognition of the need for enterprise leadership, to explore alternative views of the capabilities needed to be an enterprise leader, and to highlight some early steps being taken by agencies to develop a new cadre of enterprise leaders.

The first part of book, Contemporary Enterprise Leadership Challenges, focuses on the individuals who are charged (formally or otherwise) with tackling wicked problems. Our assumption is that, while these leaders are likely to be senior officials in one or more of the enterprises constituent organizations, they will rarely have any sort of formal, chain of command authority over most of its constituent components, not to mention the enterprise as a whole. This is an all-too-common contradiction to the classic axiom that authority must match accountability. The second part, What Makes for an Effective Enterprise Leader, offers several perspectives on various skills and capabilities required of successful enterprise leaders. The third part, An Enterprise Approach to Leadership Development, describes several practical approaches implemented by federal agencies in their efforts to develop enterprise leaders.