Honey Over Buzz – What Matters in the Marketplace of Mission Solutions
Government leaders are constantly on the lookout for innovations that could be brought to bear on their most difficult challenges. Separating the truly useful new approaches from the mere buzzwords can be hard to navigate.
When evaluating what the market has to offer, leaders should focus on one question above all else: how does this help me solve the problems confronting my organization?
Demands on Federal departments and agencies only continue to grow. As they execute their portfolio of mandatory and discretionary activities, they face greater expectations from the public even as resources remain highly constrained. Both long-standing and newfound problems further complicate the picture, diverting leadership and employee attention from core delivery of their mission.
When facing these circumstances, leaders naturally look to the private sector for solutions. Leaders often find a dizzying array of offerings that sound promising yet may find it hard to distinguish the marketing hype from the real value-add features. We have all experienced something similar in our everyday lives – staring at store shelves with countless options, unsure of which products offer the greatest value for the cost.
In these cases, it is useful to take a step back and think through how any given option might fit into the organization’s mission and operations in practice. Just as there may be any number of kitchen gadgets that offer you little added value compared to the basic staples, so too are professional services solutions that are not quite the right fit for a given organization’s challenges.
A basic tabletop or scenario exercise is an effective way of visualizing how well a particular method would meet the organization’s needs. Leaders can do a quick step-by-step walkthrough with their teams to determine whether they could imagine themselves using whatever they are evaluating. Key questions can help guide the conversation, such as:
What might be the challenges to adoption?
Will this approach resonate with the key stakeholders we have to engage?
Is this going to steer answers in a certain direction, or is it truly responsive to our specific mission and needs?
To meet the complexity of today’s Federal challenges, the best methods are not plug-and-play, no matter how many bells and whistles they come with. Rather, leaders should look for approaches that help frame and kickstart an ongoing, collaborative conversation about problems, solutions, and how to prioritize the two. Leaders need to focus on the honey – methods to drive outcomes and results – rather than selecting a shiny new object that may not work on their unique mission challenges.
