Balancing speed and coordination: Senior leaders’ perspectives on civil service transformation during and after the pandemic

Abstract

How do governments’ responses to crises change their civil services and shape their future reform agendas? We address this question by conducting interviews with sources that are hard to access but uniquely placed to answer these questions: heads of civil service and similarly senior officials from 14 countries across six continents, speaking during the waning phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Senior leaders perceived the central challenge of managing the crisis phase of the pandemic as balancing two competing imperatives: greater speed, flexibility, and decentralization of decision making, but also greater coordination and collaboration across teams and sectors. This required bureaucracies to question their largely hierarchical coordination methods and to transition toward network-based coordination mechanisms, agile methods, and new leadership styles. Senior leaders perceived these changes largely as accelerations of existing reform directions rather than ruptures, and were trying a range of methods to sustain and institutionalize these crisis-induced changes.