1. Implementing the NDP: Implications
for Leadership Development
Job Mokgoro
Conference on NDP Work: From
Design to Delivery, School of Public
Leadership, Bellville
21-23 November 2013

2. Introduction
• The NDP is a significant development in the
history of SA’s democracy
• It represents the most coherent & integrated
approach to addressing the socio-economic
challenges of SA
• Whilst it provides a clearer vision for the
future, it raises a number of major questions
such as: ‘how to get there?’

3. Doing Things Differently
• NDP sets out six (6) interlinked priorities:
– Uniting all South Africans around a common programme
to achieve prosperity & equity
– Promoting active citizenry to strengthen development,
democracy & accountability
– Bringing about faster economic growth, higher investment
& greater labour absorption
– Focusing on key capabilities of people & the state
– Building a capable & developmental state
– Encouraging strong leadership throughout society to work
together to solve problems

4. Focus of this Presentation
– Focusing on key capabilities of people & the
state
– Building a capable & developmental state
– Encouraging strong leadership throughout
society to work together to solve problems

5. Service Delivery Complexity
• South Africa is faced with complex problems,
domestically and globally
• These problems include poverty, inequality,
unemployment, service delivery protests
• These problems have many causes and many
manifestations, and many multiple different players
have different kinds of influence over them
• Cause & effect are distant in time & space & not
easily discernible

6. Service Delivery Complexity
• The causes themselves have many causes of their
own & are often interlinked & reinforce each other
• Poverty causes AIDS, AIDS causes poverty, & both
poverty & AIDS are causes of the rise in the number
of vulnerable children
• Because of this complexity, solutions directed at one
part of the system, without a view of the whole, can
compound problems in another part

7. Service Delivery Complexity
• The prospects of climate change increases the use of
bio-fuels, which leads to food shortages, which leads
to increased deforestation, which in turn compounds
carbon emissions & increases climate change
• These problems require us to work out creative &
systemic solutions by not only communicating but
also learning & collaborating across sectors, levels, &
cultures

8. Poor educational
outcomes
High disease
burden
Divided
communities
Crumbling
infrastructure
Eliminating poverty
Reducing inequality
Resource
intensive
economy
Corruption
Public service
performance is
uneven
Too few South
Africans are
employed
Spatial patterns
marginalise the
poor

9. Service Delivery Complexity
• In tackling our complex service delivery challenges:
– What are the qualities of the type of solutions we need?
– What mindsets & capacities do we need in order to be
effective?
– How do we overcome the blockages we face?
– What processes & resources can support this work?
• We need to innovate at the scale of the whole system rather
than pockets
• We should develop collective leadership capacity if we are to
succeed

10. “We can't solve
problems by using
the same kind of
thinking used when
we created them”
(Einstein)

11. Complexity
• The complexity of the issues & the web of interconnections
between government, business, civil society & society mean
that the world has:
– ‘Become too complex & interdependent for any one
institution or sector to effectively respond to today’s
challenges & opportunities’
– No one sector on its own has simultaneously the mandate
& resources to tackle some of the most difficult societal
issues

12. Actors & Stakeholder in Service
Delivery
Private Sector
Government
Civil Society
Citizens
(And non-citizens)

13. Missing Collective Leadership
•
Using 20th century management tools to resolve 21 st century challenges
•
We do not have the collective leadership capacity to:
– Draw together key stakeholders to uncover common intention
– Collectively creating profound innovation at whole system scale
•
This gap constitutes the blind spot in our institutional design & our
intellectual frames about leadership
•
Unless we address this blind spot we will continue to produce results
rejected by society in our attempts to tackle poverty, unemployment,
corruption, etc

14. The Blind Spot of Leadership
Results:
What
Process:
How
Source:
Who
Blind Spot: Inner place from which we
operate

15. Blind Spot of Leadership
•
Leaders know about what leaders do & how they do it
•
But do not know about the source level – the inner place or state of
awareness from which leaders & social systems operate
•
Success depends not on what leaders do or how they do it
•
Success depends on the “interior condition” – the source or inner place
from which leaders operate
•
Usually we are not aware of the source dimension from which effective
leadership & social action come into being – it is this source Theory U
attempts to explore

16. Key Leadership Competencies
Context:
Understanding key issues and being
able to think strategically about how
to respond
Change:
Complexity:
Understanding & working
effectively with the
dynamics of change
Having the skills to survive
and thrive in situations of
low certainty and low
agreement
Connectedness:
The ability to understand actors
in the wider socio-economicpolitical landscape and to engage
and build effective relationships
with new kinds of internal and
external partners

17. Change
• Understanding that the only constant is change
• Ability to work effectively with the dynamics of
individual & organizational change
• Leading through & within change
• Leaders are required to constantly learn, look for
fresh insights & inspire flexible, creative responses or
initiatives
• Understanding change complexity, including
stakeholder perceptions & org capability

18. Context
• Leaders must understand the socio-economic-political
context in which they operate (eg, understanding current
labour-business tensions
• They should have the ability to tackle wicked problems –
social & political messes that are seemingly intractable
problems, composed of inter-related dilemmas, issues &
other problems at multiple levels of society, economy &
governance
• They should be able to think strategically & systemically
about how to respond

19. Complexity
• Magnitude, overall size, extent & influence of the change
• Scope, or extent to which change will impact current
functions & operations of the PS
• Fluidity, or degree to which the environment is changing
during change or transformation (eg unemployment,
inequality & poverty)
• Adaptability of the change initiative to that changing
environment

20. Connectedness
• Ability to understand factors & actors in the wider political
landscape
• Embeddedness: engage with society without becoming
captive to political interests
• Help communities to develop capacity to engage & manage
own developmental challenges
• Ability to engage & build affective relationships
• Engaging in effective dialogue to build partnership with a
broader range of internal & external stakeholders

22. A model of Leadership Development

23. Developmental Experiences
ASSESSMENT
CHALLENGE
DEVELOPMENTAL
EXPERIENCES
SUPPORT

24. The Development Process
Variety of developmental
Experiences
Leadership
Development
Organizational
(Departmental, InterDepartmental & InterGovernmental Context)
Ability to learn

25. Development Experiences
CHALLENGE
SUPPORT
DEVELOPMENTAL
EXPERIENCES
FEEDBACK

26. RE
TU ER
FU
AD
LE
Increasing stress from new challenges
Experience X
Development
Experience 2
Development
Experience 1
CO
Feedback
Support (if necessary)
Set next experience
Feedback
Support
Set next experience
Feedback
Support
CH
A
Development
The Development Process

27. Assumptions of CCL Model
1. Leadership Development is development of
capacities within the individual
2. What makes a person effective in a variety of
leadership roles and processes (as opposed
to classification as “Leaders” or “Non
Leaders”)
3. Individuals can expand their leadership

28. Assessment
Provides benchmark for future development
Stimulates self evaluation
•
•
•
•
•
What am I doing well?
Where do I need to improve?
What are others’ views of me?
How do my behaviours impact on others?
How am I doing relative to my goals?
Assessment provides info that helps answer these
questions
Desire to close the gap between current self and
ideal
self

29. Challenge
 Experiences that make developmental difference
are these that stretch or challenge people
 People forced out of comfort zones
 Disequilibrium makes people question adequacy of
their skills, frameworks and approaches
 Examples of challenges:
•
•
•
•
Novelty
Difficult goals
Conflict
Loss, failure, disappointment

30. Support
• Message: Efforts to learn and grow valued
• Help people handle pain of developing
• Source of support::
•
•
•
•
•
Bosses
Coworkers
Family
Friends
Professional colleagues
• Coaches & mentors

31. Collective Leadership, Action
Learning, Talking Across Sectors

32. Talking Across Sectors
• To act more on the level of the whole problems & whole
systems, we must get together with people who are based in
a different part of the whole
• We need to get better at talking to each other across sectors
& at working in partnerships where necessary
• We do so by:
–
–
–
–
Becoming self-aware as sectors
Understanding complementaries
Iterating within microcosms, &
Seeing the system in the room

33. U-Process: 1 Process, 5 Movements
1. Co-initiating: uncover common
intent
Stop and listen to others and to what life
calls you to do
2. Co-sensing:
observe, observe, observe
Connect with divers people and places
to sense the system from the whole
5. Co-evolve: institutionalise
the new in practices
by linking micro, meso, macro
change
4. Co-creating: prototype the new
In living examples to explore the future
by doing
3. Co-inspiring:
connect to the source of inspiration and
will
Go to the place of silence and allow the inner
knowing to emerge

34. Government Leadership Development
Summit (Dec 10-12)
• Informed understanding & commitment of the political
leadership & accounting officers in collectively tackling
developmental challenges
• Enable accounting officers to lead the process of establishing
“a capable, developmental, professional & responsive state”
which has a learning & developmental strategy
• A shared understanding of the causal factors that enable
good practice but also causal factors underlying ongoing
capacity problems & weaknesses in public service

35. Conclusion
•
One of the biggest reasons cross-sector collaboration is difficult is because
sectors have different logics, values, priorities & comfort zones, ie
different cultures
•
We seldom invest in understanding these different identities, even though
it is an integral part of cross-sector partnership efforts
•
One of the challenges in developing true cross-sector collaboration is that
the sectors have perceptions & judgements of each other
•
We need to develop the ability to become aware of the differences in
logic across our sectors & to create a cross-sector, shared methodology as
teams

36. Conclusion
• Government & business don’t want civil society, &
civil society doesn’t want business & government
• Societal complex, systemic, messy & intractable
challenges make collective leadership an imperative
• National School of Government will provide
programs to improve synergy through collective
leadership development