Navigating versus Planning — Statecraft

Whitepaper · Jacob Huibers · House of Viridian | Statecraft

This document is written for executives, interim managers, programme directors and anyone working in complex environments where plans structurally fall short. It is not a management book in miniature. It describes a thinking problem that pervades the entire public sector — and explores the language and methodology that could take its place.

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper.

The Dutch planning and control cycle (P&C cycle) is the budgetary and reporting rhythm to which every Dutch government organisation is bound: a multi-year programme budget, an annual budget, mid-year revisions, an annual account, and a continuous stream of progress reports against the plans set out in those documents. It is the institutional fixture against which the argument of this paper pushes.

Coalition agreement (coalitieakkoord) and council programme (collegewerkprogramma): when a coalition is formed at municipal or national level, it issues a programmatic document committing the executive to specific outcomes over the four-year electoral cycle. These documents typically run to many dozens of pages of detailed promises. The text references one as “84 pages long” — that is not unusual.

Wethouder, college, raad: the wethouder is the alderman responsible for a portfolio in a municipal executive (the college), which collectively governs the municipality alongside an elected raad (council). The wethouder is a political appointee answerable to the council; the council scrutinises and votes on policy proposals brought by the college.

Inter-municipal partnerships (gemeenschappelijke regelingen): where municipalities cannot carry a task alone — youth care, regional health, environmental enforcement, fire and ambulance, social welfare back-office — they form joint partnerships under a 1985 framework law. The Netherlands has hundreds of these, and a typical municipality participates in eight to ten of them. Several examples in this paper draw on this practice.

The “ravine year” (ravijnjaar) refers to a steep drop in central-government funding for Dutch municipalities in 2026 due to a structural shift in the Municipal Fund formula. It has reshaped budgetary expectations across local government in the period in which this paper is written.

01 · The promise that does not hold

Every project plan begins with the same promise: if we follow the steps, we will arrive where we want to be. Define the goal, name the milestones, divide the tasks, monitor progress. It is the grammar of organisations. From business plans to coalition agreements, from reorganisations to personal development plans — the same structure everywhere. And everywhere the same experience: things turn out differently.

That is not an execution problem. It is a thinking problem.

Plan-led thinking presupposes three things: that you know the relevant variables, that the environment is stable enough to map a route, and that deviations are correctable. For building a bridge those preconditions are reasonably met. For setting up a regional youth-care organisation with seven autonomous municipalities, each with its own council, its own coalition and its own financial reality — they are not.

Hans Vermaak describes this difference as the distinction between tame and intractable problems. With tame problems the issue is clear, the solution knowable and the path to it can be planned. With intractable problems the problem shifts while you try to solve it, cause and effect are not linearly connected, and every intervention changes the system you are trying to change.

The public sector consists almost exclusively of intractable problems. Yet its instrumentation — the planning and control cycle, the budget, the coalition agreement, the project plans, the reports to the council — is entirely set up for tame ones. The tool does not fit the problem. But changing the tool is harder than ignoring the problem.

Somewhere in a meeting room in a mid-sized municipality lies an 84-page council programme. It describes in detail what will happen over the next four years: milestones, deliverables, KPIs, a quarterly timeline. It is six months old and already overtaken by reality on at least four points. The alderman who presented it has left. The “ravine year” has shifted the financial frame. The regional partnership is running differently from what was foreseen. Yet the organisation continues to write progress reports as if the plan were the reality. “We are on schedule,” they say. Or: “Adjustment needed.” As if deviation were a problem to be corrected, rather than information about what reality actually looks like.

02 · What people do in practice

Ask an experienced executive, an entrepreneur, a programme manager or a parent how they got through a difficult year, and you will rarely get the story of a plan that was carried out. You will get the story of someone who held direction while the route continually adjusted to what came up. Who took opportunities that were not in the plan. Who let something drop at the right moment. Who changed the composition of a team not because that was planned, but because it was needed.

That is navigating. Directed movement under uncertainty.

The difference from planning is not that there is no direction. The difference is that the route is not fixed. That reading the environment happens continuously, not only at evaluation moments. That acting and understanding do not run sequentially — first analyse, then act — but simultaneously.

Mark Moore implicitly described this in his Strategic Triangle: public value, operational capacity and legitimacy must be in continuous balance. That is not a linear process with a beginning and an end. It is a continuing balancing act in which every shift in one corner — an alderman’s resignation, a budget change, a media crisis — affects the other two corners. You do not plan a balancing act. You perform it, moment by moment, with your attention on what is now.

Vermaak comes to the same conclusion from change management: you cannot plan your way to a solution, but you can navigate your way to improvement. Diagnosis leads intervention, not the plan. More strongly: every diagnosis is already an intervention. The integrated plan — the master plan that covers everything — is the exact opposite of leverage. It dilutes attention across everything rather than concentrating it where movement is possible.

In my own practice as a project lead for an inter-municipal partnership of seven municipalities this was daily reality. Each of those municipalities had its own political arena, its own pace, its own sensitivities. There was an implementation plan with milestones. But the actual work consisted of something else: reading which alderman had room and which did not, which moment was ripe for a decision and which was not, where the interest lay that bound municipalities together and where the apparent agreement masked the difference. The plan was an artefact for accountability. The navigating was the actual work.

03 · The missing vocabulary

We have no good language for this work. That is not a small problem. Without a vocabulary you cannot communicate what you do, you cannot transmit it, you cannot account for it. You are forced to describe it in terms that do not fit — and that is precisely what happens.

“Strategy” presupposes a plan — a deliberate route from A to B. “Improvisation” suggests randomness, as though you are just doing whatever. “Agile” has been captured by the IT sector and narrowed down to sprints and stand-ups. “Adaptive” is an adjective, not a verb — it describes a property but not a repertoire of action. “Muddling through” is honest but not usable as a professional vocabulary.

This lack of language is not innocent. Language determines what is visible, what is discussable and what is legitimate. Without a vocabulary for navigating, navigating is invisible work. It is not valued, not developed, not transmitted. It remains a personal skill of experienced professionals rather than a transferable methodology.

If we take seriously that navigating is a discipline of its own, then it needs concepts of its own. Not as metaphors — “compass”, “course”, “fairway” — but as workable concepts you can use in a policy document, a boardroom or a progress conversation. A first exploration.

Directional indicator instead of objective. An objective fixes an end-point. A directional indicator describes the movement you are seeking, without nailing down the end-point. Not: “We will reduce the youth-care waiting list by 30 per cent in Q3.” But: “We are moving towards shorter waiting times through three concrete interventions, and we measure monthly whether the movement is heading the right way.”

System reading instead of progress report. A progress report compares reality to the plan. A system reading describes what is currently there: which forces are at play, which patterns are visible, where energy sits and where blockages. It is diagnostic, not evaluative. It does not ask “are we on schedule?” but “what do we see, and what does that mean for what we are doing now?”

Operating space — the actual ability to move, determined by mandate, resources, relationships and timing. Not the same as formal authority. Authority is formal. Operating space is practical. You can have all the authority and no operating space, and vice versa.

Intervention window instead of milestone. A milestone is a fixed point in time at which something must be done. An intervention window is a moment when circumstances make an intervention possible — or call for one. It shifts with the situation. The skill is not to deliver on time, but to recognise the moment.

Positional choice — the deliberate decision whether or not to commit yourself somewhere, based on where you can exercise the most influence. Not the same as prioritising. Prioritising orders what is already on the list. Positional choice determines where you stand at all.

Capacity to intervene — the ability to take the right action at the right moment. Not planned but not random either. It requires knowledge of the situation, relationships with those involved, and the willingness to act before all information is available.

Recontracting instead of scope change. A scope change implies that the original plan was wrong and must be corrected. Recontracting acknowledges that the situation has changed and that the assignment must be redefined — not as failure but as professionalism.

Anchoring line instead of end date. When is something done? In navigating the answer is: when it holds without you. The anchoring line is the moment at which the organisation can carry the work itself — not the moment at which the contract expires.

These are not definitions. They are starts. But they illustrate what a navigation vocabulary could do: making visible work that is now invisible, and making discussable choices that now remain implicit.

05 · Why organisations hold on to plans

If navigating is what people do in practice, why do organisations hold on to plans? The answer is not stupidity or inertia. The plan serves functions that navigating cannot yet serve.

Legitimation. A plan makes an intention communicable and testable. It gives an executive something to put before a council. It gives a council something on which to hold an executive to account. Without a plan there is no formal decision, and without a formal decision there is no democratic legitimation. The irony is that the plan thereby does not describe reality, but enables an administrative ritual.

Accountability. The entire planning and control cycle is built on the logic of the plan. Budgets, annual accounts, progress reports — they presuppose that you can say in advance what you will do, and measure afterwards whether you have done it. That system functions for routine tasks. It dysfunctions for anything complex, because it defines deviation as failure rather than as information.

Apparent certainty. A plan reduces anxiety. Not the objective uncertainty — that does not change by laying a plan over it — but the feeling of uncertainty. The plan is an incantation. We do not know what will happen, but we have a plan, so it will be all right. That is psychologically understandable, but administratively risky: it replaces vigilance with reassurance.

Coordination. In partnership arrangements — and which organisation is not one — the plan provides a shared reference point. If seven municipalities have to set up an organisation together, project planning gives a hold on who does what when. The alternative — continuous calibration based on situation reading — is more expensive, slower and more uncertain. Or so it seems.

The question is not whether the plan should disappear. The question is whether the plan has the right status. Is it a route map or a ritual? A working document or an accountability instrument? And if it is both: how do you prevent the accountability function from undermining the working function?

06 · Towards a methodology for navigating

A vocabulary without a methodology is academic. A methodology for navigating would not be a step-by-step plan — that would be the contradiction it is trying to solve. It would rather be a set of principles and practices that guide action under uncertainty. Not “agile” — that is a project management method for product development. Something that works in governance, in complex partnerships, in personal development. Five elements seem essential.

Cyclical diagnosis instead of linear planning. Not one diagnosis at the start that generates the plan, but continuous diagnosis that adjusts the intervention. Moore’s Strategic Triangle functions in this way: you continuously check whether public value, capacity and legitimacy are in balance. Vermaak calls this “diagnostic intervening” — every intervention is also a diagnosis, and every diagnosis leads to a next intervention. The quality of the diagnosis determines the quality of the intervention. That sounds like an open door, but the practice is that most organisations begin with goals and plans, and reduce diagnosis to a SWOT analysis in the appendix.

Explicit communication of uncertainty. Not pretending you know what will happen, but being transparent about what you do not know and how you deal with it. That is not a weakness but a precondition for effective navigating. It requires principals who can tolerate uncertainty — and professionals who dare to say: “I do not yet know, but this is what I see now and this is what I am doing now.”

Pattern recognition as a core competence. Planners are good at structuring. Navigators are good at recognising: patterns in the system, shifts in the field of forces, signals indicating that an intervention window is opening or closing. This is not intuition but a skill that can be developed — through experience, through reflection, through peer review, through deliberate practice in reading complex situations.

Small steps, broad reach. Vermaak calls this the stacking of small changes. Not the great reorganisation but the series of small interventions that each on their own seem limited but together break a pattern. The advantage is that each step generates information about what works and what does not. The disadvantage is that it is hard to communicate as a strategy — but that is a vocabulary problem, not a methodology problem.

Mandate as a moving target. In the plan logic, mandate is a precondition you arrange in advance. In the navigation logic, mandate is something you continually build, maintain and sometimes lose. Support is not a tick-box but a fluctuating state. The navigator continually invests in the relationships that create operating space.

07 · The hardest question: accountability

If you have no plan with milestones, how do you give account? This is the question on which navigating runs aground against institutional reality. Municipal councils, supervisors, grant-makers, shareholders — they want to know whether the money has been well spent and whether the goal has come closer. The plan is the instrument with which that question is answered. Without a plan there is no norm-setting, and without norm-setting there is no accountability.

The honest answer: the current accountability instrumentation is not designed for navigating. That is a problem to be solved, not a reason to pretend that planning works.

Navigation accountability would contain three things. First: the directional indicators — not whether you are on schedule, but whether the movement is heading the right way. Second: the system reading — what do you see now, which forces are at play, what has changed since last time? Third: the intervention choices — what did you do, why, and what was the effect?

Not: these milestones have been met. But: this is what we found, this is how we read it, this is what we did, and these are the effects so far. Not: we are on schedule. But: we are moving in the right direction, and this is why we think so. Not: the plan is being executed as agreed. But: we have adjusted the plan three times, every adjustment was an improvement, and here is the underpinning.

That is harder. It demands more of both the accounter and the controller. It demands substantive knowledge instead of procedural review. It demands trust instead of distrust. It demands a conversation instead of a report. But it has one great advantage: it is honest. It describes what actually happens rather than forcing it into a format that does violence to reality.

This requires courage. From the professional who says “I deviated from the plan because the situation called for it.” From the principal who accepts that “we are on schedule” is a meaningless sentence in a complex environment. From the council that learns that control is not the same as certainty.

08 · The personal dimension

There is one more layer that is rarely named. Navigating is not only a professional methodology — it is also a personal stance.

What I know is this: fifteen years of interim work in complex environments — municipalities, partnerships, healthcare organisations, technology projects — has taught me that the plan is rarely the reason something succeeds, and the absence of a plan is rarely the reason something fails. What makes the difference is the ability to read what is happening, to hold direction, and to act at the moment that matters.

Navigating asks three things that cannot be captured in a methodology but can be developed: the ability to bear uncertainty without rushing to act or freezing, the ability to hold direction without attaching yourself to a route, and the ability to act on the basis of what is — not what should be.

In the aikido tradition this is called centring: operating from your middle, not from your head or your fear. It is not a soft skill. It is the hardest skill there is.

09 · An invitation

This paper raises more questions than it answers. That is deliberate. The subject does not lend itself to definitive answers, and the pretension that it does would be precisely the error it describes.

The questions that remain open are essential. How do you learn to navigate — not through a course but through reflection on experience, through peer review, through deliberate practice in reading complex situations? How do you make navigating discussable in organisations built on the illusion of control? How do you fulfil the functions of the plan — legitimation, accountability, coordination — in a way that does justice to reality?

Reality is more complex, more recalcitrant and more unpredictable than any plan can capture. That is not a problem. It is a given. The question is whether we develop the instrumentation that fits — or whether we keep reporting that we are on schedule while the schedule has long since stopped mattering.

That is what Statecraft seeks to do: develop language and methodology for the practice of governing, organising and collaborating under uncertainty. Not as an academic project, but as a craft discipline. Grounded in experience, tested in practice, shared with anyone it concerns.

This whitepaper is part of Statecraft — a series of explorations on leadership, change and public value in complex environments. The forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector (forthcoming autumn 2026) develops the underlying methodology in full.

Statecraft is a pillar of House of Viridian — seven frameworks that provide structure without taking away autonomy. From public governance to digital identity, from inclusive production to collective ownership.

Jacob Huibers works as a project lead and interim executive in the Dutch public sector. He guides complex collaboration processes between governments and is the founder of Statecraft and House of Viridian.