The reproduction inwards — Statecraft

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, April 2026

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper.

The Dutch Tax Authority (Belastingdienst) sits under the Ministry of Finance and administers most national taxes and benefits. Benefits Service (Dienst Toeslagen) was hived off from the Tax Authority in 2020 in the wake of the childcare benefits scandal, but remained inside the Ministry of Finance with overlapping IT systems and statutory frameworks.

The Senior Public Service (Algemene Bestuursdienst, ABD) is the corps of senior civil servants at Dutch central-government level, established in 1995 to encourage mobility and “fresh eyes” in the senior bureaucracy. ABD members rotate between ministries on average every three to five years. The institution is one of the central characters of this paper.

Wethouder, gemeentesecretaris, college, raad: the wethouder is the alderman responsible for a portfolio in a municipal executive (the college); the gemeentesecretaris is the chief civil servant of a municipality, head of the bureaucracy and bridge between the political college and the elected raad (council). The gemeentesecretaris is the institutional figure who, in a healthy municipality, carries continuity across coalitions.

Roemer norm is a 2010 cap on hourly rates for external hire in the Dutch central government, named for the parliamentarian who proposed it. It has been periodically recalibrated and routinely exceeded.

WNT (Wet normering topinkomens) is the Public Sector Senior Officials (Standards for Remuneration) Act, which caps the pay of public-sector top officials. Like the Roemer norm, it has produced both genuine restraint and a rich literature on circumvention through structures that respect the letter while bending the spirit.

Court of Audit (Algemene Rekenkamer) is the Dutch national audit office.

Four director-generals in ten years

Between early 2015 and the end of 2025, four different director-generals headed the Dutch Tax Authority. Peter Veld left at the end of 2015 after a voluntary departure scheme proved tens of millions of euros more expensive than budgeted. Hans Leijtens was brought in to put things in order and left in January 2017, just over a year after taking office, because that order failed to materialise. Jaap Uijlenbroek succeeded him and left in January 2020 when the childcare benefits scandal struck the foundations of the organisation. At his departure, Benefits Service and Customs were hived off and Peter Smink was given a narrower organisation to lead — a restart presented not as a correction but as an organisational simplification. For Benefits Service, the hived-off body where the recovery operation is concentrated, the same dynamic obtains on its own scale. Ditte Hak built up the autonomous service from August 2020 and handed over to Coen van de Louw in May 2024.

Each of them came in with the brief to repair what the previous period had produced. A reorganisation that had run out of hand. IT architecture that could no longer be kept current. The continuing impact of a benefits scandal touching more predecessors than any single ministerial term could review. Each left before the next dossier could be completed. The successor inherited not the yield of the previous period but its mid-flight intervention state — a phase between announcement and realisation in which every new director-general had to find her own vocabulary for what is the same dossier. The hiving-off of Benefits Service and Customs in 2020 was itself the outcome of this rhythm. When continuity at the top once again disappeared from view, the organisation was redesigned rather than stabilised.

This is not the fault of the individual office-holders. It is the outcome of a system that has set up their tenure so short that fundamental improvement structurally falls outside their horizon. Office-holders of integrity and work ethic pass through at a pace at which the patterns beneath them cannot shift. What does shift is their vocabulary and their job description. Not the practice the parliamentary letters are written about.

Five city managers in seven years

A second observation, at a different administrative layer. In an interim assignment at a municipality with just over one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, I watched five city managers (gemeentesecretarissen) pass through in seven years. The first left for a larger municipality, the second for a different field, the third to an inter-municipal partnership, the fourth was an acting incumbent, the fifth had been in post for four months at the time. None of them had lived through the savings operation of the third, read the strategic personnel plan of the second, or built the relationship with the regional municipalities that the first had laid. The organisation chart stayed the same. The culture at the top stayed strikingly unchanged. What happened in each new period was a recontextualising of existing policy in a new vocabulary, while in the layer beneath, every officer in delivery knew that the next policy line was already on its way. At the registry desk, the youth-care case worker, the enforcement officers, the planners, people were at work who had seen more colleagues leave than they would themselves see come and go.

That damages not only continuity. It damages handover. A gemeentesecretaris who stays eighteen months can also mentor the directors below her for no longer than eighteen months. That is materially too short for what mentoring really is. Not formal peer review and not 360-degree feedback, but the slow process by which an experienced professional shows a less experienced professional how she moves through dilemmas that protocols cannot capture. The first time an alderman asks for something formally impossible and politically unavoidable. The moment a council is informally prepared for an unwelcome decision. The situation in which a director of social affairs must decide whether to protect her own alderman or her own staff. This craft is not learned in a training course. It is learned by seeing someone do it, in your presence, in a working relationship lasting long enough to witness both the mistake and the correction.

Shadow governance at director level

A third observation. I am sitting in 2024 at a director-level meeting at a centre municipality. Present are the gemeentesecretaris, four directors and the corporate controller. Of those six, one director is on interim hire via a consultancy, one director is acting incumbent following a failed recruitment, the gemeentesecretaris has been in office ten months through an interim arrangement converted to permanent appointment, and the corporate controller has for two years been delivered by a Big Four firm. Two of the six people at the table are structurally present in the municipality in the sense that they will still be working there in five years. The other four are present on a placement basis, with appointments running on the contract and rhythm of the supplier, not on the rhythm of the organisation.

Court of Audit reporting over recent years shows that external hire at central and sub-central government is not incidental. It is structural, and it concentrates in precisely the places where institutional memory ought to be formed: directorates, programmes, transformation portfolios. The Roemer norm of 2010, intended to constrain external hire, has been periodically recalibrated and routinely exceeded. The WNT contained comparable intentions for top officials and has, over a series of years, demonstrated how ingenious constructions can be devised to evade the spirit of the norm without breaching its letter.

It is tempting to read this as greed or as institutional failure. That is too easy. External hire is, for the hiring organisation, often rational. An interim director can do in six months what a permanent director would take six years over, because the interim owes nothing to anyone, does not need to survive, and does not need to negotiate. That a chain of such interventions hollows out the organisation is a collective effect that no individual hirer can prevent. The incentive to deliver quickly is privately strong; the incentive to anchor is publicly weak. For the consultancy delivering the interim, anchoring is even a commercial risk: an organisation that can again carry itself does not need to hire any more.

These are three observations at three scales. What they share is not a shortage of competent people, and certainly not a shortage of good intentions. It is that the architecture in which they operate offers them no time, no relationship and no handover structure within which to learn institutionally what they know individually. The next generation again receives the patterns under which the current generation has not yet been allowed to work towards a way out.

What neglect at the organisational level means

In the introductory paper of this series I drew on Joost Kampen’s diagnosis. A neglected organisation is not an abused organisation. Abuse is active; neglect is the systematic failure to provide what development requires: attention, structure, direction, guidance. The analogy came from orthopedagogy and was developed by Kampen empirically at the organisational level. What happens to a neglected organisation is that it develops patterns characteristic of those who have never had sufficient direction. Sham adaptation to avoid confrontation. Clever defensive behaviour. An incapacity for reflection from fear of rejection. Denial of one’s own responsibility from fear of guilt.

What this symptom paper adds is a question that does not stand at the centre of Kampen’s own work because his unit of analysis remains the individual organisation. What happens if the socialisation architecture of an entire administrative layer reproduces the same neglect dynamic? Not within one organisation, but in the system that forms successors across an administrative layer as a whole. The Senior Public Service, founded in 1995 to encourage mobility and fresh eyes in the senior central-government bureaucracy, was an answer to a different problem: silos that solidify too long, departments that become their own world. Thirty years on, the solution is itself the source of a new problem. Office-holders rotate at a pace that prevents them from being anywhere long enough to carry the substance, and no one above departmental level has a mentoring relationship with a successor lasting longer than a few years. What the directors transmit to the junior layer is the pattern of the rotation itself. That is what the juniors witness first-hand: the mores of the short tenure, the rhetoric of the new beginning, the disconnection between announcement and realisation.

Edgar Schein has described how organisational culture is transmitted not by rules and not by programmes, but by what seniors actually do in dilemmas when juniors are present. What institutions without a mentoring architecture above departmental level pass on to their successors is precisely the absence of that transmission. The junior learns that seniors do not stay in one place, do not see a single assignment through, do not persist on a single line of learning. He learns it not from a vision document but from observation. He is shaped in the direction in which he himself will later take shape when he is senior.

The difference from classic neglect

Here the architecture of today differs from the classical picture Kampen described. In the classical neglected organisation, the neglect is visible from outcomes: untended corridors, deferred maintenance, lost documents, conflicts that fester for years, leadership that ducks away. The organisation also looks neglected from outside. What characterises the architecture of the Dutch executive state is that the exterior does not look neglected but, on the contrary, hyper-organised. There are governance philosophies, programme frameworks, leadership trajectories, talent pools, ABD modules, integrity programmes, MD programmes at any municipality of size. What is missing is not the shell, but the handover structure beneath it. The effect is the same neglect Kampen described, but rendered invisible by a professional outer layer that appears to do the work of mentoring without actually being able to deliver it.

A management-development trajectory that runs six months and brings cohorts of twenty-five people through together cannot replace the slow, individual work in which an experienced executive or senior director shows over years what she does in dilemmas. A matching app for mentors in the Senior Public Service cannot replace the relationship in which someone recognises your path in her own and walks beside you for a term longer than an ABD rotation. A coaching trajectory from an external bureau cannot replace the meester whose work you witness daily. Not because the trajectory is not good. But because the type of learning at issue here cannot in principle be captured in a training module. It is the type of learning to which the master-apprentice vocabulary historically referred, and which in other crafts is, not for nothing, formally protected.

What the market for mentoring puts in its place

When mentoring at senior level disappears, something else appears in its place: a market for hireable wisdom. Coaches, executive consultants, leadership advisors, senior advisors, board advisors. Many of those professionals are people of integrity and skill. The problem is not their individual quality, but what the market structure does to the relationship between wisdom and organisation. The external coach is contractually not involved in the outcome of the organisation. The executive consultant has a limited number of hours in which the relationship holds. The board advisor advises per quarter. None of them is a long-term witness of the office-holder they accompany, and none of them carries the outcomes of the work they helped shape. Mentoring without shared risk is something different from mentoring with shared risk, even if the substance of the conversations is to all appearances identical.

What this does to the executive organisation is that its successors learn that reflection is something you buy in outside the line, that dilemmas are something you share in confidential conversations with an outsider rather than in the organisational reality those dilemmas fall under, and that the senior above you in the organisation is not a sounding board but a temporary visitor with the same challenges as you. That is a design choice, made over years through countless separate decisions about hire, mobility and performance management, that collectively produces what it did not separately intend. It is the same pattern I have described in the other papers in this series. No ill will, no incompetence, but an institutional architecture which can no longer correct its own by-products.

What this does to the other symptoms

In the introductory paper of this series I identified four symptoms which the series develops separately. Reproduction inwards works as an amplifier of the other three, and it is useful to make those connections explicit.

The reputation architecture, the first symptom in the series, can only autonomously organise itself when there is no longer a senior layer in the organisation that binds reputation to substance. When the director of communications comes to stand above the director of operations, that is no coincidence. It is the outcome of a mentoring architecture that has ceased to exist. The director of operations once had a line upwards that protected her substantive weight. That line is broken, and into the gap steps someone whose work is measured in media reach rather than dossier weight.

The absorbed debt without integration, the third symptom, arises because today’s recovery operations are led by office-holders who can know nothing first-hand about the original policy phase. The position of director-general of Benefits Service did not exist in 2014. Benefits was at that time a part of the Tax Authority, sitting under the director-general for the Tax Authority. The hiving-off in 2020 itself emerged as a correction of how that predecessor organisation functioned. Whoever today heads the hived-off service that runs the recovery operation cannot, by definition, have been formed by the office-holder who was responsible for the same regime in the pre-scandal years. The experience that would help her see what the current recovery operation can itself reproduce is not available in her line. What she does have is a large dossier flow, a political mandate and a tenure of somewhere between eighteen months and three years. That is the distance to the point at which the current recovery operation becomes its own occasion, and in that distance the possibility of genuine integration of what went wrong disappears.

Performative maturity, the fourth symptom, thrives in precisely the place where transmission is missing. An organisation whose seniors are too short in office to pass on their own experience looks elsewhere for footing. Codes, governance frameworks, integrity arrangements, compliance architectures fill the gap. They give an appearance of maturation where the organisation in its own socialisation architecture no longer matures. Whoever asks deeper about the craft of her own seniors gets no stories about how they were shaped in dilemmas. She gets references to a training, a trajectory, a coaching programme, a 360-degree feedback. All useful instruments in themselves. None of them a replacement for a meester.

What would work

Whoever formulates the problem this way also knows in broad terms where recovery begins. Not with more rules and not with better coaches. With the structure that makes mentoring possible again at the place where it has most disappeared.

Three design choices are not in themselves revolutionary, but cut against current practice. The first is to extend tenure at director level, with clear exception grounds that do not become the rule. The Senior Public Service rotation in its original form was a response to a different problem from the one it now helps to produce. A tenure of five to seven years for a director-general would make fundamental improvement possible for the first time. The second is to set up mentoring relationships at director level which are not interchangeable with a coaching contract, but are shaped between seniors within the administrative layer, formally protected, and not treated as voluntary side-work. The third is to designate interim hire at director level as a last resort, not as a regular provision, with an accountability regime that makes the shift from permanent to interim publicly testable.

None of these three choices is a silver bullet. Together they form a design that rearranges the incentives under which the current reproduction takes place. What in the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement is described as the Aiki method — no longer as a technique for resistance to change but as a design principle for institutions capable of letting correction in — is here usable again. The human inclination towards self-protection, in this case the commercial self-protection of the supplier chain and the career self-protection of the rotating office-holder, is not denied but redirected. Long tenures create the place where substance weighs more heavily than procedural movement. Mentoring within the administrative layer builds the handover structure that is now replaced by the external market. Hire as last resort keeps the consultancy’s incentive directed towards making itself superfluous, not towards making itself indispensable.

For interim management practice

This symptom touches my own field directly, and it is more honest to name that than to take my own role out of the picture. Interim management has become a profession within an administrative architecture that needs it. With that, interim is not free of responsibility for what the architecture reproduces. An interim executive who shapes her assignment so that she primarily increases her own indispensability actively contributes to weakening the mentoring architecture she herself wishes for. Whoever calls herself a craftsperson and refuses to see the structure from which she lives, holds an internal contradiction in place.

In the forthcoming book this is called transfer value. The primary KPI of an interim assignment is not what is delivered during the assignment, but what stands when the interim has left and no one any longer thinks about her. Applied to the symptom of this paper that means: an interim assignment at director level should end with someone who can again carry the place, with a mentoring relationship between interim and successor that does not close at departure, and with an organisation that has more institutional load-bearing capacity than it had before the assignment. That is no romantic ambition. It is what makes the assignment worth more than the fee it produces.

The open question

The introductory paper closed with an open question. If the norm towards which recovery directs itself has itself shifted, what does recovery still mean? For the symptom of this paper a related question can be posed. If today’s generation has been formed in an architecture without mentoring above departmental level, can it then deliver the mentoring tomorrow’s generation needs? The answer is not obvious. Mentoring is a craft that is itself transmitted, and whoever has never had a meester themselves has a double distance to travel to become one. There is no shortage of good will. There is a shortage of the examples, the relationships, the habits and the time from which mentoring is formed.

That is no reason for despondency. It is, however, a reason to be more modest about the scale and pace of recovery this symptom permits. Whoever begins today building a mentoring architecture at director level sees the first yield in seven to ten years. That is an investment horizon almost unspeakable in the current administrative practice. Making that horizon discussable is perhaps itself the first mentor act in which the current generation takes up its responsibility.

Colophon

“The reproduction inwards” is the second symptom paper in the Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations. The series builds on Navigating versus Planning, the paper on vacation real estate and the invisible policy, the paper on scarcity, and the architecture of silence. The introductory paper Dissociated Organisations appeared in April 2026, followed by the symptom papers on the reputation architecture and the reproduction inwards.

Statecraft is the platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on public-service delivery. The content connects to the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector (autumn 2026).

Response and counter-argument via Statecraft.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years’ experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and project lead for municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and for regional inter-municipal partnerships.