Synthesis: the recovery of substantive weight — Statecraft

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, May 2026

Closing paper in the series Dissociated Organisations

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper. This synthesis presupposes the four symptom papers; the recurring framework references it draws on are summarised here.

The four symptoms of Series I — Dissociated Organisations: the reputation architecture (paper 05) — how spokespersons, communications advisors and governance advisors have grown into a structural layer above the substantive column; the reproduction inwards (paper 06) — how short tenures and the market for hireable wisdom destroy the mentoring architecture above departmental level; the absorbed debt without integration (paper 07) — how recovery operations cost money without producing learning; performative maturity (paper 08) — how more codes and compliance worsen the dissociation rather than heal it. The introductory paper (00) is Dissociated Organisations.

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, the bureaucratic counterpart to the political college, governing alongside the elected raad (council).

Senior Public Service (Algemene Bestuursdienst, ABD): the corps of senior civil servants at central level, designed to rotate between ministries.

Boom bestuurskunde has been omitted from publisher references in this paper as the publishing arrangement for The Direction of Movement is not yet final.

NSOB (Netherlands School of Public Administration), USBO (Utrecht School of Governance), A&O Fund for Municipalities are the principal Dutch venues where public-administration practitioners train, write and meet.

A handover in the twilight zone

At the end of 2024, I handed over an interim assignment to my successor. The assignment had begun as a project lead role for a re-design of the social domain in a Dutch municipality of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and had gradually expanded into a role in which I formally replaced the director of social affairs. I was the third interim in that position in four years. My successor would be the fourth. None of us had completed the assignment we had been given.

The handover conversation had a formal and an informal half. In the formal half, attended by the gemeentesecretaris and the executive’s governance advisor, I gave the state of play on the three programmes, the status of vacancies for permanent positions, and the communications line for the council committee the following week. In the informal half, on a terrace after working hours, I passed to my successor what I had learned in fifteen months about the pattern in which the position of director of social affairs again and again became unsustainable. It concerned a dossier that had gone wrong six years earlier, the recovery of which was technically but not administratively complete; an expectations pattern of the executive maintained by the governance advisor, whose substantive unfeasibility was not discussable; an MT culture shaped by three successive interims in which every new director was forced to build her own reference frame because the previous one had left with her predecessor; and a layer of codes and arrangements which each separately worked and together had erased the place where substantive weight could land.

My successor took on her assignment in the knowledge that the informal handover was more valuable than the formal one. Six months later she left. I know — because I texted her — that she had left her successor a similar conversation with a similar treasure. What none of us had been able to disrupt is that the place where the substantive weight of the dossier should sit in the organisation no longer existed. We filled it vacant by turn.

The closed cycle

In the introductory paper of this series I defined dissociated organisations as organisations in which the evident error can no longer land — not because it is concealed, but because the chain in which it moves no longer knows a place where substance weighs more than procedure.¹ The four symptom papers that followed described, each separately, one layer of that condition. In the reputation architecture, the exterior of the organisation has come to lie above the substantive column, with the result that what the organisation tells determines what it does, rather than the other way round.² In the reproduction inwards, the substantive column has been hollowed out because the people who would carry it are in a rotation that structurally penalises the building of substantive weight relative to mobility and visibility.³ In the absorbed debt without integration, recovery operations are carried out by successor organisations that institutionally remain connected to the original harm, while the assumptions under which the harm arose are not questioned.⁴ In performative maturity, all this crystallises out into an increasing layer of codes, arrangements and compliance architectures under which the actual decoupling of talk, decision and action can stabilise.⁵

The four symptoms would not be unmanageable if they existed in isolation. What this synthesis paper adds is that the four bring forth and stabilise one another in a closed cycle. The reputation architecture produces the visibility under which compliance is adopted. Compliance produces the framework within which instrumentation-learning is elevated to a core competence, and with that the substantive column further thins out. Substantive thinning brings rotation within reach and makes mentoring within a dossier institutionally unfeasible. The rotation builds up at director levels where the directors lack their own experience of the original error. When the error then manifests as a crisis, it is answered with a recovery operation organisationally placed in a parallel organisation and administratively captured in a new code. The recovery operation absorbs the debt without integrating it. The exterior of the organisation produces the story that the system has learned. The system itself has not touched the assumptions under which the error arose. The cycle begins anew.

Whoever observes the cycle from outside sees four different crises. Whoever observes the cycle from inside sees one unchanged pattern presenting itself again in four different forms. The figures in Recovery State Netherlands are the financial signature of the pattern: at least seventy-eight billion euros in recovery operations across a decade, two to ten times the original costs, without the original architecture having adjusted.⁶ This synthesis paper is an attempt to formulate, from the observation that the pattern is closed, an action perspective that does not try to break it through the type of response that has fed it so far.

The one design question

Beneath the four symptoms lies one design question. The question is not how an organisation can organise more code, more supervision, more transparency, more responsiveness or more compliance. The answer to that question has been delivered at length over ten years, and it has fed the cycle rather than broken it. The question is how an organisation preserves or rebuilds the place where substantive weight can weigh more heavily than procedure.

This sounds simple and it is not. A place where substantive weight weighs is not an organisation-chart position. It is not a mandate, a job title or a line in a code of conduct. It is a social and cognitive constellation in which a specific person at a specific moment takes and is given the authority to say “this does not add up” in a way that changes the chain. Joost Kampen called this, in his vocabulary on neglected organisations, the change-process conscience.⁷ In the introductory paper I argued that this change-process conscience at the level of Dutch institutional architecture is no longer present in the regular provision and only appears in crisis moments when external supervision or a parliamentary inquiry can temporarily reproduce it. The design question is how to bring this place back into the regular apparatus.

That is a question poorly answered by legislation alone, poorly by instrumentation alone, and poorly by cultural intervention alone. It calls for a combination in which each of these three reinforces the other. The symptom papers have separately proposed concrete design choices. For the reputation architecture, the separation of strategic advice from governance advice, and bringing the substantive department back to the start of the editorial flow rather than the end. For reproduction inwards, the lengthening of tenures, an explicit mentoring obligation for top officials, and the visible recognition of long-term dossier weight. For the absorbed debt without integration, the statutory link between recovery organisation and parent organisation, an independent sensemaking trajectory alongside execution, and the size of a recovery operation as a trigger condition for independent evaluation of the framework. For performative maturity, the cleaning-up of existing instrumentation before new policy is added, the separation of substantive judgement from compliance, and the statutory anchoring of direct source access for external supervision.

None of these design choices is in itself revolutionary. Read together they call for a different centre of gravity in the organisation of Dutch public administration, and in the practice of those who work within it temporarily. Three audiences can contribute to that difference. It is useful to spell out what that means per audience.

For principals of interim work

Whoever as a gemeentesecretaris, secretary-general, director of operations, or chair of a supervisory board hires an interim executive rarely does so to address the dissociated architecture as a whole. The brief is usually narrower. A failing programme. A vacancy in the senior line that cannot quickly be filled internally. A crisis requiring acute leadership. A transition the sitting organisation lacks the capacity for. In each of those briefs the principal can either reproduce the dissociated architecture or correct a small piece of it.

The principal reproduces it when she formulates the brief in terms that address only the symptoms. An interim executive hired to “set up the communications to the council more sharply” will reinforce the reputation architecture. One hired to “get the governance in order” will reinforce performative maturity. One hired to “complete the recovery operation” will reproduce the absorbed debt without integration. In each of those formulations sits an implicit design that says: the exterior must be better, the substantive column need not be touched.

The principal corrects it when in the brief she explicitly creates room for the work that is most uncomfortable for the organisation itself. That is the identification of the place where substantive weight should land, and the redesign of that place when it no longer exists. That type of brief is not always politically opportune, because at some point it forces the alderman or minister into a trade-off she would prefer the exterior to handle. But it is the brief that still stands in two to three years. The other brief stands until the next interim.

For the principal this means three disciplines. The first is, in the intake, to make an explicit distinction between the visible brief and the underlying brief, and to attract only those interim executives who can read that difference for themselves. The second is to treat the anchoring phase as carrying more weight than the execution phase. What still stands after departure when no one any longer thinks about it is the KPI of the assignment. No intervention that only works while the interim is there counts. The third is, in the selection of interims, to weigh whether the candidate has, in earlier assignments, built up or used up places for substantive weight. That is not always readable from a CV. But it is readable from references, and approximately readable from a well-conducted intake conversation.

For interim management practice

For the interim executive or project lead herself, the dissociated architecture is the reality within which every assignment is carried out. Whoever does not recognise the symptoms treats every assignment as an isolated problem and inadvertently contributes to the cycle that produced it. Whoever recognises the symptoms gets the choice to perform every assignment either as a pass-through in the cycle or as a small interruption of it.

Three disciplines are available for that choice. The first is, in the first hundred days of the assignment, to deliver a diagnosis that touches not only the programme for which the interim was brought in, but also the architecture in which the programme is hung. Whoever diagnoses only the programme has within three months an action plan and within twelve months a disappointment. Whoever also diagnoses the architecture has within three months a reweighted brief and within twelve months a result that holds. The Strategic Triangle in practice that I have described in earlier work is the daily instrument for this diagnosis.⁸ At every diagnosis belongs the question on which corner of the triangle the tension actually sits, and which corner the current brief formulation systematically maximises at the expense of the other two. When all three corners in the organisation are occupied by functions that work in the legitimacy column, the diagnosis is not “the programme is behind schedule”. The diagnosis is “the organisation no longer has a place where substantive weight weighs”, and the programme is a late symptom of that.

The second discipline is the distinction between single-loop and double-loop in the final report of the assignment.⁹ What the interim has corrected in actions is single-loop, and it is of value. What the interim has helped to question in assumptions is double-loop, and it is rare. A final report that names both separately gives the principal insight into what does and does not remain in hand after departure. A final report that names only the first delivers an illusion of anchoring that evaporates with the next crisis.

The third discipline touches the hardest part of the work. It is the willingness to refuse or prematurely end the assignment when it becomes clear that the architecture in which the assignment is hung will not permit a place for substantive weight. An interim executive who senses that she is hired to serve the exterior of a dissociated organisation more professionally without the substantive column being allowed to be touched, should discuss that sense with the principal before she accepts the assignment. When that conversation produces no other result, refusal is a form of professional integrity. For the IM-Register and the broader interim consultancies this means that the anchoring KPI in the firm’s code should stand at equal height to financial criteria, and that assignments that explicitly remain single-loop should be closed with a warning to the successor. It is not made explicit in any consultancy framework that this type of refusal belongs to the professional standard. It does belong there.

For public administration scholarship and the field debate

For lecturers in public administration, for the NSOB, USBO, the academic programmes, the A&O Fund for Municipalities, for journals such as Bestuurskunde, Binnenlands Bestuur and Openbaar Bestuur, and for professional associations, the implication of this series is that a number of models presented in the curriculum as historical legacy deserve to stand again at the centre of contemporary training of public administration practitioners and interim managers.

Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle has been present in academic curricula since the 1990s and is approximately applied in practice.¹⁰ What the Dutch field debate insufficiently applies is that the triangle does diagnostic work, not only normative work. When a dossier runs aground, the triangle asks which of the three corners is systematically neglected or maximised. The dissociated organisations of this series are organisations in which the corner of legitimacy has developed into its own apparatus while the corners of public value and operational capacity have lost their structural carrier. This difference makes, for the type of intervention the practitioner recommends, all the difference. The triangle should not be deployed as a checklist after the fact but as a daily compass for diagnosis in advance.

The change colours of Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak have served in this series repeatedly to name how yellow and blue systematically win over red, green and white in the Dutch political-administrative arena, with the consequence that people, learning and self-organisation as intervention colours remain underused.¹¹ In public-administration teaching this observation instrument belongs not only to the skill set for analysing individual change trajectories, but also to the instruments for analysing an institutional architecture at meso level. The colour choice that the system congeals into in its architecture is not the colour choice that every individual leader makes in her assignment.

The three theoretical anchorings deployed in the symptom papers call for a more systematic place in the curriculum than they now have. The work of Chris Argyris on single-loop and double-loop learning and on defensive routines is present in change-management programmes, but underexposed in programmes for public governance in the Netherlands.¹² The work of Karl Weick on sensemaking failures is present in research on high-reliability organisations, but rarely explicitly deployed in administrative-science reflection on major crises.¹³ The work of Michael Power on the audit society — diagnosing the shift from substantive judgement to verifiable ceremony — that of Nils Brunsson on organised hypocrisy and that of John Meyer and Brian Rowan on institutional myth are classical sources, and they are present in the Dutch literature but rarely tied together into a diagnostic frame for current administrative practice.¹⁴ The symptom papers of this series have shown that they can be used in this way, and that the empirical reality of Dutch public administration calls for a refined application.

For public administration scholarship this also means something about the position of interim management in the curriculum. Interim management is in most programmes treated not as an academic field but as a practice on which the programme delivers at most a guest lecture. That is, in a country in which a substantial part of senior public-sector execution is structurally carried by interims, a lacuna. The forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector is an attempt to deliver, in that lacuna, a first integral work.¹⁵ For the field debate the invitation is to read that work not as a closing stone but as the beginning of an academic engagement with the field.

What remains in action perspective

Whoever has read along to this point has before her a diagnosis whose scale far exceeds the reasonable action perspective of an individual practitioner. The Senior Public Service I cannot reform. The Act on the Promotion of Integrity and Functioning of Decentralised Government I cannot amend. The growth of the communications discipline within the directorates of communication I cannot reverse. The absence of direct source access for the Court of Audit I cannot anchor in statute. What I can do is the work that is doable at the scale of one’s own assignment.

That work is not symbolic. In a municipality of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, it is possible in the closing phase of an interim assignment to deliver a redesign by which the substantive department is again at the start of the editorial flow rather than the end. In an executive organisation, it is possible to formalise the informal handover between departing and incoming director into a permanent provision that limits the loss of institutional knowledge. In a recovery operation, it is possible to link the learning impulse to the parent organisation through a statutory audit obligation that the principal herself has placed in the design of the operation. In an organisation considering adopting a new code of conduct, it is possible to look critically at the old code before the new one is accepted. None of these acts solves the cycle. Each of them recovers, at the scale of a specific organisation or a specific dossier, the place where substantive weight can again land.

The Aiki method, developed in the forthcoming book as the personal compass beneath the three organisational models, offers for this work a stance.¹⁶ Aiki is here not a rhetorical tactic or a negotiation trick. It is the design principle under which the human inclination towards self-protection — in this case the administrative inclination to protect one’s own reputation or one’s own column from the discomfort of substantive confrontation — is neither denied nor forced. It is redirected through a design in which the incentive to avoid discomfort is less rewarding than the incentive to bear it on time. Direct source access for supervision is an Aiki movement in this sense. A statutory link between recovery organisation and parent organisation likewise. The separation of substantive judgement from compliance likewise. The design choices proposed in the symptom papers are all forms of the same stance at different levels.

Aiki only works, I wrote in the introductory paper and the forthcoming book repeats, when the intent serves the collective interest.¹⁷ An interim executive who deploys the design choices in this synthesis paper to strengthen her own position will find that she is not practising Aiki but a new variation on the cycle she thought to combat. The ethics is not incidental to the design. It is the precondition under which the design works.

The open question

The introductory paper closed with the question of what recovery means if the norm towards which recovery directs itself has itself shifted. For the symptom papers individually, related questions arose. For this synthesis paper the question can be put in its definitive form. If the four symptoms bring forth and stabilise one another in a closed cycle, and if the response the system produces to crises primarily feeds it, can a redesign then come about that breaks it from inside?

I do not know. What I suspect, and cannot prove, is that the answer will depend on the combination of two movements. The first is a crisis that cannot be resolved through more compliance, more reputation work, more rotation or more recovery operation, and that is so visible that the shortage of substantive weight itself becomes the scandal. Which crisis that will be, and when it will arrive, cannot be foreseen empirically. The second is that, in the moments when such a crisis arises, a number of people in central positions in principalship, interim work and public administration have approximately the diagnosis of this series ready to hand, and have the courage to act on it. This synthesis paper is, in that sense, an investment in a future moment that cannot be planned from the present, but that can be prepared from it.

What can in the meantime be done is, at the scale of the own assignment, to deliver the design where the place for substance is recovered. That is what this series formulates as the action perspective. It is not the recovery of the system. It is the recovery of a place where the system can still be corrected.

For the reader who stands in her own assignment, that is enough.

Colophon

“Synthesis: the recovery of substantive weight” is the closing 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 The reputation architecture, The reproduction inwards, The absorbed debt without integration and Performative maturity. The full series is digitally available via Statecraft.

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.

Jacob Huibers, Dissociated organisations: Why evident errors no longer land, and what that asks of public restoration, Statecraft, April 2026. ↩
Jacob Huibers, The reputation architecture: What happens when the exterior of government begins to rewrite its own interior, symptom paper I in the series Dissociated Organisations, Statecraft, April 2026. ↩
Jacob Huibers, The reproduction inwards, symptom paper II in the series Dissociated Organisations, Statecraft, May 2026. ↩
Jacob Huibers, The absorbed debt without integration: How recovery operations cost money without touching the cause, symptom paper III in the series Dissociated Organisations, Statecraft, May 2026. ↩
Jacob Huibers, Performative maturity: Why more code, more supervision and more compliance worsen the dissociation rather than heal it, symptom paper IV in the series Dissociated Organisations, Statecraft, May 2026. ↩
Jacob Huibers, Recovery State Netherlands: Why the government only acts when the court compels it, Statecraft position paper, March 2026. For the financial signature see the table of domains, signals, judicial interventions and recovery costs in that paper. ↩
Joost Kampen and Alje Mulder, three-part essay on neglected organisations, ManagementSite, 2007. The concept of the change-process conscience is further developed by Kampen in Verwaarloosde organisaties: Introductie van een nieuw concept voor organisatieprofessionals (Neglected Organisations: Introduction of a New Concept for Organisational Professionals), Vakmedianet, 2011, and in subsequent editions. ↩
Mark H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press, 1995. For the Dutch application see the Statecraft publication Navigating versus Planning (April 2026) and the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector (autumn 2026), chapter 3. ↩
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Addison-Wesley, 1978. The distinction has been developed by Argyris in, among others, Strategy, Change and Defensive Routines, Pitman, 1985, and Knowledge for Action, Jossey-Bass, 1993. ↩
Mark H. Moore, Creating Public Value, 1995. For the Dutch curriculum see, among others, Hans de Bruijn and Ernst ten Heuvelhof, Sensible Government: Beyond Strategic Management, Routledge, 2018. ↩
Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak, Leren veranderen: Een handboek voor de veranderkundige (Learning to Change: A Guide for Organization Change Agents), Kluwer, first edition 1999, fourth revised edition Vakmedianet, 2018. ↩
Chris Argyris, Strategy, Change and Defensive Routines, Pitman, 1985; Overcoming Organizational Defenses, Allyn & Bacon, 1990; Knowledge for Action, Jossey-Bass, 1993. ↩
Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage, 1995; and “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 1993, pp. 628–652. ↩
Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford University Press, 1997; Nils Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, 1989; John Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony”, American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977), 340–363. ↩
Jacob Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (The Direction of the Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector), forthcoming autumn 2026. ↩
For the development of the Aiki method as a personal compass beneath the three organisational models see The Direction of Movement, chapter 10. ↩
Huibers, Dissociated organisations (April 2026), section “Connection as intervention”. ↩