By Dr. Anastasia Michailidou Kamenou*
- Why does the “NESTOR” plan bear no resemblance to the Mala strategy, and exactly where does it fall short?
- What does the Ministry of Agriculture’s most junior employee have to do with a twelve-year strategy for livestock farming? Much more than we realize.
- And why should Stavros Malas’s real work perhaps begin now, after the strategy has been submitted?
Let the livestock farming strategy, as drafted by Stavros Malas’s team, serve as a model of best practice for how we should design and implement strategies in the Cypriot public sector.
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
Catarrhal fever: 46 sheep and goats were infected; ten died
How will public sector hiring ultimately take place in 2027?
The first observation concerns the very composition of the team that worked on it, led by a Cypriot technocrat of recognized standing. Although there are people in Cyprus who can design, in a structured way, a far-sighted and truly ambitious strategy, every time we are faced with the need for major change, it has almost become a reflex to call in foreign consultants.
Bringing in foreign experts is not a bad thing. External expertise and international experience can be extremely useful. However, they are not enough on their own. A Dutch expert, for example, might incorporate into a strategy an extremely innovative and promising initiative—one that has, in fact, been successfully implemented elsewhere. What he probably does not know—in fact, I would say that sometimes he can hardly even conceive of it—is the administrative environment within which this measure will have to be implemented in Cyprus.
This is because the Cypriot public sector operates with certain “peculiarities” that—with a touch of humor—could even qualify for an award for administrative innovation. A single activity may be fragmented across five or six ministries and departments, with no single entity bearing end-to-end responsibility, no unified coordination, and no common performance indicators. Nor is the budget actually drawn up on the basis of activities and strategic priorities—activity-based budgeting—but rather, to a large extent, based on previous budgets. In other words, we want to fund significant changes without always setting aside the necessary financial resources to implement them. Finally, there is often a lack of a real mechanism for monitoring progress: clear indicators, measurement of results, feedback, and continuous improvement based on those results.
That is why I consider the example of the Mala team to be significant. Expertise in the subject matter and knowledge of the implementation environment are not secondary elements of a strategy. They are part of the strategy itself.
However, there is also a second advantage to the Mala team’s work. The outbreak of fever was used only as a catalyst. The Commission could have treated the resulting crisis as the central focus and limited the strategy, for example, to how we handle similar incidents in the future.
Something like the much-publicized “NESTOR” plan for dealing with incidents where large trucks overturn on the highway. This plan outlined the procedures for handling such incidents. However, it did not go any further. It did not analyze why two trucks overturned within a two-month period, how the movement of large trucks on Cypriot roads could be improved, etc.
This is precisely the difference between addressing a problem and strategically capitalizing on it.
Mala’s strategy incorporated the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease as an element of strategic analysis. Foot-and-mouth disease exposed weaknesses that already existed: the concentration of livestock units, problems with siting and biosecurity, as well as broader weaknesses in the production model.
And instead of asking, “How do we restore livestock farming to where it was before the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, or even, how do we deal with similar incidents?” the question became something much more strategic:
What do we want Cypriot livestock farming to look like in ten or twelve years?
And here, in my view, lies the major difference from many of the documents we call “strategies” in the civil service.
If one reads enough strategic plans from ministries and public organizations, one will notice this major shortcoming. In these documents, we usually describe what we are already doing, outlining our mission and our activities. Strategy, however, is first and foremost forward-looking: it describes where we want to go, not merely where we are today.
The livestock farming strategy includes all the key components that are often missing from what we call “strategies” in the Cypriot public sector: strategic analysis, long-term goals, specific policies, a time frame, and a link to funding needs.
A suggestion for further leveraging Stavros Malas’s work: the hard part is implementation
Robert Kaplan and David Norton, who developed the Balanced Scorecard and subsequently the Strategy-Focused Organization model, devoted a significant portion of their work precisely to this problem: why organizations with good strategies fail to implement them and turn them into results. The literature they review reports failure rates in strategy implementation as high as 90%. A good strategy alone is not enough. A mechanism is needed that can translate it into day-to-day operations.
If I were the leadership of the Ministry of Agriculture, I would not consider the Malas team’s work complete with the delivery of the strategy. I would assign them the next major and necessary task: what Kaplan and Norton call “translating the strategy into operational terms.”
What do they mean by this?
Strategy, as we’ve said before, is forward-looking. But to be achieved, it must be translated—from today until its completion—into actions carried out in day-to-day work. Strategy is not a parallel process, separate from an organization’s day-to-day activities. It is the way in which these activities gain direction and serve a common goal. We must, therefore, ensure that even what the lowest-ranking employee in the chain does on a daily basis is connected to the strategy.
I once heard an example from a very good friend that illustrates this beautifully. A worker was sitting there chiseling stones, while behind him lay a large pile of them. A visitor walked by and asked him:
“What are you doing here?”
And he replied:
“I’m building a temple.”
This is exactly what “translate strategy into operational terms” means. The worker doesn’t just see the stone he’s chiseling at that moment. He sees the temple into which the stone will be incorporated.
And perhaps this is the greatest lesson to be learned from Mala’s efforts—not only for the Ministry of Agriculture but for the entire civil service.
A good strategy is not the end of a study. It is the beginning of a different way of managing.
* Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (NTUA/PK), MBA (CIIM), Economics (APKY), European EFQM Assessor.
