Choosing what to protect, instead of looking where to cut

The operation had grown over the years around several expertise domains: user experience, online learning, digital employer services and platforms. At the same time, responsibilities were spread across services, projects and governance forums. An ambitious direction was in place, but the underlying choices had not been made: what is the core mission, which audiences take priority, what does the service no longer take on, and how does it relate to IT, communications and regional operations. On top of that came uncertainty, change fatigue and the fear of losing expertise and identity. Because the exercise ran within a broader reorganisation, it could not pre-empt the definitive structure.

The heaviest part, moreover, was not in the analysis. Every domain defended its own operation, and beneath that defence sat the fear of losing identity and built-up expertise. As long as that undercurrent did not move along, every proposal remained something people underwent. The real risk was fragmentation: if the digital functions were to fall apart, the customer journey erodes, manual work grows, the scale advantage disappears, and no one is any longer accountable for falling reach or falling quality.

The original broad policy and business-plan exercise was redrawn into a compact, decision-oriented positioning trajectory. Not another vision exercise, but starting from the existing strategic direction and bringing it back to four questions. For whom must this operation create value as a priority? Which results must the digital layer make possible? Which expertise, products and functions are needed for that? And which activities are in the core, in a grey zone, or can be phased out?

With a small positioning team, focused work sessions ran. In them the core qualities per domain were made visible, guiding principles were formulated and the core offering per domain was made concrete. Activities were tested against different future scenarios, with the dependencies between services, the risks and the grey zones explicitly on the table. The starting point was deliberately not the preservation of existing domains: the question was which functions and expertise the organisation needs, regardless of where they later land. Alongside the scenario for the tight situation, two scenarios also came for the case where funds free up again, so that broader service delivery and further development stayed visible as a basis for longer-term decisions.

The insight that stopping projects barely freed up structural capacity. Further savings therefore required real choices about service delivery and expertise, not fewer projects. From that moment the conversation no longer went about what was being cut away, but about which public value must be protected and what expertise is minimally needed for that. That tipped the logic from cutting to deliberate positioning.

A coherent and reusable decision basis: a sharpened core mission, a concrete core offering per expertise domain, and a clear line between audiences, value and digital functions. The outcome was of the same type each time: a limited number of functions that must remain intact, wherever they organisationally land, on condition that oversight, ownership, data agreements and consultation stay anchored together. Just as important: it became a proposal the domains stood behind together, instead of an exercise that went on over them. Alongside that, scenarios for different future assignments, an overview of dependencies and risks, explicit decision questions for management and governance, and a matrix to further validate choices. It became not a positioning document, but a substantive basis for prioritisation, reorganisation and decision-making.