By Akin Monehin

What government scorecards can miss about the outcomes that really matter

“WE’VE had a very good year.” “How good?”

“My agency is ahead of target. From the latest review, most of the other agencies under the ministry are doing well too. The departments at headquarters are reporting progress. There is a lot of green on the scorecards. It should be a strong year for the Honourable Minister.”

“And the ministry?”

He looked at me. “Isn’t that what I just told you?”

“Not quite.”

His expression changed.

“I run a statutory agency. We have a mandate, agreed targets and a performance scorecard. If we deliver what government asked us to deliver, surely that counts as success.”

“It sure does.”

“So what exactly are you suggesting?”

“That all the parts can perform and the whole can still fail.”

He laughed. “That makes no sense.”

“It makes uncomfortable sense.”

Nigeria’s federal ministries are not single operating entities. Headquarters departments sit alongside supervised agencies, parastatals and other statutory bodies, with the precise relationships varying by ministry and enabling law.

That vertical structure is necessary: mandates need owners, budgets need accountability, departments need directors and agencies need leadership.

But the citizen rarely experiences government vertically.

“Imagine a patient undergoing major surgery,” I said. “The surgeon performs well. The anaesthesia team does its job. Nursing follows its protocols. Pharmacy supplies the required drugs.”

“Sounds like good care.”

“The patient dies.”

He stopped.

“Why?”

“A critical deterioration emerged during a handoff between teams and was not acted on quickly enough.”
“Then somebody failed.”

“Perhaps. But imagine every department can show that it completed the tasks on its own scorecard. Would you tell the family the hospital performed well?”

“Of course not.”

“Why?”

He paused.

“Because the patient is the outcome.”

“Exactly.”

A patient does not experience departments. A citizen does not experience parastatals. Both experience outcomes.

That is where institutional performance can become misleading. An agency may deliver its mandate, a department may complete its programme, a regulator may meet its statutory obligations…. yet the end-to-end outcome may still fail because the value depends on what happens across them not within them.

Government is organised vertically, however value is created horizontally.

Consider an investor trying to establish a facility, a young person moving from university into employment, or a patient moving through a public-health pathway. The outcome may depend on several institutions, each with legitimate authority and its own targets. The failure may occur not inside any single box, but at the interface between boxes: a delayed decision, missing information, unresolved dependency, conflicting priority or handoff that nobody owns end-to-end.

“So you are saying my agency can be green inside a ministry that is red?”

“Exactly; you got it now.”

“Even if we genuinely delivered everything assigned to us?”

“Yes.”

“Then the scorecard is wrong.”

“Not necessarily. It may simply be answering a different question.”

That is the paradox. Vertical scorecards tell leadership how individual institutions are performing. They do not automatically tell leadership whether the system is producing the outcome citizens were promised.The consequence is not merely administrative untidiness.

“When every box is green but the citizen is still waiting, the problem may be between the boxes.”

When interfaces fail, businesses absorb delay, citizens make repeated journeys between offices, projects consume more money, and ministers can be presented with reassuring institutional performance while the public experience deteriorates.

Government may then respond by creating another programme, another committee or another intervention whereas the deeper problem is that existing institutions are simply not operating as one delivery system.

In the worst cases, the citizen becomes the systems integrator of government: carrying information from one institution to another, chasing the missing approval, discovering which office must speak to which office.The citizen should not have to manage government in order to receive government.I call the resulting problem the Institutional Interface Gap™: public value lost when responsibility is distributed across institutions but the dependencies between them are not governed with equal discipline.

He pushed back again.

“You really cannot hold my agency responsible for an outcome controlled by five other organisations.”

“I agree. Shared outcomes do not mean blurred accountability.”

“Then what do they mean?”

“That government must be as deliberate about managing the horizontal journey as it is about managing the vertical institutions.”

Three shifts would make a difference.

First, begin with theministry-level outcome, not merely the agency scorecards. Keep the individual targets, but connect them explicitly to the small number of outcomes citizens are meant to experience.An agency target should be evidence of contribution to an outcome, not the final definition of success.

Second, govern the interfaces. Identify where responsibility crosses from one department, agency or regulator to another. Who sees the dependency? How quickly is a stalled handoff visible? Where does a cross-institutional trade-off get resolved?Coordination is not another meeting. It is the deliberate governance of dependencies.

Third, create an integrated line of sight to the outcome. The Minister, Permanent Secretary and senior leadership still need vertical performance information, but they also need an execution capability that can see across institutions, detect where value is becoming trapped and test whether all the green boxes are adding up to a green public outcome.

He reflected deeply.

“So you would not get rid of the agency scorecards?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You would add another scorecard?”

“Not necessarily. I would add another question.”

“Which is?”

“Did the patient live?”

He smiled, but the point was serious.

Government needs strong ministries, strong departments, strong agencies and strong regulators. Institutional excellence matters. But citizens cannot consume institutional performance; they experience what those institutions collectively make possible.

A green agency inside a red public outcome is not evidence that government succeeded.

The machinery of government may be organised vertically.Public value, however, is created horizontally.

Monehin is the best-selling author of Execution Is a Lie and Managing Partner of Praxis Execution Advisory.