What is strategy work for you?

It seems that the understanding of what strategy is is changing with a more inclusive understanding of the meaning of strategy. There is an openness that you can adjust to it, that you can take a step back, and sometimes you can make a very big jump forward.

Strategies must help us find our way in the framework conditions we have as a municipality. This requires them to be both long-term, so we stay focused on the difficult things over time, while also doing trial actions that give us new solutions in the short term.

Strategy becomes very important in Odense Municipality. We want to cooperate with the whole of Funen and drive the development, among other things, with business development and new jobs. In this context, our strategies mean a lot for the overall development of Funen.

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What is the biggest challenge in your strategy work?

We, like other municipalities, also have far too many policies and strategies — there are 89 policies and strategies, and it can be difficult to have a common overview.

It is part of the mid-term governance that individual committees make policies. It is therefore particularly important that we ensure that there is consistency across the board, so that we ensure interaction across policy committees and the whole organisation. We do this, for example, with our urban strategy, which actively states that we can only succeed when we do it together. Our next step is to get a unified visual overview of the policies and tie policies and strategies together. It must be easier to manage according to them and, in the long run, to cut the number of policies and strategies.

The challenges we have in Odense Municipality, and in most other municipalities, cannot be solved with a quick fix. There are a lot of wild problems that take years to get to grips with. Therefore, there is also a need for us to approach them with a different view of impact.

We need to see if we are measuring on the right thing or if there are some impact targets that we need to cut out, so that we focus on achieving what really has value for citizens.

Therefore, we are working to develop a simpler effect model.

How do you manage your strategy?

I focus on implementation, implementation and implementation. For me, it is about us implementing what the politicians decide. Policy and solution need to be linked, so I support, that what politicians say to citizens and in the media 'municipal front door', also it is, which we, as a whole organization, work to fulfill by 'municipal backdoor'. It is with this aim that I do what I can to support work across the municipality with shared priorities. This is necessary if we are to address some of the significant local community problems we face. There, strategy tools can help us identify the problems and find new ways to solve them.

Finally, I see myself as a conversation starter -- of strategic conversations.

It requires me to be a little bit of an ethnographer in my own organization. It takes a curiosity on my part to understand what drives different agendas, and there may lie the key to uniting them.

In addition to myself, I focus on the fact that we throughout the organization are curious about ourselves and always see the perspective based on the needs of the citizen. Sometimes there is a need to be preoccupied with one's inner life as an organization. For example, by being a learning organization, where we as leaders dare to take risks and could continuously invite tests and could be wrong. When we challenge our own logics, we also become better at supporting good lives for the citizens of Odense Municipality.

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Strategy in Odense Municipality

In Odense Municipality, the developed policies are the overall governing documents. Under some of the cross-cutting policies or the policies of individual committees, strategies have been developed. A strategy may well cover two or more administrations. The function of the strategies is to “translate” and operationalize the ambitions of the municipality's policies. Strategic work is supported by three principles of communication: Authenticity, dialogue and action: “We are authentic”, “We engage in dialogue” and “We put action behind words”.

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