The Map That Didn’t Exist

Stockholm, 2020. The Swedish Public Employment Service — roughly 15,000 employees, serving an entire country — has run for decades as what you’d call an autonomous organisation. Every office, every region, is largely doing things its own way. I’m brought in as a Strategic and Process Manager to help move it toward a more process-oriented approach. Structured. Repeatable. Fair, regardless of which office you walk into.

There was no template for this. Not one I could photocopy from a private company and drop into a government agency serving a country that size. I had a direction — process over autonomy — and no route.

So I did the only honest thing: I mapped the critical flows as they actually existed, not as the org chart said they existed, and I took that mess in front of the Director General and the leadership team, and said: here’s the terrain. Here’s where I think the path is.

It wasn’t implemented until 2023 — three years after I’d moved on to the next assignment. That’s a detail I think about a lot. The leaders who are only interested in the wins they can put in this year’s report will avoid that kind of work entirely. It doesn’t flatter you. It just happens to be the reason the thing actually lasts.

Finding the way forward, when there’s no map, isn’t about confidence. It’s about being willing to be the one who draws the first version, knowing you might not be there to see it finished.

Next: what it costs a leader to actually stay visible when the plan is failing — not when it’s succeeding.