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New Ways of Working seems to change the leadership agenda. Activity-based working and home-based work lead to different behaviors of employees. Supervising styles will change from command-and-control toward goal-setting-and-trust. This chapter describes the trend and provides new data on the actual use and effectiveness of these new supervision styles. It appears to be a mix of different leadership styles, such as leading by vision, setting targets and control on output, providing trust.

The chapters in this book have all in some way focused on new steering instruments in the public sector, or on how governments, often in collaboration with other actors, attempt to achieve integrated results and broad social outcomes. The trend away from the traditional and NPM-style prescriptions, the latter of which often resulted in a certain degree of fragmentation and a loss of steering capacity (Terry, 2005), is visible in a wide range of areas, both on the delivery level, and on the more strategic level. This has put the need to coordinate the public sector and to find new ways of steering firmly on the agenda (Braun, 2008; Bouckaert et al., 2010).

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of Innovative Laboratories as a learning format which can be used to create public value in a Danish context by specifically coping with strategic challenges which takes the form of paradoxes.

The learning format is theoretically informed by Niklas Luhmann’s functional approach as well as based on concrete teaching experiences within the course on strategy which is an integral part of the Master of Public Administration, CBS.

The structure and processes of Innovative Laboratories incorporate the idea of theoretical perspectives as contingent ways of observing and apply this idea to the way strategic problems are reformulated by the participants and thus to how new strategic solutions become viable.

As such, the laboratories represent a way of innovation, as the most valuable part of the process is not to find a solution but to create a new problem by reformulation. This innovation process is captured by the metaphor of ‘managination’.

Advanced information technologies, and particularly big data, provide new affordances to facilitate inter-organizational collaboration. Rich flows of real-time data provide transparency across organizational boundaries and enable greater automation of inter-organizational routines. Taking stock of the literature and building on observations from the research in an industrial setting, the authors introduce the concept of technological embeddedness as an important characteristic of inter-organizational relationships, denoting the degree of monitoring, control, and optimization of intra- and inter-organizational tasks accomplished through technology at the interface of the inter-organizational relationship. The authors theorize how increasing technological embeddedness created by big data technologies affects the development of inter-organizational trust, mutual adaptation, and temporal structuring of collaboration. The propositions elaborate how greater technological embeddedness enables collaboration, and warn about the potential limiting effects of technological embeddedness on the development of interpersonal trust, strategic learning, and long-term orientation.

This chapter focuses on the use of outcome-based performance management systems within public administration. It reports two qualitative case studies from respectively the Danish Tax and Customs Administration and the Swedish Tax Agency. Both of these administrations use outcome-based performance management systems to steer subsets of their administrative work. The chapter shows that the systems respond to broader demands for accounting for outcomes, yet, the systems also operate in very different ways. The Danish case shows a quantitative system which measures on a daily basis, the Swedish case shows a qualitative system which measures on a four to five-year basis. What is striking about both cases is that they balance meeting the demands for accounting for diffuse outcomes, with developing measurements that ‘fit’ local contingent concerns. While much of the current research on performance management systems in public administration is critical and stresses the downsides of such systems, this chapter shows that these systems should not always be assumed to be connected to gaming, strategic behaviour and/or reductionism. Instead, the performance management systems can be seen as attempts to reconcile and make ends meet in ‘post-bureaucratic’ organisations that are increasingly expected to account for rather diffuse and abstract outcomes and expected at the same time to steer and prioritise daily administrative work.

The research problem investigated in this paper addresses how love can intentionally be reflected in decision-making processes. The study is built on a theoretical and a practical foundation. The theoretical foundation comprises two parts with perspectives from theology and organizational theory. The practical foundation is derived from field research in the area of public administration and church leadership. Examples from field research indicate that trust and building of relationship will change adversarial behaviour into cooperative behaviour. Three network strategies are identified to make decision-making intentionally relational. The conceptual contribution is original, although the authors draw on existing insights from theology and public administration.