This article is about a critical pattern in public services: the failure of layered leadership caused by systemic privilege.
It happens when the top bosses (at the executive and governance levels) lose touch with the day-to-day reality of the people they serve. This pattern of damage is called arrogant incrementalism.
Arrogant incrementalism is when senior leaders, often shielded by their privilege, quickly roll out lots of small, new changes without ever checking if those changes will work together, or without ever analysing for subsequent impacts across other factors. The problem isn’t the goal they have; it’s that the chaos caused by their uncohesive decisions ends up harming staff and vulnerable clients.
I’m using the ongoing challenge of helping children and young people in New Zealand (with education and poverty issues) as a case study. My main goal with this article is to give managers and leaders below the executive and governance levels a clear pragmatic strategy to recognise this pattern and protect their people from the inevitable damage.
The problem: when privilege blinds us to our decisions
The core issue is that highly privileged leaders often think they have the “obvious solution” to complex, systemic problems. They aren’t usually innovative; they are generalists who view the solution as simple but ignore the complex processes required and just think they can do things better than the last person, which is often arrogance. They barely listen to feedback, dismissing experts who contradict their plans.
The failure to grasp socio-economic reality
The most damaging aspect of arrogant incrementalism is the failure to grasp socio-economic reality. Leaders impose punitive measures from a position of privilege, ignoring the fundamental barriers faced by vulnerable families. As one principal noted regarding the threat of fines for truancy:
“If you’re going to start fining the parents, you’re going to be fining that bottom echelon of society, again, causing even more social issues.”
How chaos is created incrementally
When different parts of the system (like welfare, transport and education) all make separate uncoordinated decisions, the results are disastrous.
The harm: The leaders assume the good parts of their policies will magically outweigh the bad parts, but for families, the cumulative hassle and cost of these uncordinated decisions make life much harder.
The strain: Middle leaders at the breaking point
Managers, principals, and team leaders operate as a “buffer” between the out-of-touch executive and the frontline staff. They recognise the guaranteed harm coming from above, but feel helpless to stop it. This is compounded by the executive disconnect:
“He (Seymour) needs to get into schools and find out what’s happening because a lot of schools are targeting attendance and doing a good job at it.”
The burden of the unfunded mandate and systemic drift
Middle leaders are now burdened not just by explicit education mandates (curriculum, daily attendance reporting) but by the unfunded operational fallout from failures in health, housing and social policy.
This synthesis reveals that middle leadership is not just managing one boss (the Ministry of Education), but is constantly absorbing the cumulative system failures of multiple government departments.
The ultimate outcome: The path to NEET
The uncohesive chaos caused by arrogant incrementalism drives a clear path toward students becoming Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). The truancy pattern is the visible symptom, not the root cause.
This cycle demonstrates that increasing truancy reporting (a top-down compliance response) will only exacerbate the issue if the foundational social and economic barriers are not addressed.
The strategy: How to act under constraint
If you are a leader below the executive, remember this: you cannot deviate from the explicit instruction. Your strategy must shift from changing the mandate to using the resources you control to neutralise the friction the mandate creates.
A. Strategic pattern recognition and risk reporting
You can’t argue with politics, but you can argue with risk.
- Map the friction (the equity tax): Stop just complying. Start quantifying the cost of the chaos on your most valuable resource: staff time and discretionary budget.
-
- Example: Calculate the cost of food security. “We spend $5,000 annually from our OPEX/fundraising to feed students outside the funded programme. This represents a direct transfer of the poverty mandate from MSD onto our operational school budget.”
- Example: The new daily attendance reporting mandate steals valuable minutes from teachers daily. Calculate this loss (eg. 500 lost hours of planning annually: 15 mins per day per teacher x 25 teachers). This is the “equity tax” imposed by the compliance mandate.
-
- Report harm as risk: Present this friction data as an operational risk management report. Instead of saying “this policy is unfair,” say, “This reporting mandate/unfunded food mandate guarantees a drop in instructional capacity and risks a failure to meet your own national literacy target.”
B. Actionable mitigation: Neutralising friction with local solutions
Better decision-making is about strategically spending the resources you do control (staff time, discretionary funds) to absorb the destruction before it hits the client.
Final thought
The ongoing failure to improve outcomes is not a failure of the frontline; it is failure of cohesive leadership. The harm is caused by arrogant incrementalism.
The most effective action for leaders below the executive is to master pattern recognition and ensure that local resource allocation is always used to absorb the destructive friction caused by top-down mandates. Leadership integrity is achieved by prioritising the quality of the process, not the speed of the deadline.