Promising signs government workforce culture is adapting to an uncertain future
The CSIRO recently published seven megatrends that it believes will shape the next 20 years. It’s the big picture, about dealing with significant climate, health, technology and societal issues, and the “opportunity we have to invent the world we want to live in”.
The CSIRO describes these megatrends as a type of wind tunnel, where we can test and refine existing strategies to ensure they’re robust, whatever the future holds. It’s in this context that we start to examine how the public service is building capability and capacity for our future.
The Australian public service is onto the challenge. In its learning and development strategy, the APS aims to develop “a highly capable and future-ready workforce; always learning and adapting to deliver for the government and Australians”. It highlights the need for a “one APS” approach to lifting the skills and capability of the workforce to ensure a high-performing, driven and trusted public service, with a five-year L&D action plan to translate strategy into action.
A five-year plan probably would not provide enough data to ensure robustness in the wind tunnel test, but it’s a start.
The APS Academy, established just over a year ago “to increase impact and reduce duplication”, is also committed to contributing to skill development and a public service attitude that is “open to new ideas and ways of working” through APS Craft. This is an ability to connect, inspire and mobilise both self and others for lasting outcomes – with integrity at its heart.
In parallel and integrated to varying levels are departmental capability frameworks, the integrated leadership system and the creation of data, digital and human resources professional workstreams signal a capability prioritisation for the future.
Foundations are being put in place but it’s still early days. Those transformational megatrends are upon us now. I’m sensing a significant gap between emerging “craft” and the global reality.
Change is underway
So where are the green shoots of evidence that show the public service having a red hot go at reskilling and reshaping “at the speed of change” mentioned in the L&D strategy?
Transformational change and leadership expert Mary Souter from Artemis Partners recently became aware of an environmental regulator exploring with industry how to establish a true risk- and incentive-based approach. Through a genuine partnership, their plan is to reduce government and provider effort and costs while protecting regulatory and environmental outcomes.
“In taking this collaborative approach which considers both risk and benefit, they’re demonstrating a willingness to embrace that ‘trusted and respected partner’ relationship the APS independent review is seeking”, she says.
In keeping with the L&D strategy’s statement that “our people will need not only to develop new skills but stay open to new ideas and new ways of working” and strategic planning capability in the context of megatrends, we need to look no further than the Australian Antarctic Division. Its futures team draws on a suite of future-ready knowledge and skillsets to plan for a range of scenarios to 2050.
“We give this team a lot of freedom in the way they work, collaborate, investigate, design and test their scenarios,” says team leader Gaia Puleston. “Traditional hierarchies become less relevant as it’s the person with the idea or the understanding that will make the most difference.
“Our job as leaders is to connect and enable them to perform at their best. Our goal is to protect Australia’s national interests in Antarctica in a fast-changing world. Taking traditional approaches to this work would not be enough.”
Then there’s Services Australia, which is immersing its frontline workforce in virtual reality technology experiences to provide insight into the challenges faced by customers and staff with vision impairments. These “walk in their shoes” experiences are designed to build workforce empathy as well as help staff prepare for customer interactions they might experience face-to-face.
When building capability in a service delivery environment, enabling trainees to “choose their own adventure” from their customers’ perspectives is a long way from the more traditional training of not that long ago. At some point, someone in leadership took a risk, stepped out of the known and gave it a go. I think that speaks to “inventing the world we want to live in”.
There are other examples across the public sector, as we see a groundswell of leadership support, resources and intent for a modernised public service with the capability and capacity to lean into the challenges ahead.
Promoting skills transfer
It’s early days, but as we see in the examples above, green shoots are emerging. As these increase, it’s likely confidence will build across all levels of leadership to take bolder steps.
According to Souter, however, the public sector frequently misses a significant opportunity to leverage the investment in outsourced support to build internal capability.
“The public sector is in a strong position to insist on and enforce the effective transfer of skills and capability from the contracting and consulting sectors to the public sector teams they work with,” she says. “Imagine if every contractor and consultant was actively providing on-the-job training to your teams.”
This supports Katy Gallagher’s recent statement to an IPAA audience that “as servants of the public, we’re responsible and accountable for leaving the APS in better shape than we found it”. A good consultant should do the same.
What may also be missing is the power to effectively deal with legacy and stubborn resistance to less hierarchical, knowledge and solution-oriented ways of working.
A modern workforce is agile, adaptable and flexible. In our work, we see a minority of people actively demonstrating the very opposite characteristics, yet they are often in positional leadership roles and effectively stifle the impetus for modernisation on a micro-managing daily basis. This is a cultural issue.
The L&D strategy recognises this in one of its pillars: workplace culture. Most agencies have a culture program of some sort underway. But if I was a public sector executive, I’d be tripling down on this one to make sure that the attitudes and underlying systems and processes fully support a continuously learning, future-focused culture that understands the benefits of and commits to modernisation. Without that, we know what the non-modernising culture will be having for breakfast.
