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Developing public service bureaucracies to meet the demands of the 21st century

Presentation by Lynelle Briggs
Australian Public Service Commissioner
CAPAM 2008 Biennial Conference - Barbados
Monday 20th October 2008

Introduction

It’s wonderful to be here in Barbados with CAPAM.

Public services should be focused on what is in the best interests our people. Our senior officials also need to have a national and global view, which brings perspective to the wider public service. I say this because it is crucial that the public service recognise and respond to the broader environment as it changes.

Many of you will be familiar with the work of Gary Hamel, the business strategy expert, who argues¹ that the resilience of every society, organisation and individual will be tested in the coming decades by ‘an accelerating pace of change’ and that the most important question for an organisation to ask is ‘are we changing as fast as the world around us?’

We can’t afford to sit back and wait for change to happen to us. We have to be active participants in the process; anticipating what is ahead and renewing our organisations in ways that make the most of what change has to offer, and managing the risks that arise.

It would be a mistake to think of change or reform as something we can get past before we settle into some fixed version of the future. A cultural bias for continuous organisational change is essential if our public services are to help governments work in the best interests of their citizens.

There is a great deal of diversity across the Commonwealth’s public services—reflecting our cultural and political heritage, our core business and how we operate. However, we are all in the business of public service and I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we have in common. It is the need to serve the public well, through good policy, really impressive programme implementation and regulation and responsive client service, that should be driving organisational change in public administration today.

So how can we identify and respond to new challenges of the future? One way is to pose a series of questions about the public service as an organisation.

The key challenges over the next decade

If we apply the shock thinking behind a UK education futures discussion called shift happens² to the public service, we’ll find that we should be preparing for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

Shift happens’ daunting picture of today’s fluid and fast-paced environment is our reality.

1. Scenarios

One way to deal with this is to develop scenarios with government and other stakeholders on likely environments in 5, 10, or 15 years, and identify the corresponding capabilities the public service will need, and the changes that need to be put in place to get there.

In 2005 an Australian State Government (Victoria) adopted the scenario model³ to explore key trends and drivers that shape the future ways in which our citizens will live and work, and key issues affecting the future of the public service. It identified seven key issues for the public sector, including developing systems and skills to work effectively with the private and non-profit sectors, engaging across portfolios and jurisdictions in our Federal system, and supporting the development of individual responsibility to achieve better outcomes.

2. Observing what’s going on elsewhere

Another option is to observe innovations and responses in other countries. One of the benefits of globalisation is the ease with which we can transport ideas, capability and technology. Being up to date and well versed on what is happening elsewhere is critical to the advice we give and to the decisions we take in our jurisdictions.

3. Common challenges

While the future is uncertain and unpredictable, there are a number of challenges that governments will encounter in most Commonwealth countries in the next decade.

Among the most manifest global challenges are complex problems like poverty, climate change and terrorism that appear intractable because of their complexity, history and scope, and require flexible cross-country solutions. Domestically, many of us face intractable issues such as HIV/AIDS and its devastating social and economic impact, or how to balance environmental protection and economic growth. On top of that we have a world financial crisis, whose tentacles will affect us all.

All Commonwealth public services operate under ongoing economic pressures and the need to produce more and better outcomes with fewer resources. Citizens want governments that do more, cost less, and provide better, faster and more services.

Citizens also expect to have a greater say in the development of public policies, programmes and services. Increasing civic participation has progressively led to the role of government being questioned and redefined.

To date citizen expectations have been a one way street—focussed on what and how governments provide public services and benefits. Increasingly, a difficult but important challenge for public services is supporting our citizens to manage their behaviour and accept individual responsibility for issues that affect them, like the potential health consequences of excessive alcohol consumption or the impact of their violence on others. The challenge is to strike the right balance between incentives and sanctions, while still building the capacity of individuals and communities.

Many of us also grapple with labour market challenges which range in scope and nature from serious unemployment to skills shortages, to managing the impact of HIV/AIDS or labour mobility.

To give you an example, the UN⁴ estimates that Trinidad and Tobago, Mozambique and Barbados are amongst the developing countries with the highest emigration rates of highly educated people to OECD countries. The loss of much needed talent, expertise, knowledge and skills is detrimental to these countries’ public services. Developing and retaining a critical mass of talent is essential, so “earn, learn and return home” strategies are now taking hold.

The UN⁵ also estimates that the working populations of the eight African countries with the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS will be approximately 20 per cent less by 2020 just because of HIV/AIDS. It identifies four critical challenges for these public services:

• the loss of significant numbers of skilled workers;
• high levels of absenteeism by employees with HIV/AIDS - especially in the public sector where leave provisions are usually more generous than elsewhere;
• the preparedness of new workforce entrants for skilled work—due to the growing number of orphans and related child poverty; and
• increased demands for public services and social assistance and a loss of revenue.

These challenges and pressures are complex and seemingly insurmountable. They provide great opportunities for innovation, and it is our public services who will lead the responses.

Public service operations to neet the challenges

If the shift happens predictions regarding the tempo of change are accurate, public services will need to be able to adapt quickly their structures and processes, as well as culture and relationships, to future trends and analysis.

1. Agile and strategic

This means that public sector organisations will need to be more agile, able to quickly respond to changing agendas, and to the fast moving pace of our operating environment. We have to be in a state of readiness to anticipate and deal with crisis situations and other challenges. If the current financial crisis tells us anything, it is that we need to be more strategic globally so that we are able to recognise policy and implementation failures before they happen.

2. Organisational renewal

Organisational renewal is a useful starting point. This is a dynamic reform process designed to improve public sector capability so that our organisations are better able to successfully deliver government services in a constantly changing environment⁶.

The message is that we aren’t going to achieve successful outcomes when it comes to things like climate change or skills shortages due to AIDS if all we do are the same things we always did, and if we do them in the same way.

The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mr David Thompson, said as much recently when he warned that major changes were needed in the way the public service functioned, if Barbados was to cope with the challenges it faces.⁷

3. Doer to Enabler and Collaborator

How individual country’s public services position themselves to meet these challenges is ultimately determined by a number of key factors, including the role of government and government policies and decisions.

Increasingly the role of government in Australia and elsewhere is becoming one of “enabler” rather than the automatic “doer” and this is having a profound impact on how public services operate.

There is now far greater emphasis on public servants connecting, guiding, directing and coordinating as more and more government services are provided collaboratively through third parties. According to Raadschelders, Toonen and Van Der Meer⁸, only public services can perform this intermediary role and they suggest that‘more than ever before, civil servants have become brokers among a wide range of non-profit and private stakeholders’.

4. Working across sectors

As brokers, public servants need to fundamentally change the way in which they operate. They need to develop the capacity to work effectively in partnership with the private and non-government sector or with other government partners to develop solutions to complex issues and to ensure the successful delivery of services. This will become the new “usual way” of working.

Ultimately this requires development of horizontal systems that work flexibly and effectively across and beyond organisational boundaries to complement existing vertical hierarchies in policy-making, processes and cultures.

This shift will inevitably lead to tensions between the vertical and the horizontal systems, with the challenges being, when, why and how to connect government with citizens and how to manage related accountabilities.

For example, promoting social inclusion in Australia requires a rethink in how policy and programmes across portfolios and levels of government can work together to combat economic and social disadvantage and break down barriers to full participation in our society.

The Australian Government, as part of its social inclusion agenda, is exploring ways to develop a new and stronger relationship with the not-for-profit sector, based on partnership and respect. One way to do this is through a National Compact—like in the UK—where the government and the not-for-profit sector formally agree how the two will work together to improve and strengthen their relationship.

Whole of government responses require different government agencies to work together effectively. Most public administrations have evolved from single function departments—often referred to as silos, because of their narrow sectional perspectives and inability to see the broader picture. Increasingly, however, our traditional administrative structures and arrangements do not readily fit the ways in which we need to respond to challenges or package and deliver services to meet community needs.

[My country, Australia, is the driest inhabited continent on earth, and as the impact of climate change intensifies, we face increasingly acute long-term water shortages. Tackling the water crisis and securing Australia’s future water supply will require all Australians to work together—our three levels of government, our business and community sectors, and individual citizens—to use water more efficiently, cut water wastage, more effectively capture rain and stormwater, and adapt to the impact of climate change].

It’s important that we look to agency health, governance and agency cultural change to break down our silos and enable us to embrace new ways of working.⁹

 5. On-line information and services

Collaborative approaches are also increasingly being supported by technology. Success will hinge on our ability to leverage off technological advances that provide opportunities for better, faster and more services, and opportunities for increased democracy through greater transparency in government and increased citizen participation in the policy making process.

To date technology advances have focused primarily on the front end of service aimed at creating a single portal or secure government channel on which all or most services could be accessible so that citizens could access government services through a single point. After years of focusing on the service front end governments are devoting more attention to the back-end infrastructure of systems to improve the quality of services.

Over time this will require whole of government responses to issues such as: data ownership and data storage; common citizen identifiers and authentication; and barriers to whole of government information communications technology infrastructure decisions.

However, while technological change facilitates connections it also raises community expectations about how the public sector should work. In many countries this has led to a rethink on how we deliver services, so that a lot more is delivered on-line.

6. Citizens at the centre

Citizen expectations and increasing citizen involvement in policy development and the design of services has been a significant change in the way many public services operate. Today many of our citizens are much more sophisticated consumers of government services than they were in the past—they are better educated, better informed and wealthier.

There is no doubt that greater community participation has become one of Australia’s biggest new drivers for changes to the way the Australian Public Service does business. It has driven expectations of government performance. Our citizens no longer expect governments only to provide the fundamentals of health care, shelter and welfare services. Increasingly they are concerned about the overall quality and standard of government services. These expectations are extensive and wide-ranging—citizens expect to have a say in government.

Our citizens will continue to expect to have a greater say in the development of public policies and programmes, so we need to encourage and accommodate new ways of engaging our communities.

The Australian Government’s 2020 summit is an interesting example. It sought to engage with the community by drawing on the best talents of our people to harness the best ideas for Australia’s future. The Government has also made Community Cabinet meetings part of its regular programme of government to increase cooperation between the Government and business and community organisations.

Public services with the right skills and capabilities to deliver

So how do we ensure that our public sectors have the right skills and capabilities to meet the demands of the 21st century?

1. Agile and strategic

Agility needs to become a core public service competency in our decentralised and complex world. Agility means both how quickly and how flexibly we respond in our uncertain environment. Agile flexible organisations need agile and flexible leaders.

Encouraging structured pathways for top and emerging talent is one way of fostering a flexible leadership cohort with a whole-of-government outlook.

In Australia the Prime Minister has put the public service on notice that it must be creative, think big and take account of the future—this will mean building the strategic capabilities of policy advisers, thinkers and researchers.

But, it is hard for public service leaders to maintain a long term strategic focus in wake of short electoral terms and 24 hour media cycles.

To remain future focussed public service leaders must ensure they nurture the necessary statistical, research and policy development capabilities required to analyse, conceptualise and provide innovative responses to both short term and long term policy and programme delivery challenges.

These capabilities need to be developed across the leadership cohort, rather than expecting individual leaders to perform across the full range of policy, strategic and service delivery activities.

2. Organisational renewal – doing things differently

We also need to adopt organisation renewal as an integral process in our organisations—as something that will help us work better, achieve results, and respond to change. Too often public servants resist change and new ways of doing things. Our leaders need the capability to create an environment where people welcome change and growth.

As part of the renewal process public services will need to develop more flexible and attractive employment arrangements to accommodate changing labour market participation patterns—such as greater diversity in careers and more part-time and flexible working patterns. We will need to get better at effective work force planning and work place training if we are to compete for tomorrow’s skilled employees.

3. Leaders as enablers

The public service’s role as an intermediary or broker demands a leadership model that balances understanding, influence, authority and innovation.

Future public service leaders must be able to lead both vertically and horizontally, and to act as facilitators who don’t have all of the answers but can engage the right people in the process to get the right answers. This requires a participatory approach to governance, which includes sharing power, authority, information, knowledge, responsibility and accountability, as well as the development of relationships based on trust.

This will inevitably create tensions and conflicts. There are clear political dimensions—engagement outside government necessarily brings in considerations of the Government’s agenda and constituency and tactical preferences.

4. Working across sectors and whole of government

Part of the leadership challenge is therefore to develop and maintain flexible relationships across the whole of government and into the community and business sectors.

This applies to both policy and delivery elements. Policy leaders need to think ‘strategy’ and increasingly collaborate with the third sector and citizens to ensure that policy options better meet the needs of citizens. Like working across sectors for service delivery, co-development and co-ownership of policies needs to become the norm rather than the exception.

We need to create a new breed of public service leaders and employees who can deliver across organisational boundaries through greater interchange and mobility outside of the public service.

Senior public servants should participate in placements in community and private sector organisations to broaden their experience and policy thinking. We need to develop and attract leaders and employees with hands-on experience in business, finance, logistics, strategic planning and so on, and in voluntary and community organisations.

Handling complex problems

More often than not, we are in the business of competing models; trying to sort out which one is best, when we probably should be working out how they can compliment one another if we are going to be successful at fixing complex problems. Roger Martin from Harvard tells us that choosing the best bits from each model may deliver new solutions.

Brenda Zimmerman from York University tells us that as problems become more complex, the public service should be subject to fewer rules because rules stifle creativity and innovation. This means to get the best results, we may need to minimise accountability rules.

5. On-line information and service

Technology has changed work practices, and made available global information and events in short timeframes. Governments are increasingly using information and communications technologies for the full range of government functions and to deliver less complex services on-line.

These trends require us to rethink our approaches to recruiting and developing people with the right technical skills. We also need to think about career structures for these people and how we retain cutting edge technical skills in a competitive labour market.

Employees at all levels and in all agencies will need to be able to operate effectively in the information age and require information communication technology skills commensurate with those of the average tertiary graduate today.

6. Citizens at the centre

Technology provides significant opportunities for more citizen centred service delivery approaches. The increasing shift to citizen centred services is fundamentally impacting on how public services operate, and the skills and capabilities required of public servants.

Increasingly citizens see themselves as time poor and are demanding choices about how and when they access government services. They want to know about how to access information and products, rather than hear about public sector complexities such as organisational structures and distinctions between policy and service delivery components.

Not only do front end services need to mask complexity from users, they need to be structured around events, common questions and answers, and be offered via the Internet, publications or phone lines.

Like many contemporary challenges, citizen centred services demand public servants to fundamentally look at the design and delivery of services and whole of government relationships. The accountability and governance challenges are similar to those for other whole of government work—the need to work across organisational boundaries and the related cultural change to foster whole of government skills and behaviours.

Citizen centred services will require the public service to develop greater capacity for strategic and creative thinking, and innovation over and above traditional analytical, conceptual and project management skills.

Increasingly staff with connecting skills, who can build and leverage relationships across sectors and have the ability to understand how services connect for citizens, will be in demand. Staff at all levels will need to develop some citizen insight capabilities.

Conclusion

Today I have probably asked more questions than I have answered. This is because there are no simple solutions for the complex challenge of developing public sector capability to meet the demands of the future.

Today we have identified some of the many contemporary challenges facing our public services. It is clear that the future agendas of our public services will inevitably be shaped by the policy, citizen and workforce challenges of the 21st century.

The issues I have highlighted today - such as the bedding down of whole of government approaches and the strengthening of our relationships with external stakeholders—will continue to be a fundamental part of our operating environment.

The key to our success will be our capacity to adapt and respond to changes in the environment, in particular, leveraging off technology. Our success will be measured by how fast we can do so and how effectively we work at a whole of government level and engage with our private and not-for-profit sector partners and citizens.

It is through opportunities like today that we can all increase our knowledge of what is happening elsewhere; and consider how best to position our own public services to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

 

1. Hamel, G (2007) The Future of Management, HBS Press Book

2. UK version of Shift Happens was modified from Karl Fisch's American original to reflect both a UK context, and designed specifically for an audience of people involved in the UK education system.  Available from various internet sites including http://blogs.msdn.com/ukschools/archive/2008/09/11/shift-happens-uk-download.aspx.

3. The future of the public sector in 2005, State Services Authority (2006)

4. Unlocking the Human Potential for Public Sector Performance, World Public Sector Report 2005, United Nations New York (2005)

5. Ibid p46

6. Organisational Renewal, Management Advisory Committee, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra (2003), p10

7. PS warned to expect change, PSnews Issue Number 137, 9 September 2008

8. The Civil Service in the 21st Century, page 3, 2007 Anthony Rone Ltd Great Britain Ed. Jos C.N. Raadschelders, Theo A.J. Toonen and Fritz M. Van Der Meer

9. See two publications in the Australian Public Service Commission series Contemporary Government Challenges 2007 – Agency Health—Monitoring and Improving Performance and Building Better Governance.

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