The climate for change - public sector renewal

2009 IPAA National Conference
Friday 20 November 2009

Good morning everyone.

As you all know, our Prime Minister has set us on a process of public sector reform with the stated intention of making the Australian Public Service (the APS) “the best public service anywhere in the world”.  I have the honour of being a member of the Advisory Group that is working towards a blueprint to get us there. 

This is no small thing.  The APS employs about 160,000 people across almost 100 agencies, and as the discussion paper released by the Advisory Group recognises, they are “motivated people committed to the attainment of outcomes for Australian people”. The annual State of the Service Report confirms that commitment; 96% of employees report they are willing to go the extra yard to get the job done and 82% report they are motivated to do their best work.

International comparisons and studies also show we perform well across a range of measures - for example, in our independence from political interference, which is a measure of the capacity to provide impartial evidence based advice, and our citizen levels of confidence in their public sector. 

So too the APS has demonstrated its ability to respond quickly to events and circumstances.  In responding to the global financial crisis for instance, the Government has praised the quick design and implementation of the $42bn Nation Building and Jobs Plan, including being able to put in place new co-ordination arrangements to make sure that these measures hit the ground as soon as possible.

Despite this, there is growing recognition that we need to do better.

As the Prime Minister noted in the John Patterson oration, the issues we face, both locally and globally are “broad in scope and deep in complexity… (they) are challenges that will require a new generation of public service leadership, a new standard of public service excellence and therefore a new era of public service reform”.

The drivers underlying this need for change include:

• increasing complexity of policy demands
• increasing citizen expectations
• demographic change
• technological change
• globalisation
• financial pressures

None of these are new.   Just ask any public servant whether they have felt the impact of technological change or financial pressures in the past, or talk to any Centrelink or ATO Customer Service Officer to see what they would say about citizen expectations.

What is perhaps new however is the extent to which all of these pressures are growing and converging; the speed of response which is then required; and the impact they are having on our organisations.  Hamel talks about “gap resilience”, and a world which is becoming turbulent faster than organisations are becoming resilient.  What this means is that without reform, without change, we not only risk playing a continual game of catch up, but in a worst case scenario, we find ourselves simply trying to stem the pace at which we are falling behind.

The current reform agenda is aimed at bridging that gap. 

Fundamentally, we are looking to create an APS that is by its nature innovative, adaptive and outward focused.  The key will to both attract and develop talented leaders with those attributes, and also to hardwire those attributes into our systems and architecture. 

The blueprint we are developing is a critical first step.  The process to formulate that blueprint is nearing the end of its consultation stage.  This has included formal submissions and a series of blogs to try and increase input and participation.  There have also been a series of employee meetings around the country. 

The analysis to date suggests that people don’t disagree with the need for change, which is an important factor.  A strong theme emerging from the on-line blogs was the need for much better collaboration between and within agencies, as well as the removal of red tape.  These are factors which we have been talking about in the APS for some time; why we haven’t gained enough traction to date will be an important component of moving forward.

Two themes which underlay our initial thinking, and which the consultation process appears to be reinforcing as being essential to meet the challenges outlined above are:

• the importance of planning and stewarding the human capital of the APS
• the need to relentlessly pursue a high performance APS culture.

There are a number of dimensions to the issue of human capital. 

Sound planning will require accurate workforce intelligence.  Our current and future needs will have to be identified and renewed, including through horizon scanning and co-ordinated strategic analysis.  We will need a recruitment and development model that will attract and then retain the types of public servants we will need - agile, flexible, mobile and forward thinking.  We must also develop a strategy to engage our people through their career cycle, whether that be active intervention to enhance their capacity or simply accommodating their own changing circumstances.

From a performance perspective, we need to look to our values.

After 10 years of operation of our current Act, there is very high level of understanding and recognition of our current values.  What we want to do moving forward is to take that understanding, possibly refine or recast the values, and utilise them to drive performance and excellence. 

In a public service context it is important that our values be broadly based.  The challenge is ensuring that those values translate into tangible behavior that delivers desired outcomes. Ideally, the values will instil a sense of unity, and by demanding things like integrity, fairness, accountability and transparency, will drive behaviour and enhance public trust. 

Our current values framework  - or to put it another way, the delivery system by which we embed those values - has three components, namely:

• commitment - which builds a values based culture through the demonstrable actions of our leaders, through strategic direction setting and through learning and development.
• management - which fosters good judgment and integrity through sound management practices supported by policies and guidelines, and through the performance management process.
• assurance - which measures how we perform from a values perspective, through accountability and assurance mechanisms.

I believe that framework is sound but, like much of what is encompassed by the reform agenda, requires a retooling for what lies ahead.  For instance, to achieve the agility and innovation we want, we will need to develop a greater tolerance for failure when it occurs as a result of carefully considered risk taking.  We will also need to carefully balance the need for accountability against the need for flexibility, and how we measure achievement will be as important as what we measure.  Our framework must accommodate those requirements.  

There is a lot of water to go under the bridge but if we manage the reform process well, we have an opportunity to create the type of organisation and environment Hamel has in mind when he talks about the quest for resilience:

“The goal is a strategy that is forever morphing, forever conforming itself to emerging opportunities and incipient trends. The goal is an organisation that is constantly making its future rather than defending its past. The goal is a company where revolutionary change happens in lightening-quick evolutionary steps…”

He also reminds us that “a noble past does not entitle an institution to an illustrious future”, and so however well we have done and are doing in the APS, it will ultimately count for nothing if we don’t respond to the challenges raised by that future. 

Thank you