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The Public Sector of the future
The Forum of Commonwealth Agencies in NSW Incorporated
2003 Government Business Conference
Terrigal, NSW
Andrew Podger
27 February 2003
Introduction
It is a formidable task to follow Bob Hawke, particularly with a keynote talk on the subject of 'The Public Sector of the Future'.
The Australian public sector has been through enormous changes over the last 25 years, not least in the period of the Hawke-Keating Governments. We have built an international reputation for successful reform, in large part I believe because it has been sustained and deliberate and mostly well managed, unlike some other nations: we have not 'dropped the ball' during this period, nor have we experienced dramatic 'u-turns' with changes in government - rather, each has built on previous reforms..
My message today is to expect more change, yet within a framework of continued substantial government involvement in the economy and society, and with a public service that continues to operate within the traditional culture of professionalism, impartiality, accountability and responsiveness to the elected government.
There are significant differences between private and public sector leadership. Private sector leaders are responsible, not only for how their organizations perform, but for what they choose to do and where they do it. They can change the business they are in and move all or part of it offshore. We can't do that. Through the democratic process it is the government-of-the-day and its Ministers who set the agenda-choose the business we are in-and set both the direction and the priorities. And we are often bound by legislation that requires us to undertake certain functions-as Public Service Commissioner, for example, I am required to 'contribute to, and foster, leadership in the APS'-though how we achieve these is, in many cases, for us to decide.
A retired permanent head and then professor of public administration, LF Crisp, put it nicely.
[Agency heads]…must be outward-looking, and Janus-headed at that: one face constantly scanning the whole complex of Ministers and departments whose concerns are intertwined with their own; the other as constantly surveying the general community, with an especially discerning eye for the activities and interests related closely to their own fields of responsibility. The Permanent Head must know and alert his Minister to all the sensitive points, the snares and the traps. (Crisp 1970: 457)
The public sector requires both reactive and proactive leadership. We must react -be responsive to-political leadership and Ministerial agendas, and as managers ensure that we effectively mobilise our resources in the pursuit of government objectives. We must be proactive in our policy advising role to scan the environment, be alert to impending changes and bring these issues to the Ministerial table. As leaders of our organizations we must be proactive to ensure that they can meet the emerging needs of public administration.
Drivers of change
The public sector, like all sectors, is swept up in the changes that are facing Australia. The pace of change is greater than in the past and there is more uncertainty. This affects the policy agendas of governments and the context in which we work.
Social
Australians are increasingly better educated, producing a more discerning public in terms of expectation of government services. They are, in general, also wealthier, with the gap growing between those at the top and those at the middle and lower end of the income scale. They-we-may not be willing to accept one-size-fits-all government services, but insist on choice and service standards more commensurate with personal preferences and position.
Australians are also growing older and living longer. In 40 years' time the number of people aged over 65 will have more than doubled, and the number over 85 will have more than quadrupled. This has already begun to place some pressure on government spending, a pressure that will escalate as the so-called 'baby boomer' generation begins to reach old age in the middle of the next decade. At the same time the number of young people is declining as women have chosen to have fewer children.
As a result, the size of the working population will decline in relation to the total population. This will affect Australia's ability to maintain a healthy economic balance, to have the funds needed to spend-on health, aged care and age pensions-and to continue to increase Australia's current standard of living. It is going to be very important to encourage both greater participation in work and greater productivity. That is the key message from the Intergenerational Report last year, in my view.
We will need to find ways to encourage older people to stay, or return, to work and to maintain or develop their skills as technology changes.
The demographic picture is not all gloom and doom: indeed, it is driven by a series of positive forces-fewer young people dying, older people living longer and with more years of healthy living, women having more control over their fertility. But it does present important challenges, particularly for longer-term government policy decision-making, if we are to see GDP per capita continuing to increase.
Economic
The advent of globalisation has increased pressures on all sectors to increase productivity and match international benchmarks of performance. Pressures to do more with less, and to be innovative and adaptable in meeting demands and finding solutions, will not go away: almost certainly, they will increase.
That said, I am generally optimistic about continued economic growth, both for Australia and internationally. Increased trade drives a lot of increased wealth, including in particular for developing countries. Equally-and partly as a consequence-it increases pressure for greater productivity.
Technology
Technological change is the underlying driver of many of the changes we are now experiencing. As faster communications across international boundaries spread knowledge of research and development more quickly and more widely, technological developments are taken up faster than ever before. There is also some evidence of accelerating discoveries, for example as modern communications allow much faster clinical trials for medical developments.
Technology is not only driving the pace of change but also providing some of the solutions. It is helping Australia overcome the 'tyranny of distance' internationally and helping those who live outside the urban conurbations to gain better access to the services that urban citizens accept as standard. E-business and e-governance are making service delivery more effective and user friendly.
Associated with globalisation, technology is exacerbating other problems. It is reducing the number of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs available and is accelerating structural change leading to higher rates of redundancies and bankruptcies.
Old problems are taking on different guises and require new strategies. Empowered by globalisation and facilitated by technology, the terrorists and criminals are finding new ways of achieving their aims. Governments have to find new ways of fighting the 'stateless, decentralized networks that move freely, quickly, and stealthily across national borders' to create terror, or to trade illegally in drugs, arms, intellectual property, people, and money.
Environmental
There has been an extraordinary shift in thinking about environmental issues over the last 30 to 40 years: perhaps those first pictures from the moon of Planet Earth presaged a fundamental change of thinking, both about who we belong to, and about man's overall dominance, both positive and negative. Yet for all those affected by the drought, or close to the recent bush fires, it is very clear that we are still subject to the apparently random impacts of Nature. Nevertheless, there is some indication that technology is beginning to help improve our forecasting and our understanding of ecosystems. That, in turn, provides new opportunities for both governments and markets to operate in closer alignment with the environment. Nonetheless, the environmental issues now facing Australia make it imperative that governments think and plan for the longer term.
How will these changes impact on the public sector?
I suspect that the key issues for the public sector will include: participation and choice; competition, efficiency and effectiveness; risk management and change management including communication; balancing short-term political imperatives and long-term agendas; and integration, including internationally.
What will the public sector of the future look like?
I am not sure crystal ball gazing too far into the future is particularly constructive. Simon Schama, the historian whose TV series I've recently enjoyed, has a nice quote that recognises that life is not predictable:
'history almost always takes us by surprise' (Brodsky 1995:121)
Nevertheless, let me describe how some of the trends I've mentioned might affect the public sector of the future (recognising that a number are already well in evidence).
Despite the rhetoric of a decade or two ago, it seems most unlikely that we shall see a fundamental contraction in the role of government. We remain in the business of public goods, protecting the disadvantaged and promoting stability and protecting rights. What has happened, and seems likely to continue, is a change in the way that role is managed. So there is less direct service provision and more purchasing and partnering. There is a more careful analysis of natural monopolies and a greater use of competition. There are new approaches to regulation to protect consumers and to protect public safety at minimum reasonable cost to business and the community.
In terms of service delivery, I think that there will be more pervasive and integrated customer entry points, facilitating individually-crafted service packages, particularly through Internet connections, as we now find in the highly competitive travel and banking industries. I also expect more commercial approaches to service delivery, not necessarily through privatisation or contracting out, but client-focussed, competitive service provider arrangements.
Despite what many commentators expect, I don't think we will have what has been dubbed 'hollow government', in which the public sector of the future will constitute only generalists and purchasers, who turn to outside experts for any and every substantial input. I do expect that we will have a more agile public sector, mixing and matching to address particular priority problems, and forming and reforming partnerships across all sorts of boundaries. And I expect to see a highly technologically proficient public sector with increasingly structured learning and development strategies for all employees, building and sustaining high levels of productivity.
In terms of the workforce, demography will have a profound impact. As the numbers of young people reaching the employment market declines there will be increasing competition for the best. The workforce will become more skilled, with more higher degrees; and achieve a greater mix of expertise by drawing more heavily on the expertise of contractors. The retention of older workers will become a priority because of their skills and corporate knowledge and this will encourage employers to design more flexible working arrangements to meet their expectations. I expect that working arrangements in general will become more flexible, recognising the increasing importance of maintaining work-family and work-leisure balances, with more flexible work location options. While I expect that we will continue to rely heavily on career public servants, I also anticipate continued increase in mobility between different sectors, and a greater expectation that many will do this as part of their career development.
In terms of our relationships with the community, the government and Parliament, I suspect that public servants will continue to become less anonymous and more skilled at managing communications professionally, though still firmly within the bounds of Ministerial responsibility. The relationship between the political arm and the bureaucratic arm of government will, as always, remain critical to the success of our political system and the public's confidence in it. But of one thing I am certain, we shall see an even more closely scrutinised public sector responding with vastly improved performance reporting and management.
What are the managerial implications of this for those leading the public sector?
Before I turn to some of the broader policy challenges and dilemmas, let me look at some of the managerial implications from this changing public sector of the future.
Flexibility
The Australian public sector has undergone sustained, incremental reform over the last 25 years involving new legislation and new ways of working. Governments have learned new ways of delivering services, drawing on new policy architecture to achieve their aims.
As a result, many activities have been privatised or corporatised, delivery functions outsourced, other activities are being market-tested, prescription has been significantly lessened, regulation re-engineered, and, as in the private sector, employer powers have been devolved to the heads of each agency (almost fully at the Commonwealth level; to a considerable degree at the state level).
Corporate governance and financial management are now based upon principles rather than detailed rules, and responsibility is devolved from central agencies to the array of agencies that make up the public sector.
This now gives agency heads the flexibility to manage their finances and their staff to meet their organisation's specific needs. The 'quid pro quo' of flexibility is always, of course, increased accountability, together with tougher aggregate financial controls. The agenda over the next few years will involve 'making the managers manage' and requiring them to exploit these flexibilities in managing their people and delivering results.
Results-based management
In planning the processes of government decision-making, Australia has turned away from the incrementalism of Lindblom in which policies are gradually built on, one upon the other, to take account of the adjustments and compromises required of changing situations. This has been seen as too limiting, too cautious. Instead, there has been an acceptance of Dror's argument-that by clarifying objectives and going through a series of planning stages it is possible to do more than make incremental changes. This rationalist approach has flowed directly into program budgeting and the outcomes/output framework with which many of you are familiar.
Nevertheless, the rationalist model has certain limitations, especially when the scope and rate of change is considerable. It can squeeze out the complexity and fluidity of objectives, aspirations and values that are the context of problem solving in government. We need to be open to assessing our decision-making models in striving to meet the increasingly broad policy demands of government.
There is no doubt that the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs have improved as a direct result of the program budgeting and evaluation agendas of the 1980s and the increasingly sophisticated outcomes/outputs budget arrangements under accrual accounting in more recent years. Together with more systematic reviews of program performance and a wider application of competition in the public sector, they have not only improved efficiency but also improved responsiveness to clients and program effectiveness more generally.
But management attention has now moved from objectives-based management, or management for results, to how we achieve those results with an emphasis on skills and performance management and, more recently, to values and capability in its broadest sense. This latest shift recognises the importance of relationships and partnerships and perhaps builds in a more forward looking approach that can better deal with change and uncertainty.
In its policy advice to government, the Service has a long tradition of identifying options and the pros and cons of each, and in its program management of building in robustness, and a degree of redundancy, to handle unusual situations.
But the pressure for a more systematic approach to identifying risks and their management is more recent. It is a response to more rapid change and greater uncertainty, and the demand for increased productivity through reduced layers of redundancy eg just-in-time processes. Agencies are increasingly developing high level risk assessments linked to their corporate plans, and targeting risk management strategies around their major programs and projects. Typically, these plans identify the importance of such issues as workforce planning, succession management, relationship building and communications, and underline the need for good processes, information and evaluation.
Client and stakeholder participation
There is an increasing expectation that members of the public, clients, and industry members will be consulted in terms of both policy development and service delivery, thus improving their opportunity to influence the services they receive. This is resulting in agencies, not only informing citizens about policy initiatives and programs, but also involving them in helping to develop policy and programs. This is now part of the quality agenda. Agencies and Ministers are using a range of techniques, including focus groups, consultative committees, open inquiries, ad hoc panels and even negotiation processes.
In the last thirty years a suite of administrative law mechanisms-the Ombudsman, freedom of information, judicial review of decisions-have opened up administrative decision-making to public scrutiny. More recently, a greater focus on customer service has led to many agencies serving the public encouraging their customers to lodge complaints directly with them so that they might be dealt with more quickly, and the organisation can learn from, and improve on, its mistakes.
Service Charters, introduced in 1997, have also had a significant impact on service standards in many organisations. Together with the APS Values that require public servants to deliver services 'fairly, effectively, impartially and courteously', they encourage agencies to put in place robust systems for assessing their own performance and receiving feedback from their clients.
A critical issue, however, is that these expectations of responsiveness direct to the public and stakeholders have to be handled consistently with our formal accountabilities to Ministers, the government and the Parliament. Decision-makers must have legal authority and be held accountable.
This has added another major dimension to decision-making-the management of communications.
There has been a shift in emphasis from reactive to proactive communications, and from one-way to two-way communications. By this I mean that the public, stakeholders and Ministers expect communications to work both ways. It is not just a matter of spreading the message; it is also about listening and engaging, and understanding the fears and sensitivities of those affected by the programs we run and the initiatives we are implementing. It is about understanding the different values and perspectives of our stakeholders and partners. We need to be able to advise Ministers of the views of our client groups and stakeholders, and of how best to take them on board as well as how best to explain the government's policy decisions. We also need systematic feedback arrangements.
These days, good decision-making, particularly when it relates to major policy, requires communication strategies to be developed in parallel with the advice. The effectiveness of a program or policy initiative can be enormously influenced by the quality of the communications strategy. We need to develop professional expertise in communications and use it to assist both policy development and program implementation.
Integration
Nation states are no longer self-sufficient-if indeed they ever were. While the state still defines the policies and rules for those within its jurisdiction, global events and international agreements are increasingly affecting its choices. The globalisation of economies places pressure on governments to improve their competitiveness and the relative efficiency of its taxation and regulatory framework.
Globalisation is changing the nature of what governments do and indeed the role of governments in Western nation states. It poses before governments more complex problems while, to quote Yehezkel Dror, reducing their elbow-room.
The need for international approaches to big issues like the environment is being reflected within nations by attempts to coordinate government approaches to intractable problems. Governments are searching for new ways to find solutions to problems that cross governments, cross jurisdictions and cross portfolios. Recent successes include the management of the Olympics and the tremendous cross-government and cross-agency efforts put in this year and last to quell the bush fires in eastern Australia.
The challenge for governments is to develop mechanisms, structures and cultures, that facilitate whole-of-government approaches beyond times of crisis and as part of the way governments work in our accountable, federal democratic system. The challenge for public sector leaders is to meet one of their key Public Service Act responsibilities-to promote cooperation with other agencies (s. 35(b))-and to contribute to these solutions by managing across new types of structures.
Many jurisdictions have been addressing this problem. The Blair catchcry of 'joined-up government' is just one example. The New Zealand government has experimented with 'circuit breaker' teams to address 'wicked problems'. NSW, Victoria and South Australia all have initiatives aimed at better management of whole-of-government priorities. And the Commonwealth has its examples with the Indigenous community projects and the cross-government priorities set out in the Prime Minister's CEDA speech last year.
One of the conclusions I have drawn from all this is the limit to ongoing structural solutions, and the importance of appropriate cultures and skills in problem solving including project management, at all levels.
Leadership
The devolved environment increases the complexity of the leadership task. Leadership is no longer just about telling people what to do, or leading from the front, but is about inspiring and motivating, and leading for commitment, not only to organisational outcomes but to the fundamental values and meaning of public service. The challenge is to develop individuals who can lead for high performance in this new environment.
The new Senior Executive Leadership Capabilities identify five core attributes for successful public sector senior executives: shapes strategic thinking; achieves results; cultivates productive working relations; exemplifies personal drive and integrity; and communicates with influence. When you look at them in more detail you will see that they exemplify many of the behaviours that leaders need to meet the complexity of government in changing times. They relate very explicitly to the managerial topics I have just highlighted: flexibility, results-based management, client and stakeholder management and integration.
While they emphasise capability over knowledge we need to be pragmatic about pathways to leadership, and to draw on experience and skills as well as capabilities.
Human resource management
Performance management is increasingly seen as a tool to improve organisational capability, meet broad organisational objectives and deliver high quality policy advice and program administration. The broad diversity of government agencies requires that each agency tailor its approach to ensure alignment with its culture, credibility in terms of fairness, rigour and transparency, and integration with its organisational objectives.
Many agencies are now focusing on integrating their people management, business strategies and workforce planning to ensure their agency has the knowledge and skills it needs to deliver advice and services.
The demographics of the public sector reflect a general reduction in size (with a modest increase more recently), an ageing workforce, and declining youth employment. Given the wider demographic changes I have already talked about, the public sector will face increasing competition for new entrants and pressures to retain its skilled employees. We will need to be more active and systematic in planning our workforces, identifying our skill and capability needs, and using both recruitment policies and structured learning and development initiatives to ensure these needs are met.
Succession planning will be particularly important, and new leaders will need both the capabilities set out in the Capability Framework, and the technical and management skills needed in the emerging environment, including financial, contract, project and risk management skills, and communications expertise.
Challenges and Dilemmas
Let me turn now to some of the broader policy challenges for public administration.
Values based management
In devolving responsibility from the centre to each government agency it has been necessary to develop an enduring framework for our operations, when constant change and uncertainty requires flexibility and agility, traits not enhanced by prescriptive rules and processes.
There is now a set of principles that guide behaviour. Since the passing of the 1999 Public Service Act, public servants are required to 'at all times behave in a way that upholds the APS Values and the integrity and good reputation of the APS'.
Fundamentally, the Values are about relationships and personal behaviours: our relationships with government, the public, our stakeholders and our work colleagues; and our personal ethical behaviour, which establishes 'the way we work around here'. They reflect our particular institutional framework, are robust enough to govern the behaviour of all public servants, and provide real support as we carry out our policy advising and program management responsibilities.
Key words here are impartial, professional, ethical, accountable, fair, effective, diligence, courteous, honesty, integrity, and compliance with the law. They are not just aspirational statements, but are gradually being embedded into agency systems and procedures through fraud control and risk management procedures, appropriate governance systems, performance management and training.
This is not just an issue for the public sector. Private sector organisations, such as Enron, and, in Australia, One.Tel and the HIH Insurance Group, have come under the spotlight for their lack of values and standards of behaviour, particularly those universal values that demand transparency and open accountability. Issues of governance have been shown to be essential constraints on the operation of free markets.
But community expectations of the public sector are higher and it is right that they should be so. In terms of personal behaviours, we are obliged to have the 'highest ethical standards'. This is a natural consequence of the authority the public, through the Parliament, has vested in us: that authority must be exercised in the most ethical way.
A key challenge for the APS Commission is to limit the gap between rhetoric and reality. We are currently undertaking a project on Evaluating the Values in Agencies to study and promote good practice examples.
There are risks if we do not get this right. One is that the pendulum could swing dramatically back towards central controls with which the Parliament might feel more comfortable notwithstanding the costs.
Leadership
I've already talked about key capabilities for today's public service leaders. As the tasks of governments in a globalised society become more complex, and working across agencies, with the community, or with outsourced providers, I want to reiterate the importance of good leadership in the public sector. Change is ongoing. Leading change is a crucial part of leadership in the public sector. Committed leaders who can establish a shared vision and sense of purpose, and inspire, coach and enable the achievement of their people are increasingly essential.
Leaders must be clear about the values which underpin their organisations; be clear about the behaviours which reflect those values, and build the commitment of their staff to see what must be achieved, how it can be achieved and be empowered to achieve it.
In discussing how to successfully bring about organisational change John Kotter argues in his new book, The Heart of change, that the central challenge is changing people's behaviour-what people do, and the need for significant shifts in what people do. Changing behaviour is less about analysis to influence their thoughts than about helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings. Both thinking and feeling are essential, but he argues, the heart of the change is in the emotions.
People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings. (Kotter & Cohen 2002: 1)
This is a fairly new way of thinking about leadership in the public sector, and I suspect in most organisations, and I am sure we will need to work out how we apply these ideas in our particular environment. But his research is pretty convincing-certainly worthy of further analysis. And we do need to regularly review what sort of leaders the public sector needs and find ways of developing or recruiting them.
As far as leadership in the APS is concerned, leaders need to consistently model the Values and promote this culture across their entire organisation.
Example is not the main thing influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer.
Accountability to Ministers, Parliament and the public
Accountability is one of the foundation values of the Australian Public Service, helping to define our role as an institution in Australia's democratic system. We have seen many improvements in accountability over the last 20 years. The panoply of administrative law reform has opened up our decision-making to far greater scrutiny, and budgetary reforms have also helped Senate Committees in particular to examine how well public moneys are managed.
The traditional hierarchy of accountability shows Parliament accountable to the people, Ministers to Parliament and public servants to Ministers. Ministers and the government-of-the-day determine the public interest in terms of policies and program priorities, and public servants, within the requirements of the legal framework, advise on and implement their decisions. The public service has particular responsibility for the public interest in upholding the law and ensuring due process-impartiality, fairness, openness, etc.
A previous departmental Secretary, Allan Hawke, saw it this way:
Public servants serve the public interest by providing honest, good quality and timely advice to assist Ministers decide on what practical measures they wish to take to advance their conceptions of what's in the wider public interest. Once Ministers have decided, officials must implement their decisions within the law and within the comprehensive structure of checks and balances in our system of parliamentary government. (Hawke 2002)
Increasingly, we are also required to work directly with the public. Not only has administrative law given the public direct access to our decision-making, but other elements of public sector reform require us to work directly with all our stakeholders and to be less anonymous and better communicators than in the past.
This greater transparency involves a degree of accountability direct to the public. Yet, fundamentally, our accountability remains through Ministers to the Parliament.
Ministers too are under more external pressure, generally far more than us. Increasingly they are expected to respond to anything and everything immediately. The capability of the media has vastly improved and will continue to do so. Ministers need the resources now in their Offices to help them manage this pressure and, in turn, they need the public service to be attuned to the pressure and to provide timely and professional assistance. The key is a partnership built on trust, and on an understanding of respective roles and responsibilities.
The challenge is not new, but it is increasing in its intensity.
Business driven approaches and devolution vs. integration
A further challenge is that brought about by whole-of-government initiatives. Over the years, devolution, program budgeting and the more recent outcomes/outputs framework have delivered substantial gains in program effectiveness and efficiency. The increasing challenge of the 21st century is how to hang onto those gains, while making the most of opportunities for cross-program, cross-agency, and cross-jurisdictional collaboration and coordination.
As the Prime Minister, John Howard noted when marking the centenary of the APS:
We live in an increasingly complex and interdependent environment and there is no doubt that, in recent years, issues have more consistently reached across traditional portfolio boundaries. This trend will continue. Whole of government approaches, collectively owned by several Ministers, will increasingly become a common response.
Senior Public Servants and their staff will need to find ways to minimise any limitations associated with what could be described as the 'Silo effect'. A methodology for rapid and effective integration of work units from traditionally unrelated departments will need to be further refined to achieve broader government objectives. (Howard 2001)
The risk is that the very devolution that has helped to improve performance might exacerbate the problems of coordination, just when community expectation of seamless services and whole-of-government coordination is soaring.
The UK has taken a strong top-down approach to its whole-of-government initiatives, identifying its priorities and setting clear performance indicators, what they call Public Service Agreements, and establishing a wider range of options for agency structures within and outside line departments. One approach they have taken to handle the balance between local autonomy and central control, is the concept of 'earned autonomy', where proven performance down the line earns the right to greater flexibility.
There is some resonance of the UK approach in recent developments in Victoria and South Australia, though without the extreme centralism that seems, so far, to permeate the UK.
Some of you will know of the approach the Management Advisory Committee has taken to management of information communication technology, with what it has called a 'federalist' approach involving central setting of standards, and cross-government initiatives via cooperative development, while allowing ICT investment and management to be mostly business-driven through agency arrangements.
The Management Advisory Committee may well wish to pursue this complex issue further, particularly to find appropriate management solutions to the Prime Minister's whole-of-government priorities set out in his CEDA speech last year.
Whatever structures or systems emerge, success will depend crucially on the attitudes and behaviours of public servants, and on local leadership across agency and jurisdictional boundaries.
Short-term vs. long-term
One last challenge I should like to mention briefly concerns ensuring we focus successfully on both short-term political imperatives and long-term agendas.
The pressure of modern communications which I have highlighted has arguably helped us to focus on results and the solving of real-life problems, but has also increased our attention on the short-term. The resources Ministers require to manage the immediate pressures they face are not only in their Offices but also in their Departments, and our ability to provide depth and perspective may be constrained by the need to give quick answers and to take rapid action.
Yet one of the elements of our Leadership Capability Framework is to 'shape strategic thinking'.
The CAPAM Conference I attended last September in Glasgow on 'creating self-confident government' identified some of the characteristics required. These included ensuring democratic values are deeply embedded (essential to ensure the self confidence we want is justified), the wide use of partnerships, and, most interestingly, the capacity to 'weave the future'.
The last term is from Yehezkel Dror. It encompasses such things as more systematic organisational learning, wider appreciation of science and technology (the major driver of big changes), more scenario planning, engagement in future issues with external think tanks, etc, and increased involvement of citizens in public administration.
As we address the capability of the Service, and its ability to respond to the future, this ability to 'weave the future' is critical, and needs to be a central part of our engagement with Ministers.
Conclusions
The climate of change will continue, obviously with a lot of uncertainty about specific directions, but the general trends will include: further rises in community expectations, further commercial and financial discipline, and an increasing focus on finding policy and service delivery solutions through greater government integration across agencies, across jurisdictions and across nations.
But it is essential that we hold onto some 'truths'. One of these is the importance of the Values of public service, particularly those around professionalism, impartiality, open accountability, responsiveness to the elected government, and the highest ethical standards.
The second key truth is to recognise the essence of the role of government-an understanding of public good, the protection of the disadvantaged, and the rule of law to protect rights and provide stability.
The modern public sector environment will continue to give rise to challenges in meeting the high standards of performance and accountability expected of it. As leaders we will continue to face the challenges of responding proactively to government and leading our organisations through the time of change ahead.
References
Brodsky, Joseph 1995, 'Profile of Clio', in On grief and reason, Farrer, Straus Giroux, New York, p. 121.
Crisp, LF 1970, Australian national government, 2nd ed, Longman, Croydon. Victoria.
Dror, Yehezkel, The Capacity to Govern, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 2002
Hawke, Allan 2002, 'Public service-A Secretary's view', The Telstra address to the National Press Club, 19 June 2002.
Howard, John 2001, 'Centenary of the Australian Public Service-oration to the Centenary Conference of the Institute of Public Administration Australia, 19 June 2001', Canberra. (http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/2001/speech1163.htm)
Intergenerational Report 2002-3. Budget paper no. 5, May 2002. AGPS, Canberra.
Kotter, John P & Cohen, Dan S 2002, The heart of change, Harvard Business School Press, Harvard, Mass.
Moises, Naim 2003, 'The Five wars of globalization', Foreign policy, January-February 2003. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/
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