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Public Purpose 2019: a brief review
It’s been a pretty solid year and I wanted to thank the many friends and colleagues I have had an opportunity to connect and work with, drink quite a lot of coffee (and enjoy some good food and wine occasionally) to test and grow a mutual obsession with the value and impact of good public work in these unsettled times…
I am aways grateful for your good counsel, deep expertise and generous sharing of experience and ideas. It’s a big part of what I do and the fun I have doing it:)
It’s been a pretty solid year and I wanted to thank the many friends and colleagues I have had an opportunity to connect and work with, drink quite a lot of coffee (and enjoy some good food and wine occasionally) to test and grow a mutual obsession with the value and impact of good public work in these unsettled times…
I am aways grateful for your good counsel, deep expertise and generous sharing of experience and ideas. It’s a big part of what I do and the fun I have doing it:)
The portfolio of work this year reflects an eclectic mix of work in strategy, leadership and change, in digital transformation, in social impact and in the unviersity sector.
This is a quick look at some of the 2019 projects I’ve been lucky enough to be part of. If there’s anything here that you’d like to talk about or might be of interest for some work we could do together in the new year, let me know.
Strategy, leadership and change
I’ve worked with the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy on business improvement, leadership and board development and strategic planning, helping to design, facilitate and reporting on planning and reporting forums at both agency and senior leadership level. I did some similar work for the Queensland Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women and I’m finishing off a revision of their strategic plan with the NSW Electoral Commission.
Two small but unusual projects – one was a half-day session with the emerging leadership group in the Queensland Department of Housing and Public Works on the notion of “craft” and “stewardship” in public administration (with expert input from Griffith Unviersity’s Anne Tiernan and the CEO of the Public Service Commission Rob Setter).
The other was a stimulating half-day workshop with the board of management in the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries exploring how they confront, as a leadership group, the need for long term “futures” thinking in the context of changing conceptions of the work, purpose and role of the public sector. And only a couple of weeks ago, I wa invited by CEO David de Carvalho to contribute to a forum for the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) exploring similar themes of change and innovation in the public sector.
I worked again on the Business Improvement and Innovation in Government state conference (Biig 2019), helping to theme and curate a two day discussion with over 700 public servants on the changing work of (public) innovation. You can access the audio and video highlights of some wonderful sessions here.
The Mandarin commissioned me to undertake a series of interviews with current and former leaders in the public sector to share ideas and experiences about their leadership and policy journeys in and around the public sector. We’ve published four so far – Peter Shergold, Maryann O’Loughlin, Mike Pratt and Sara Pearson. Early next year I will be interviewing Glyn Davis and Nadine Flood to add to the collection.
And I am closing out the year with a contribution as a board member and advisor to the States of Change program, a global network of innovation practitioners, leaders and teachers working with the government in Europe, the UK, North American, Latin America and now Australia and (soon) Asia to build the practical capabilities of innovation in public work.
Digital transformation
The big event this year was the publication of a book, Are We There Yet: The Digital Transformation of Government and the Public Sector in Australia, co-authored with Deloitte Digital’s Simon Cooper. The book sets out an argument, grounded primarily but not exclusively in the Australian experience, that digital transformation is a story missing half the plot. The project needs to push further and deeper into questions of purpose, role and impact for government and the public sector. Digital transformation should be a catalyst for a new “theory of the business” whose rising and urgent ambitions can be tested against a combination of trust, empathy and competence.
You can buy the book here. We were grateful for the generous support and encouragement of many leaders and practitioners across government in Australia and around the world who contributed their ideas and expertise. We were grateful too to Peter Shergold, Terry Moran, Sarah Pearson and Martin Hoffman who launched the book in various locations and lent our work their considerable individual and collective expertise and wisdom.
I’ve been working with Deloitte on a project to lift digital skills and capabilities across the NSW public sector, a project coordinated by Emma Hogan, now Secretary of the Department of Customer Service and now Acting Commissioner Scott Johnston at the NSW Public Service Commission.
And just so I don’t end up just writing and talking about it all, I’ve had a chance to contribute to a coupe of projects that are working at the innovative edge of digital capabilities in Australia. One is the introduction to Australia of Opengov(www.opengov) a platform to improve budgeting and financial reporting, project and performance management and citizen and community engagement. The other is a start up, The Experience Exchange (TEX), about to launch as a powerful new model of lifting digital skills and know how by connecting people who want to access, and those who can share, expertise and experience in digital skills and capability in the public, private and non-profit sectors.
In a slight (but important) twist on the digital theme, I will be working in 2020 with the Behavioural Insights Team to spread and scale their well researched and rigorously tested work, supported by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, to find effective ways to help young people find more ethical and safer ways to engage with social media.
BIT has made a powerful contribution to a rising challenge impacting some pretty deep issues about the way all of us, but especially young people, engage the digital world with confidence and a real sense of agency. Putting together a combination of potential investors and supporters to take this wokr to sustainable scale is now the task.
Social impact and social innovation
The work of The Impact Assembly at PwC is carving out some important territory in new ways to convene complex and unusual networks of expertise and experience to tackle difficult social challenges. I’ve been part of the team for the past couple of years and will work with them again in 2020, primarily focused on a project around education and learning reform, specifically with a focus on new ways to chart better “pathways” for young people from school to a lifetime of work and learning. The work is part of a new movement, Learning Creates Australia, for a 21st century learning system from Australia, led by Jan Owen and Tony Mackay.
And as we go to press, I’ve been working with Carolyn Curtis at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (www.tacsi.org) and many others, including Geoff Mulgan, Glyn Davis, Rod Glover, Tom Bentley and Kristy Muir to develop the concept of a more effective and systematic research and development system for social innovation in Australia.
The idea of a “social R&D” system is (we hope!) gathering some steam and we’ve put a submission to the NSW Government, as part of its initiatives to lift its R&D leadership role and performance, to find an equal place in an R&D system for the state for social challenges along with critical, but ore traditional areas like agribusiness, finance, technology and manufacturing.
Universities
I’ve had the good fortune for the last couple of years to work with Vice Chancellor Barney Glover and his senior leadership team at Western Sydney University on a number of leadership conferences and workshops. That work has been part of similar contributions with other universities in recent years (University of Queensland, Curtin) which was prompted in part by my earlier work with Cisco and as a board member for the Business/Higher Education Round Table.
And over the past 18 months, I’ve worked with a number of universities, and some businesses too, to develop a campaign to reinforce the value for a shared Australians prosperity of effective collaboration between business and universities. We’re hopeful that the campaign will start to engage into the new year.
I’ve had the good fortune for the last couple of years to work with Vice Chancellor Barney Glover and his senior leadership team at Western Sydney University on a number of leadership conferences and workshops. That work has been part of similar contributions with other universities in recent years (University of Queensland, Curtin) which was prompted in part by my earlier work with Cisco and as a board member for the Business/Higher Education Round Table.
And over the past 18 months, I’ve worked with a number of universities, and some businesses too, to develop a campaign to reinforce the value for a shared Australians prosperity of effective collaboration between business and universities. We’re hopeful that the campaign will start to engage into the new year.
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