How the Australian Public Service operates in practice

High quality, well motivated and skilled staff are a key component of any successful organisation. The most powerful IT systems will not compensate for poorly-motivated and/or badly prepared staff.

Every member of the organisation must understand the organisation's mission and be prepared and capable of taking the initiative in achieving this. This requires a substantial investment in staff training and education and an integrated HR approach that puts the right people, with the right background into the right jobs.

The staffing of organisations needs to reflect that, at any time, a sizable proportion of the staff will be off-line, undergoing training and education. Training and education need to cover the required knowledge, skills and attitudes and we should accept that a poor performance in training in a critical area should inform future placements.

To achieve this, training/education programmes need to be supported across the APS (for generic skills), the agency and at levels below that.

Once an agency has such high-quality and well-prepared staff members, the organisation's leadership is in a position to delegate effectively and expect staff to effectively use their initiative to achieve good outcomes.

While some of this happens now in some places, it is not common practice. Frequently the least experienced staff are left at the front-line, answering difficult questions (including from the public). Specific job-skill training is 'on-the-job' but frequently with minimal formal support. Frequently, the reasons for doing something in a particular way are not well understood and carried out mechanically without an understanding of context.

A review of training and education in the APS will impact recruiting, staff levels, facilities, agency funding.

Would it be useful to try some Priority focused pilots using different approaches to leadership, structure, collaboration and tools. A trial using some of the digital leadership* & agile approaches might provide valuable insights - particularly if it's treated as an experiment & observed & evaluated for outcomes/impacts, the experiences of using those approaches &/or tools, & the customer experience.

A number of submissions have commented on the need to push decision-making down & closer to the customer, eliminate unnecessary layers, overcome impediments to collaboration, have a more customer focussed approach, improve service provision and platforms etc. Many of these sentiments have been heard before both within the public & private sectors & in the public policy, administration & management literatures.

The DHS submission talks about the national redress initiative they ran using human-centred design & working beyond edges. It would be useful to learn from this experience & feed it into a more whole of government/crossing edges experiment.

Overcoming the impediments to these types of arrangement needs strong committed leadership. Endorsement by & reporting to the secretaries board with a nominated secretary as guide and mentor is a good start. Choosing the right team members, ensuring it is not in addition to their day job, providing resources (and enough time), collaborating with academia & others to understand the environment & 'problem' will all be important. Importantly staff will need training in the techniques but also more broadly so they have content knowledge and share the higher purpose.

• Westerman and Co, Leading Digital eg https://www.thedigitaltransformationpeople.com/channels/the-case-for-digital-transformation/leading-digital-a-summary/

Done well, there would be real value in publicly available analyses & outlooks around key policy challenges and fiscal outlooks.

The Treasury's Intergenerational reports have generated much discussion within governments as well as in the media, academia & around some bbqs. Bringing new issues to the forefront can help to change the conversation & can open 'policy windows' & provide a valuable input to government & other sectors' thinking, directions & activities. Eg one of the earlier IGRs brought the ageing population & potential impacts to public attention & debate (if not alarm & some trolling of baby boomers).

Criticism is inevitable but shouldn't be a deterrent. The IGAs generate heat along with light - with critiques of method, underpinning values & assumptions, & policy responses or non-responses (eg https://www.actuaries.asn.au/Library/Events/FSF/2016/LyonAmidharmoIntergenReport.pdf and https://www.themandarin.com.au/25616-will-intergenerational-reports-really-save-us-future/).

I haven't been able to find an analysis of the impact of IGRs (with 30 seconds of googling) but it may exist. If not it should if only to help understand what works well & what doesn't to enable improvements.

Building on IGR type offerings can help set the agenda, create shared understandings & purpose - as well as provide information & evidence that undermines false or distorted narratives. Perhaps they should be developed at arms length, independently and/or collaboratively to avoid the perception (or reality) of political or other interference.

The products should be multidisciplinary and provided in ways that work for a range of audiences eg https://www.unfpa.org/data

Doing it well will require commitment, resources and courage but could be game changing

I support specifying national priorities and focusing resources (& incentive systems) on them - & collaborating with relevant parts of the whole system eg states/local, academia, interest groups and affected citizens.

In my APS experience, problem solving often starts within agencies (or traditional interagency or intergovernmental forums) with assumptions about what the problem is & it is usually articulated as only their fragment of the whole & expressed as 'we need a regulation/program (run by my agency) that...'. This naturally leads to solutions that are the APS equivalent of 'if you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail' & where collaboration occurs with the usual partners and in the usual way.

We used an approach adapted from program logic & made it the first part of our project planning (& leveraged off the RIS requirements to justify it). It started with what is the societal problem that needs solving, who has it, how do we know, what factors are leading to the problem & what's the evidence. This helped with a broader view of what might work, what policy tools were relevant & who should be invited into the problem solving. It also helped us understand & respond to challenges & assertions from stakeholders, including taking some suggestions on board.

However, although we sometimes wanted other agencies to help join the problem solving as owners of important 'fragments' we were often unsuccessful as it wasn't a priority for them because they were too stretched - leaving us with just a hammer.

We also need to learn from previous attempts, ours & others - eg secretaries remote area service delivery project. High quality RIS approaches (not just economics) should be the start. The APS isn't well skilled here but should be

Large organisations struggle with getting collaborative approaches, including the APS (within and between levels of govt and with stakeholders). As turf protection, wariness of 'outsiders' & conservative approaches to cooperation are based in deeply rooted human instincts, overcoming them to instil a 'collaboration as default' approach requires more than exhortation. I've seen examples where the right leadership, processes, rules, culture and support (modelling, advice, mentoring & training) have turned around APS combative areas into better functioning collaborative ones. We started with a requirement that our executive team and managers start stop their battling, repeatedly expressed the importance of cooperation & that conflict was not acceptable, asked staff what the friction points were and changed some processes and did other things to help. But we only got widespread change when we 1) introduced a genuine, acted on requirement for collaborative behaviour in exec and EL performance agreements - & made collaboration a pre-requisite for getting a satisfactory rating & performance pay 2) treated repeated uncooperative behaviour as performance management issue 3) spent time with external antagonists to try to improve relationships & understand their friction points so we could fix the problems. There were lots of benefits eg internal staff survey results went from poor to the second happiest agency in the APS, we improved some of our approaches & reputation. However it wasn't a silver bullet - some problems remained & when the leadership changed (& exec gender balance) elements of the old combative style started to reemerge. This a useful resource https://hbr.org/2007/11/eight-ways-to-build-collaborative-teams & Prof Lynda Gratton could be a useful contact

I think one of the big challenges, that's already been picked up in some of the posts, is that as public servants our natural tendency is to respond by creating processes rather than focusing on the behaviours or practices that are needed to get the right outcome.

Due process is important to making sure that what we do is fair, equitable and inconsistent but it often results in additional red tape, becomes inflexible and is experienced by people outside the process as impersonal or not genuine. The trick is finding the right balance.

"The people of Australia may not be worried about the structure of the Australian Public Service, but they do care about the services they receive and outcomes for the nation" - APS Review.

In recent years our agency restricted our website content around the topics that the public were concerned about, rather than the organisational structure that produced the content.

Having had to cooperate on a number of multi-agency issues, however, it strikes me that beyond our agency most digital content across the APS that is still divided and presented to the public along the lines of the APS structure (i.e. split across departmental websites).

Perhaps there should be a greater push to consolidate topic content for public presentation. This would be more 'user friendly' for Australians.

-Requre suitable qualified staff, adequately experienced, competent and motivated to serve the public

• Public servants will collaborate and innovate when they aren't burdened with prescriptions and directions as well as business as usual tasks
• By specifiying national priorities, we'll be diverting resources. It'll take time to reorient the public service. It's better for ideas to organically flow.
• Yes, the APS should release whole-of-government analysis. These should not use vague language, but clear, probabilistic language (quantitative) and fallible, discrete predictions
• The APS should link up with global priority setting leaders like the Oxford University Global Priorities Project or the Centre for Effective Altruism to identify long-term issues and solutions

To have a "whole of government" approach, the relationships with all tiers of government need to be considered more carefully in terms of roles and how they work together. Too often it is a "tell" without input being sought from local levels.

There are regional networks in place, but these do not seem to be effective with local decision making powers.