Reform of Australian Government Administration
Beyond the horizon
A better public service requires well-trained leaders with the time to work on long-term strategy, writes Glyn Davis.
AUSTRALIAN public servants are so overwhelmed by day-to-day demands they do not have sufficient time to think about the most important policy problems facing the government.
That is to say, the public service needs to spend more time working on strategy.
This is the view of the Advisory Group on Reform of the Australian Public Service.
Our report, Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for Reform of the Australian Government Administration, was released last week. It calls for comprehensive, long-term change to the public service, with improved strategic policy and leadership as a key theme.
More time for the important over the immediate is the view of many public servants.
In a recent survey drawn on in the blueprint, almost half of all employees and three in every four senior executives said one of the most important ways they could become more effective would be to spend more time on strategic planning – for example, on improving the delivery of programs and services.
Importantly, improving strategic thinking needs a change in the public service mindset.
This is a difficult challenge and it must begin at the top with public service leaders.
But why is strategic thinking not a priority already? Perhaps because the balance between responsive policymaking and creative policymaking is skewed in favour of being responsive – reacting to the urgent. The desire to help to tackle the pressing is laudable.
Yet to be effective over the long term, the public service must balance responding to immediate problems with sustained strategic thinking.
The 24–hour news cycle and instantaneous communications contribute to this imbalance.
But public service leaders must shoulder some responsibility.
Public service leaders have a stewardship role – a duty to maintain the capability of the public service.
This includes ensuring the public service builds its ability to give the highest quality advice to ministers on the most important and complex policy issues.
Strengthening capability is challenging. And adding an element of confusion is the rather too free bandying about of the word "strategy". In a recent speech, advisory group chairman Terry Moran cited Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School, who argues that managers often confuse the concept of strategy with the concept of operational effectiveness.
Operational effectiveness describes the search for efficiency. It is important but it is not strategy. Again, Porter suggests, strategy requires having a vision over a horizon of a decade or more, not a single planning cycle.
For the public service, strategic thinking means thinking how the public service will do its job beyond the next electoral cycle.
Whichever party forms government, it will need clear-sighted advice on improving education, tackling climate change, providing services for an ageing population and responding to the rise of a multi-polar world.
Strategy means improving the links across various services and programs for individual citizens.
Good strategic policy will drive a debate within government about complex problems, drawing on robust analysis of data to identify new and creative ways to tackle such challenges.
It means tackling wicked problems – issues that can never be solved but must be dealt with nonetheless.
Fortunately there are many examples of how public servants in Australia and beyond provide strategic advice on pressing issues.
The work of officials in tackling climate change, or promoting the Group of 20 nations as the main vehicle for responding to the global financial crisis, may be invisible to the wider public, but it matters.
We need to encourage such strategic responses through cultural change and a well-trained leadership with time and resources to do the task.
The Ahead of the Game blueprint expects public service leaders to drive cultural change.
We recommend reinvigoration of strategic leadership through a new Secretaries Board to bring together the most senior public servants.
The Secretaries Board provides an opportunity to discuss and engage with policy problems and build the capability of the public service. It would be supported by a new leadership forum, the APS 200, comprising senior public servants and agency heads.
The APS 200 would provide the leadership to pursue projects and champion issues identified by the board.
We also recommend specific reforms such as changes to workforce planning and learning and development to ensure the public service identifies, recruits and develops the right skills, including for strategic policy.
As a matter of routine, the public service needs to embrace collaboration across the public service and the broader community. We recommend a formal Strategic Policy Network to share best practices and foster collaboration and innovation on strategic policy issues.
And public servants should be given more opportunities to join networks involving business, the academy and community groups. Cross-agency policy design would be strengthened through the use of cross–agency project teams that would work across departments on specific, complex projects.
But the responsibility to drive change still remains firmly with public service leaders.
They must fulfil their stewardship of the service and the policy outcomes it must deliver.
To this end, the Public Service Act would be amended to recognise the roles and responsibilities of departmental secretaries and the public service commissioner, and ensure there are clear expectations about performance, with evaluation to measure results.
Australians want a public service that delivers the high–quality strategic policy thinking required for a world in which economic, environmental and social forces beyond our borders drive much of our national life.
It takes skill and strategy to make a difference.
The Ahead of the Game blueprint identifies ways to push the public service to be not just good at strategic thinking, but among the best.
Glyn Davis is vice-chancellor and president of the University of Melbourne, and was a member of the advisory group that prepared Ahead of the Game.
Author: Glyn Davis
Publication: The Melbourne Age (Tue 06 Apr 2010)