If we know a great deal about something, we close our minds to alternative pathways, we share our knowledge with people who support our opinion and this, in turn, creates confirmation bias, and our creativity is constricted because we think we know what’s possible and dismiss anything that sounds unrealistic. Lyn Carson shoes how to mitigate these realities of being in governance and oversight positions.

Victorian Public Sector Commissioner Paul Grimes and Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Kristen Hilton share five ideas that can help public sector leaders tackle sexual harassment in their organisations and steer a course towards safer, more inclusive workplaces.

The leadership of Australia’s public services is really white. At last count in 2018, government departments across the country had a higher proportion of chief executives from an Anglo-Celtic background than the ASX200, the university sector, or even the federal government ministry. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Leading for change report found 84.5% of secretaries […]

I hope this collection of essays can provide some practical ideas, strategies, lessons and discussion starters for public servants across Australia and the world, and I look forward to continuing to learn, contribute to and support the public sector reforms and evolutions that are so urgently needed to support the communities we all serve.

After a long period of consultation around upcoming federal data-sharing and release reforms, questions about consent and commercial use remain the most controversial. While a lot of researchers and policy-makers are keen to unlock latent value in the data held by the Australian Public Service, the need to maintain social license looms large.

Attempts to support more effective coordination across government departments is not a new concept, and stories of failed attempts or at least only partial success tend to dominate. One of the key reasons for this appears to be the fact that government bureaucracies lack the “supporting architecture” needed to support joined-up-working. Thea Snow examines the success stories and sincere attempts of cross-government collaboration around the world.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them — Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676 The burden of unbounded knowledge weighs heavily on those with open minds. Those trapped within a specific moral code express righteous indignation that their beliefs should be […]

Miriam Vogel developed and led implicit bias training for federal law enforcement while at the United States Department of Justice. Tackling defensiveness is an important part of successful implicit bias training, she says. It’s really helpful to start by defusing that defensiveness and making it clear that this is a human condition, it doesn’t make you an evil person, it makes us human.

Data from the Australian Public Sector Database shows a steady long-term decline in the number and proportion of people with disability in the Commonwealth public sector. One APS narrative is that the problem is not as big as it seems — non-disclosure of disability is more of a problem than a lack of representation. It becomes too easy to use such statements as a means of shifting responsibility for failures in public sector disability employment policy, writes Paul Williamson.

Terry Moran AC, chair of the Centre for Policy Development and former secretary of the PM&C presents a review of how Commonwealth, state and local governments could work together more effectively, at the 2019 John Cain Lecture.

The business model on which Australia’s rural landscapes have been settled is unravelling before our eyes. Australian agricultural industries will not be restored by a couple of rainy seasons or construction of new dams, and support is building for promulgation of a national drought strategy.

Obama's ambassador to the UN on how she avoided bureaucratic isolation while tackling ISIS, why presidents prefer golf, and finding 'one's slice of change that one can make'.

When designing a new service, there can be a lot of pressure to nail down a project plan and get on with it. But spending more time consulting, throwing around ideas and testing them before charging ahead can really pay off.

Even if you've completed your course in agile and lined up the authorising environment in favour of change, workplace habits and the relentless daily pressure of government can easily stifle innovation. 

Treating the public service like a business has become the norm, with the structures, language, practices and incentives inherited from private sector managerialism. We know that citizens don’t expect public sectors to act the same way — which is evident in the feedback, discussions, user research and myriad public engagements — yet when we adopt the mindset of a business we create pressure to act more like a business in everything we do.