5 time-tested lessons for public servants

Currently an early PhD candidate at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Monica Pfeffer spent 27 years in the Victorian Government, followed by 12 years at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government building bridges between public servants, new research and new ideas coming from universities, public intellectuals and civil society. As a public servant she worked on, inter alia, income security and State concessions, women’s policy and family violence, social justice, ageing, disability, health reform, health inequalities, diversity, poverty and social (in)exclusion, Indigenous Affairs and youth justice. She has lived through several different political regimes and what felt like innumerable machinery of government changes. The latter is the subject of her PhD as she remains puzzled to this day as to why and by whom decisions to rearrange the departmental landscape are so frequently made.

• The problem: Continuity and stability to balance agility and innovation; institutional memory; a learning culture; respect for the place of elected officials in our democracy. It is easy to forget how important and enduring these values are when you’re living in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, or possibly that ‘a’ actually stands for ‘absurd’).

• Why it matters: The aspiration to make the world a better place is not advanced when we jump on every passing bandwagon, reinvent every wheel, and lack respect for what’s gone before, not to mention for the democratic system in which we work.

• The solution: Keep an open, critical and generous mind, one which is always willing to respect, learn and share.

Reflecting on the truths about achieving meaningful change that remain eternal through my very long career in and around government, it is easy to identify how different the public service I joined in 1982 is from the world Apolitical’s readers are experiencing. Imagine, if you can, a workplace without computing, the internet, the mobile phone or social media and picture instead a typing pool, faxes and telexes, tea ladies (sic), electric typewriters, carbon paper between various coloured sheets for different filing purposes, base entry by competitive examination and a rigid hierarchy with promotion by seniority. The senior ranks were filled by white males of a certain age who sincerely believed they had a monopoly on merit, women only recently having been permitted to enter the service on equal terms, including access to superannuation once married. The gender issues like women’s health, sexual assault and family violence on which I first worked were viewed as boutique at best, irrelevant (and definitely career-limiting) at worst, as was any consideration of how government should respond to the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and sexual diversity of its citizenry.

And yet, some things never change. So here are five lessons for reform-minded public servants, distilling the hard-won wisdom of a career spent trying to make the world a better place, which after all is why we joined the public service in the first place.

Pick the framing that works for the problem you’ve got, not the newest and shiniest.

Lesson 1: Don’t aim for utopia in one hit! Small, useful steps have a better chance of success

Why is this so? Research shows the vast majority of big picture reform efforts fail, in the first instance because reform ultimately involves people and those people (ministers and bureaucrats alike) have a tendency to lose office, lose interest, change jobs or all of the above. Or “stuff happens”–as we have now all experienced, this could be economic shocks, crises and downturns, pandemics or natural disasters. Driven by the accelerating pace of the political and media cycle, the next big idea frequently comes along before the last one has had any chance to work. Sometimes it’s our fault in the reform design: we’ve conflated so many agendas it’s impossible to disentangle what initiatives lead to what outcomes, so nobody knows what “success” means.

Lesson 2: Never think we’re better than the democracy we serve

As officials our role is to give well-evidenced, workable and savvy advice, and it’s heartening to see the idea of ‘stewardship’, being cognisant of the future as well as the present, restored to its rightful place in the responsibilities of the public service. But in the end, whatever you might think of the calibre and integrity of the particular individual you’re currently serving, ministers are the democratically elected decision-makers. As a consequence and regardless of any imbalance in expertise, they, not us, are responsible and accountable for big-picture strategic thinking.

This is not to say you shouldn’t be ready to assist when the need for a big idea is the problem you’re helping a minister to solve. The smart policy analyst always has a bottom drawer full of well thought out proposals, ready to seize the moment when the planets are suddenly and miraculously in alignment.

Lesson 3: Beware the fashionable solution in search of a problem

Selecting just a few of the greatest hits of my career, I’ve lived through social justice, purchaser/provider, contestability, competition and market testing, output funding, partnership, community capacity building and localism, joined up government, market design, choice and voice, human and social capital, networked governance, client-centred service delivery, Gov2.0, evidence-based policy, commissioning and so many more. Recognising that I’m probably a few steps behind the fashions, you’re all in the era of lived experience, co-design and co-production, behavioural insights, design and system thinking, crowdsourcing, public purpose sector, deliberative democracy, intersectionality, wrap around services, agility, digitalisation, gamification, data analytics and big data, plus the zombie existence of everything in government that’s gone before.

Many of these ideas are wonderful but it’s all about appropriateness, which is why “horses for courses” continues to be a good rule. Pick the framing that works for the problem you’ve got, not the newest and shiniest. Sadly, there are way too many bandwagons and intellectual fashions in government. Resist them! Be careful not to lose the story (narrative) you’re telling in a sea of current jargon. It has to be about worthwhile change for actual people in the real world.

Lesson 4: You’re not the first person to work in any space

As the late great Peter Cook said, I have learned from my mistakes and I am sure I can repeat them exactly. Virtually every policy issue you’ll encounter has a history, sometimes a lengthy one. You need to work out what’s gone before, learn its lessons, and try not to reinvent the wheel, or at least know and acknowledge you’re doing it.

Lesson 5: Stay nice (your mother was right!)

Incontestably, policy reform involves history, evidence and increasingly, data analytics. But it’s also an intensely human activity, involving relationships and networks, both inside and outside government. Simple human virtues make a huge difference: saying “thank you” directly rather than by text, generosity, willingness to share (because information is the currency of government), acknowledgement of others’ work and expertise. It can’t be emphasised enough that reform is invariably a collective activity, built on reciprocity: you need other people, across government, service delivery organisations and academia. Reciprocity is the key.

Summary

If I were only permitted one lesson, it would be: ‘It’s not about you’. Whether it’s writing briefs for senior decision-makers, either officials or ministers, working with citizens or stakeholder groups, empathic relationships are the key.

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