Reimagining Government is a podcast where we shine a light on government changemakers around the world, who are pushing beyond the current debate about what government does, in order to address the more fundamental questions of how government should operate.
Each month these changemakers will share their ideas on how to reimagine a new government equipped to face modern challenges and find real solutions.
Listen to the episode here.
Episode 5 - National government 2.0
What does it look like for national governments to adapt to the modern challenges we face today, and how can leaders share power with those best placed to act? In this episode, we explore what it takes to rethink government at a national level, and speak to the changemakers who are spearheading efforts around the world.
Part 1
Adrian Brown: [00:00:00] When most people think of government, they tend to think about it at a national level. The elected leaders at the helm of their country and the national policies they campaign on. But government is also the social worker acting in the interest of a vulnerable child.
SFX: I think the biggest challenge that social workers face in completing their daily tasks is just the sheer amount of work they've got to do.
Adrian Brown: The small town mayor, navigating budget cuts;
SFX: Do we just start to cut services like other councils around us are doing, or do we start to try to change the way we work with residents?
Adrian Brown: and the civil servant tasked with shepherding through new climate protocols.
SFX: Ultimately, we have most of the solutions to reduce carbon emissions. We need to find ways to disseminate them, to policymakers and to governments across the world.
Adrian Brown: So far in this podcast, we've introduced you to several of these government changemakers. [00:01:00] Those leading a new era where government thinks systemically, but acts locally and champions the voices of those who are heard the least.
Many examples of this radical new approach can be found at the local level. Local leaders are much closer to the people they serve, enabling a deeper understanding of the challenges faced and possible solutions. But we're also starting to see some of this thinking bubble up to the national level.
So what could it mean for national leaders to share power with those best placed to act? What if they let go of their need to control outcomes and instead optimise for learning and adaptation at every level? It's not as counterintuitive as it may seem.
Reimagining Government is a podcast where we shine a light on changemakers sharing their ideas on how to reimagine a new government equipped to face modern challenges and find real solutions. In this episode, we will explore what it looks like at [00:02:00] a national level with host Thea Snow.
Thea Snow: So many of the concepts that are central to our approach at CPI; complexity, relationships and learning are also core concepts to First Nations people's way of knowing, being, and doing. It is important to acknowledge that and pay our respects to all First Nations peoples across the world, as well as those whose lands I am lucky enough to live on.
My name is Thea Snow and I head the Centre for Public Impact’s work in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. My experience spans the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. I worked as a public servant for almost a decade, and as part of NESTA's government innovation team, an organisation dedicated to strengthening innovation capacity across governments.
Let me introduce you to some of the changemakers around the world who are working at the level of national government to [00:03:00] reimagine what government needs to do and be in order to create the conditions in which everyone can live their best lives.
"It is not the strongest of species that survives nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." This is a quote from Charles Darwin, a man who knew a thing or two about life's complexities and how we must adapt to overcome them. Generally speaking, how current national government structures and systems were designed at a time when many of the issue that we are facing today didn't exist. How do we expect to tackle today's issues with systems and structures that were designed for a world that looked very different? If national government is to remain relevant and effective, it must be willing to evolve, adapt.
Misha Kaur: It's really interesting to ponder on, on what [00:04:00] national governments are doing wrong or what the models of national governments are are doing wrong.
Thea Snow: Misha Kaur is an innovation specialist at the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation at the OECD. The observatory tracks public sector innovation efforts around the globe to provide a global forum and knowledge hub for shared learning. Misha previously held an assistant commissioner of design position at the Australian Tax Office, where she oversaw a shift to the purpose, vision, and role of the ATO’s design capability.
She's passionate about rethinking the way that governments can work and spearheaded a systems thinking approach to help government understand and respond to the complex challenges we face.
Misha Kaur: The model and the history of governments, they've played a really important role in bettering many outcomes, and so that model has served a purpose in the past.
This isn't how things are today. Governments [00:05:00] recognise that the world is changing, and they recognise that systems are not built as adaptively or with agility. Governments are challenged in how to really make those changes because major transformation is tough because the system is ingrained with legislation, with regulatory frameworks, it's not that easy to adapt a government system that was built a long time ago.
But one of the challenges, I think, is often they did not pivot from traditional operating models. Basically, they had to work against the system in many occasions, not with the system.
Thea Snow: Misha cites one example where she worked with the Australian Capital Territories state government, or ACT, which encompasses the country's capital Canberra. She outlined some of the benefits from taking a systems approach when tackling family violence issues in the state.
Misha Kaur: Having had the privilege of working with the ACT state government in Australia on family violence issues, we took a [00:06:00] systems approach in, in developing a collaboration hub. And we ended up creating this space where we brought different people together to start thinking about how family safety showed up as a system.
Everything from community perception, social norms, uh, how we interact with people with lived experience. Where incidents of family violence can occur, the impacts and all the different types of issues that we needed to, to deal with. It can help governments identify those types of levers within the system that could be used to help change systems.
Sometimes we only consider a new structure, a new rule, a new policy where we may need to adjust things like the paradigms, the social norms, the information flows, even the goal of the system. For example, you can put in a new policy around, you know, driverless cars, clean energy, electric cars, et cetera.
But if you don't change the mental models of people, the way they think about [00:07:00] this and connect this, you won't get the outcomes that you're looking for.
Thea Snow: Given the complexity of the challenges that national governments face, Misha explains why taking a systems approach is vital. Misha Kaur: It's a way of being able for governments to take an active role in convening and coordinating actors, resources, information around big, complex, cross-sectoral, often cross-national issues that cannot be solved by individuals alone.
Thea Snow: While the focus of this conversation is on national government, the role of local and regional government should not be overlooked when it comes to systems change. They are closer to the public, to communities and may have the knowledge of and access to actors that national government are not aware of.
Misha Kaur: They can help national governments, they can help in actually understanding what is important to to citizens, to voters. How to promote uptake. The adoption of policies. Regional and local governments also have certain actual responsibilities that [00:08:00] are mixed in and are core to changing systems. For example, in education, in health and urban planning and cities, waste management, if they're delivering on these services, the value in the knowledge they bring into how to actually create the right policies, how to create decisions, because they have a on the ground knowledge of what's going on.
National governments, I think, need to still consider how they utilise and build ecosystems that include local governments into the decision making. We can't have national strategies that are different or misaligned to local strategies. So how do they work together in terms of creating these visions for the future?
Thea Snow: Experimentation and learning are sometimes considered costly, both in time and resources, but Misha suggests they are worthwhile, proactive ways for possible solutions and policies to be tested before being rolled out nationally.
Misha Kaur: Potentially also ensure that through experimentation, it builds credibility. It builds the right process to allow [00:09:00] uptake from citizens.
It can be set up in a way that can provide evidence to policymakers and decision-makers. To help them have confidence in the decisions that they make. And this is a really important one because evidence-based policymaking is obviously a key topic in today's discourse around policymaking. We see experimentation happen almost outside the policymaking process.
It's almost like when we consult with stakeholders, but it's done right at the end in a way that actually then doesn't allow for things to be iterated. We need to rethink these types of practices. Multidimensional approaches to governance and policymaking that include stakeholders and citizens involving them in the testing so they understand they're part of the process in which policies succeed or fail because they're the ones that are going to be benefiting or being part of the policies.
And it can help to build the trust as well. It can help to build support around decisions that are made because they were part of those decisions.
Thea Snow: Learning is vital for any government, but Misha thinks we also need to make [00:10:00] space to unlearn.
Misha Kaur: What are mental models we've had that we might need to unlearn because they're not useful anymore? What do we need to challenge about our own social norms and the ways and practices we're working
Thea Snow: To enable experimentation, Misha argues that we also need to reimagine funding models and introduce feedback loops that better support learning across government and beyond.
Misha Kaur: Funding models are often not built for iteration, for learning. They're often built for long-term commitments. How do we also think about different types of funding? How do we include stakeholders? How do we think about co-funded sources of experimentation? How do we think about grassroot experiments to occur? Sometimes that competition really helps to figure out what works best.
Another part is around the feedback loops. Often we do experiments. Often things happen, and yet there is no feedback.
Both in the way of a feedback loop around those learnings from those specific experimentations back into the [00:11:00] decision-making process, but as well as cross-learning. So learning in, in, in different ways, learning across the systems, learning from an intra-organisational perspective.
In terms of a final principle or a takeaway I have around, you know, reimagining governments in this world of complexity, it’s this balance between idealism and pragmatism in all forms. Have big goals, yes, inspire with a vision, be ambitious, but also be pragmatic because systems are not perfect. They don't work like a model.
They're filled with humans, with biases, with mental models, with imperfections. A level of pragmatism is required for us to actually enact change
Thea Snow: As Misha states, national government must be pragmatic in its approach. There will be problems and there is no one size fits all solution. But embracing complexity and making space for experimentation allows government to adapt [00:12:00] and better serve all.
Thea Snow: Over in Scotland, we can see an example of national government putting power and funding back into the areas that need it most. Healthcare Improvement Scotland, or HIS, is the national healthcare improvement organisation of Scotland, and they do pretty much what it says on the tin.
Ruth Glassborow: I'm Ruth Glassborow, director of Improvement at Healthcare Improvement Scotland. Healthcare Improvement Scotland is a national organisation working across health and care services in Scotland, whose mission [00:13:00] is to enable the best possible quality of care for people in Scotland.
Thea Snow: They do this by enabling people to make informed decisions about their care and helping health and social care organisations redesign fractured services.
Ruth Glassborow: So we use a range of approaches to support both health and social care services to improve in Scotland. We are the national evidence organisation for the health system. We have a role around community engagement and public engagement in service change. We do work there to make sure that people who use and need services are absolutely embedded in the work around making service change.
Ruth Glassborow: And then we have the work that sits under the ihub directorate that is about providing practical support across health and care services to support them to both design interventions that will deliver improvements and to implement those changes.
Thea Snow: Healthcare Improvement Scotland's Improvement Hub or ihub is dedicated to supporting those delivering health and social care across Scotland to redesign [00:14:00] and continuously improve services to ensure they meet the changing needs of people.
Ruth Glassborow: The ihub is a directorate within Healthcare Improvement Scotland, and our focus is very much on supporting health and social care services to use evidence-informed approaches to change. So we do that by having a focus on evidence informed approaches to designing changes and then also supporting the system to implement that change.
Part of our ethos, our underpinning ethos here is how do we really help systems to both redesign so that we deliver what people need when they need it in the right way for them, but also to leave the services with the ability to keep doing the work of continuous improvement.
Thea Snow: As part of its initial response to COVID-19, [00:15:00] the ihub created a national learning system to enable rapid learning across health and social care services in Scotland. This involved bringing together health and social care practitioners to share insights, learning, and best practice around pandemic response initiatives.
Diana Hekerem: Because we've been working with different people in the communities for a while now supporting different kind of improvement and transformation and redesign change, we reached out to people that we had connections with, and said tell us what you're doing. Tell us what you're learning. Tell us what you're finding out. What's working for you and do you know anybody else who's doing good stuff? [00:16:00]
And so we built those relationships, captured those stories, captured the insights, captured what people were noticing was working.
Thea Snow: Diana Hekerem is the Head of Transformational Redesign Support at ihub.
Diana Hekerem: Where there was real success, where there was real trusted relationships between communities and, and the health and social care partnerships that predated COVID, the community was able to innovate so much quicker to be able to respond and adapt so much quicker because the trust was there so the processes didn't get in the way of being able to do that really quick and effective adaptation and delivery. The Highland Hospice up in the north of Scotland and the home care team, you know, developed a shared space around person-centred volunteering for people at end of life to make sure that that palliative care, which was obviously so important during the pandemic was done. But their shared language and their shared understanding of the quality of care enabled them to develop that partnership quite quickly. [00:17:00]
What we saw in that learning and together in that partnership with the communities was a much more sense of these people are vulnerable people and they need help, and that's our shared responsibility and how do we come together to deliver that?
Thea Snow: ihub is a means to learn. So what are some of the things that ihub has learned and how might it be applied by governments working at a national scale?
Ruth Glassborow: Learning is really central to our work because we are trying to help services to bring about change in a context where there is a lot of complexity, a lot of uncertainty, and the pace of change in the world we live in seems to be ever increasing. [00:18:00] So I, I think for me, probably the best example of why it matters is actually COVID itself.
SFX: Cabinet met this morning to assess the up-to-date COVID situation, which I must say at the outset is extremely serious.
Ruth Glassborow: There was no textbook or guidance to tell us what we needed to do as a healthcare system, what we needed to do in education, what we needed to do as a society. And we had to learn both individual city, country, worldwide levels about how to respond and adapt to this new virus. And we saw multiple examples of systems and nations experimenting, observing the impact even around issues such as lockdown.
SFX: We have decided to introduce a legal requirement to stay at home except for essential purposes.
Ruth Glassborow: and then adapting what they were doing in response to that learning and I use that as an analogy because that's our experience for all of the work that we do across health and social care. It's a complex system and we can make a change in one bit of it, and there can be all sorts of unintended consequences in another bit of it. So unless we have learning at the heart of [00:19:00] what we do, we will end up actually making everything worse. But if we have that focus on constantly assessing what's the impact? What are we learning? What do we need to adapt, then it's that focus that enables us to deliver genuine improvement for the people who need and use services across Scotland.
Thea Snow: ihub shows us that learning and collaboration are key principles when reimagining a better functioning health and social care system for all.
It also shows us that national government needs to act locally, relying on already established relationships. And local knowledge within communities to make long lasting systemic change. [00:20:00]
Ruth Glassborow: We learn an enormous amount from what other people do, and we're certainly not the experts here. It's not about other countries learning from us. It's about how we learn together, and I suppose if there is something that other countries could learn, it would be that a lot of what we do in Scotland is based on that constantly looking to other countries and looking internally to see who is doing something well. And then how might we adapt that into our context, because we don't just take something from somewhere else and just drop it in.
We're so aware that context really, really matters. That importance of constantly scanning to see who is on the front edge of practice, who is doing something, but then that curiosity to understand what is it that's behind their success, and how can we adapt that into our context.
Thea Snow: But as they say themselves, the work at Healthcare Improvement Scotland is not a magic formula [00:21:00] that can fix health and social care on a global stage.
It is a solution that relies heavily on the intimate knowledge of Scotland's public sector. Experimentation and collaboration must be an independent effort as well as a collaborative one for a national government to find the right solutions for their people. And with that, let's leave Scotland behind and travel to another nation who are no stranger to implementing innovative solutions in the public sector.
Thea Snow: Welcome to Finland. We're here to speak to Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who you may remember from the first episode of the series. We spoke to Olli-Pekka about Finland's approach to building humble government, a form of government that encourages humility, diversity of thought and experimentation in order to tackle modern challenges. Finland put this form of government to test in the education sector when the Finnish National Agency for Education introduced the Innovation Centre, an [00:22:00] experimentation and innovation unit that operated from 2017 to 2020.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen: The National Agency for Education and its Innovation Centre is an innovation on itself. That was the tool where we started to experiment what a different approach could be.
Thea Snow: One of the approaches at trial was to set up experimentation labs. Creating spaces for those working across the education system to experiment and co-create solutions to challenges.
But how did these work in practice? I asked Olli-Pekka to find out more. [00:23:00]
Olli-Pekka Heinonen: We brought together some very talented persons with different talent bases to engage themselves with teachers, schools, municipalities, and building that confidence to see that what are the challenges on the local level?
Once the confidence was built, they were there to actually facilitate the process, to solve the problems that people on the local level identified. And that quite often actually meant bringing together not only education professionals, but also social health authorities, kind of local other organisations, parents. And the funny thing was that quite often actually, it was a situation that those people met for the first time together [00:24:00], although they were kind of all in a way, owners of the same problem. So that was what we did as a four year trial to see that could something new be created out of that.
Thea Snow: Part of what made the agency's approach revolutionary was how it sought to redefine the very role of national government rather than taking a top down approach it sought to listen to and work collaboratively with teachers and schools on a local level.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen: We are not trying to kind of tell from the national level that what needs to be done on the local level and then ask schools to be compliant. And actually it was interesting that the first time that the people from the Innovation Centre started calling schools, the answer they got was a very frightened voice that, what have we done wrong? Why are they calling us? [00:25:00] And that kind of told that what the traditional way of working had been earlier. And now it was kind of the question was that how can we help? Do you have something, would need an extra pair of hands? And, and kind of thinking to, to help you solve the challenges that you have.
Thea Snow: While the Innovation Centre has ceased to operate in its current form, the Finnish National Agency for Education continues to encourage experimentation with the support of its innovation and development function.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen: The major key learnings of this project have been that it is an approach that is able to create something that is sustainable. [00:26:00] It's not only solving the challenges on hand at a certain period of time, but it actually creates a learning culture, a learning loop in that educational system where the actors, when they start to know each other, there's the trend of them to start to support each. Once you know what's the things that are missing on the local level, you start understanding that that's something that you need to support. And also on the local level, you start to understand that what's the rationale of the national policymaking? Why is there these kind of values that need to be taken into consideration?
Olli-Pekka Heinonen: And then this interaction starts to function permanently. And, and, and that's a huge thing actually. So in that sense, I think we've been able to solve a lot of kind of local challenges that there have been. [00:27:00] But most importantly, we have been able to create a learning culture inside the education sector.
Thea Snow: Through this approach, the agency demonstrates the power of thinking systemically within national government, whilst encouraging local ownership and putting power into the hands of those best positioned to use it. A national government should be used as the helping hand of its people rather than the iron fist of control.
But how do we ensure a national government works for all, not just the few? We will be touching on that after this short ad break.
To continue to Part 2 of this episode's transcript, please click here.
Don't miss a single episode
Join Apolitical's global community of 150,000+ public servants and policymakers and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes launch.
What will I get?
- Fresh public service insights through our Weekly Briefing and Articles
- Free professional development through live Events and Courses
- Connections with public servants around the world on our Q&A forum
Already a member? Enter your email here and we'll send you episode reminders!
Featured in this episode:
- Adrian Brown (Host) - Executive Director, Centre for Public Impact
- Thea Snow (Host) - Director, Australia and New Zealand, Centre for Public Impact
- Misha Kaur - Innovation Specialist, Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, OECD
- Ruth Glassborow - Director of Improvement, Healthcare Improvement Scotland
- Diana Hekerem - Head of Transformational Redesign Support, Improvement Hub, Healthcare Improvement Scotland
- Olli-Pekka Heinonen - Director General, International Baccalaureate Organization (formerly Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education)
- Jolene Head - Director, Indigenous Procurement Policy, Public Services and Procurement Canada
- Aaron Maniam - Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Communications and Information, Singapore Government
Have your say in the episode Q&A:
Share your reflections on this episode and learn from others in the thread below.
Log in or sign up to continue the conversation