Public Sector Informant: The public service can innovate, when we let it

More innovative government requires public servants to have "agency", which we define as the inherent capacity of public servants - and their organisations - to influence the formulation and implementation of government policies. Public service agency is, in fact, built into the constitutional foundations of Australia's system of government. For this reason, and despite some concerning trends in recent years, the often novel responses to the global pandemic show just how resilient agency is in the public sector, and how important it is to our collective safety and welfare - and to innovation in government.

The goal of innovation in government is not new. Back in 2003 the then-public service commissioner (and current Public Sector Informant contributor) Andrew Podger speculated about the public service of 2020. His headline was "innovation with integrity". Championing the Public Service Commission's then newly released leadership framework, he was quite optimistic about the prospects for the public service in 2020, stressing the benefits of training and structures that promote innovation in government.

Unspoken in Professor Podger's speech was the fact that a foundation of innovation is the agency exercised by public servants. Twenty years ago, public servants' agency was more or less assumed. The public service was central to both the development of government policy and its implementation, integrated within a wider network of institutions and players. There were of course worries to the contrary - Professor Podger referred to such worries in his speech - but the fundamental role of the public service was reasonably well recognised.

But do public servants have agency now? If they do, how much and what sort?

Commentators have suggested that current public policy debate increasingly either excludes the public sector entirely, or sees it as a mere mouthpiece for the government of the day. Similarly, outsourcing of both policy advice and implementation is thought to be increasingly de-skilling and disempowering many departments and agencies. These are valid concerns, but the story is more complex than a simple linear decline in the public service's agency.

To tackle this question, let's consider to what extent agency in the public service enables Professor Podger's "innovation with integrity". Integrity and its dark side, corruption, are currently much discussed. Public officials' agency is of course central to building and maintaining (and potentially eroding) public sector integrity. But what about innovation?

The Thodey Review's terms of reference indicated that "the APS needs to be apolitical and professional, agile, innovative and efficient, and characterised by a high-performing culture - a culture of openness, innovation, collaboration and partnership (our emphasis)." In response, Thodey recommended that the Morrison government "embed high-quality research and analysis and a culture of innovation and experimentation to underpin evidence-based policy and delivery" - a recommendation the government effectively rejected, committing only to continue doing what it was already doing.

Dispiriting though this response is, there are some counter-trends apparent. The recently established APS Academy highlights innovation as integral to its toolkits and courses on strategy, policy and evaluation, and on implementation and services. One of the benchmarks for the academy will clearly be the extent to which it helps reinforce a culture of innovation in the APS.

As we have observed, agency is essential to building such a culture. Measuring such intangible qualities is difficult, but there are proxies available, including the State of the Service survey.

According to the 2020 State of the Service report, only 58 per cent of Australian public servants agreed that "my agency inspires me to come up with new or better ways of doing things". The figure is considerably lower in some organisations: in Home Affairs, for example, it is 45 per cent.

Public servants having the sense that they are empowered to improve things in their workplace is an important indicator of their agency. To the extent that these survey results are indicative of what is happening at the institutional level, they are quite concerning.

But what is innovation, and why does it matter in the public service?

In 2007, the Productivity Commission produced a valuable research report that includes a useful, broad and tangible definition of "innovation", as consisting of "deliberative processes ... that add value to the economy or society by generating or recognising potentially beneficial knowledge and using such knowledge to improve products, services, processes or organisational forms". The report also said that changes arising from innovative processes can be "incremental or novel".

This definition clearly undermines the cynical view that "innovation" and "government" are mutually exclusive. But let's, for a moment, entertain the possibility that the cynics are right on this point. Such a view can only be sustained if you accept the premise that public servants lack the agency to operate innovatively. But if there is evidence to the contrary, then the cynical view becomes much less sustainable.

The response to the "mega problem" of COVID-19 has generated just such a body of evidence. The pandemic response has seen many examples of public servants exercising both their agency and their innovative capacity. They have done so not through having the odd bright idea, but by imagining different possibilities and undertaking the hard slog of making novel things happen. Examples include the rapid design and sustained implementation of myriad public health orders, the design and implementation of various forms of lockdown, implementation of quarantine and isolation policies, recommending and implementing border closures, developing and delivering emergency economic policies and programs, and designing and running vaccination campaigns at national, state and local levels.

It is important to stress the novelty of what we have experienced since early 2020. In an enlightening recent interview, the secretary of the Department of Health, Dr Brendan Murphy said: "If you have the right culture, you can be unbelievably adaptable. You can do things that would seem to be almost impossible in a normal business-as-usual world." Dr Murphy makes a crucial point. Prior to COVID-19, lockdowns and border closures were simply not part of the pandemic playbook, here or almost anywhere in the world. Not because they were not technically warranted, but because they were thought impossible in our economic and social context. Yet here we are, reaping the benefits of public servants and health officials who have worked with their ministers and the wider community to propose, design and implement such "impossible" measures. These officials had both the agency to act and the knowledge and imagination to propose extremely difficult and risky actions. And this has happened at multiple levels of government action, whether it be the rapid rollout of local vaccination campaigns, or giving hard, unpalatable advice to government ministers.

Yes, there have been problems - gaps in quarantine arrangements, delays and missteps in vaccine acquisition and distribution, inconsistencies in border closures and lockdowns. But serious though such failures are, the fact is that far fewer Australians are now dead or are likely to die than would otherwise have been the case. And this is due in part to the many public servants, in big ways and small, who had the imagination and courage to recommend difficult actions, and the commitment to help implement those actions. So perhaps Andrew Podger was right after all: The public service of 2020 (or 2021) is able to demonstrate "innovation with integrity". When we let it.

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