Alex Hagan is a futurist, author, and strategic advisor who helps leaders and organisations navigate complexity and rapid change. Alex advises governments, corporates, and communities on emerging trends, system transformation, and workforce strategy.
He will deliver the opening session of ANZSOG’s Leadership Through Different Lenses series - Leading in the Age of AI: Power, Trust and Human Strengths – which will examine the leadership implications of an AI-embedded public sector - how it alters internal dynamics, shifts citizen expectations, and introduces new risks.
But the changes facing public sector organisations go beyond AI, and in this article Alex looks at the ‘polycrisis’ of multiple transformative trends facing the public sector, the changing nature of work, and which capabilities will remain most valuable through an uncertain future.
Public sector organisations today are confronting shifts potentially more significant for the labour market than the creation of the internet. These shifts are arriving simultaneously, and they’re arriving rapidly. Against this backdrop of compounding change and uncertainty, how do we plan for the future of work when the future itself is so unclear?
In the 33 years since the first web browser in 1993, a pattern has emerged which holds lessons for us on how different approaches to strategy perform in times of change. Organisations that maintain an orientation towards the future, prioritising their vision and mandate over their legacy business models, tend to embrace change to build new advantage and more effective service delivery. On the other hand, those that cling to their existing operating model, or try to preserve what worked in the past, risk losing relevance and stagnating.
The number of transformative trends coming at us at the moment can be overwhelming. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2026 lists misinformation and geoeconomic confrontation as top short-term global risks, with societal polarisation and inequality intensifying over the medium and long term. The same organisation’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists Artificial Intelligence and digital transformation, followed by climate adaptation and demographic shifts, as the most impactful for the future of work.
Each of these trends would be transformative on its own. Together, they create something qualitatively different from the sum of their parts. Each has ripple effects that will reshape the public sector workforce.
To further compound the challenge, it is impossible to accurately predict the specific impacts that any of those trends will have over the long term.
For example, there is no one “future of AI”, but a range of plausible and possible futures. Which ‘future’ of AI depends on questions experts and non-experts alike are grappling with: Will AI have a net positive or negative impact on society? In the short term or the long term? Will more jobs be lost than created? How quickly? Is this a precedented change akin to electricity or the internet, or an unprecedented one?
AI is just one of the high-impact, high-likelihood, but highly ambiguous trends transforming the sector. If we wait for certainty about exactly what the future will look like before responding, then we are sure to be reacting to a future someone else creates and abdicating our ability to create the best future of work we can.
How work is being transformed
The Future of Jobs report projects a net employment increase of 7 per cent over the next five years: an estimated 170 million jobs created while 92 million are displaced. This change in net jobs does not seem to be an insurmountable challenge. Yet the framing hides a more profound change.
When asked what we do for a living, most of us reach for a noun: I’m an accountant, a nurse, a policy officer. It’s a useful shortcut, but it doesn’t really answer the question. Work is a verb, not a noun: something you do, not something you are labelled, and what people actually do within a given role is shifting far faster than the titles suggest.
The real story from the Future of Jobs Report isn’t the degree of net employment change forecast, but the nearly one billion jobs which it optimistically labels as “stable”. Within that category, the report continues, 39 per cent of the skills workers currently rely on are expected to become outdated or require substantial change within five years.
Stability is a misnomer. Skill transformation is far outpacing job displacement for the foreseeable future. People will be in roles with the same job titles, but the fundamental work they do will be changing so rapidly that they will be, in effect, learning new entirely jobs while keeping the same title.
The government sector data is particularly stark. Public sector employees expect more work to be done by technology than by humans by 2030, and that expectation is higher in Australia than the global average. Yet we still structure career development, training budgets, and performance reviews as if roles are stable entities, rather than constantly shifting collections of tasks, the allocation of which is being renegotiated.
Four shifts for public sector polycrisis planning
In my work with public sector workforces navigating change, I have identified four shifts that matter for building workforce adaptability.
1. Alignment Over Operations
The first question for any organisation facing disruption is deceptively simple: are your workforce capabilities still fit for your mandate? Not your current operating model, but your vision and purpose. Organisations that anchor to their mission and vision and adapt how they deliver it tend to navigate change well. Those that confuse their operating model with their purpose tend to stagnate.
2. Atomisation of Roles
We tend to think of roles as atoms - irreducible units. In reality, roles are molecules, made of component tasks that can be separated and recombined.
Consider mental health registered nurses, a critical role facing global shortages. According to data from Skills Australia, roughly 12 per cent of their time goes to collecting and recording patient medical histories, 10 per cent to analysing data, 4 per cent to communicating with other medical professionals, and 3 per cent to maintaining inventory.
That is roughly a third of time on tasks that are not direct clinical care, in a role that takes years of specialised education to enter and faces chronic shortages everywhere. Some of those tasks could be supported by other people or technology so that the much-needed skills of this critical section of the labour market be most effectively utilised. Of course, the reality is more nuanced, but such data can be a starting point for a productive conversation.
3. Aggregation Across Boundaries
At a systems level, recording patient histories is not unique to mental health nurses. Thirty-one different occupations perform that same task. Some spend up to 22 per cent of their time on it, dental therapists and dental hygienists among them.
This systems-level view reveals opportunities for shared capability development, work redesign, technology investment that benefits multiple roles, and identification of opportunities to cross-skill from one occupation to another.
This principle is well established in health, where there is significant effort spent in designing roles so that everyone works to the ‘top of their scope’. It is less common in other sectors, but offers a useful framework for work redesign, particularly in roles that are shifting rapidly.
4. Augmentation Over Automation
The WEF data shows that government and public sector organisations expect more augmentation, humans and technology working together, than pure automation. That is an encouraging sign.
Work done by humans alone is projected to drop from 47 per cent to 33 per cent within five years, while work done by technology alone rises from 22 per cent to 34 per cent, and hybrid human-technology work rises from 30 per cent to 33 per cent. The one-third share of tech-assisted humans is the real hybrid work - not just home versus office, but human capability enhanced by technological partnership – freeing up capacity for humans to do uniquely human work
What Remains Most Valuable
There is a peculiar irony in how we have approached work since the Industrial Revolution. We essentially treated humans like robots: putting them in boxes, giving them inputs, expecting consistent outputs, asking them to leave their personality at the door. Now that we do actually have robots (and AI) that can increasingly handle repetitive work, our real opportunity is to rethink work and design public services that truly reflect human care and judgment, complemented with technology that can do the predictable, the repetitive, and the transactional.
The skills forecast to grow in the coming years are not exclusively, or even predominantly, technical. AI and technological literacy top the list, but creative thinking, leadership, social influence, curiosity, and lifelong learning also feature prominently.
These four shifts point to a common thread: as technology absorbs more tasks, what remains most valuable is the human element - care, judgment, and initiative.
Ask anyone who the best teacher they ever had was, and most can answer immediately exactly who they were, and why they were exceptional, even decades after leaving school. The attributes they mention are remarkably consistent: they believed in our potential. They were kind but firm. They held us to account. They made personal connections. They let us make mistakes without punishment. They created psychological safety. They saw our strengths and pushed us to develop them.
What rarely comes up is that they really knew the curriculum well. The qualities that elevate exceptional teachers above average ones are care, and uniquely human qualities. In a polycrisis world, that remains vital. Because as we have more technology, we need more humanity to complement it.
Building for Uncertainty
Strategy in uncertainty is not about drawing a straight line from where we are to where we want to be. The context is too changing and too complex for that to be effective. Nor is not about predicting what the future would look like. Instead, it’s about building principles that can adapt to a range of plausible futures. This way we can ensure that we achieve our mandate whatever the world throws at us.
A workforce ready for an uncertain world requires ongoing investment in adaptability: regular environmental scanning, scenario planning that tests workforce assumptions, and the right combination of both technical and uniquely human capabilities. To do this effectively we need to think of work in the sense of that word as a dynamic verb, not a static noun.
Leadership Through Different Lenses consists of five two-hour online masterclasses each led by a different presenter who will cover one aspect of modern public sector leadership. The series begins on 18 March and runs until 15 April.
Sessions are:
Leading in the Age of AI: Power, Trust and Human Strengths with Alex Hagan
Seeing the Whole World: Leading Through a Systems Lens with Nick Fleming
Leadership Grounded in Place: Context, Community and Connection with Luke Craven
The Microdynamics of Leadership: Teams, Habits and Everyday Practice with Jessica Schubert
Leading with Empathy: building Trust and Human-Centred Institutions with Dr Claire Yorke
Registration is now open, including an Earlybird special and group discounts. More information on the series is available here.