Leading through change when the pressure is coming from every direction
For public servants, change is not new. But according to Queensland Public Sector Commissioner David Mackie, the environment facing governments today is distinct in its speed, complexity and intensity.
After 36 years in the public sector, Mr Mackie says leaders can always count on change. What feels different now is the number of external pressures landing at once: shifting political landscapes, financial austerity, heightened media scrutiny, declining trust in institutions, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and growing public expectations for fast responses to deeply complex problems.
“There’s a real contradiction in all of this,” he says. “Communities want governments to act quickly on wicked problems such as cost of living, youth crime and pressure on health systems, while also wanting government to play a smaller role in their lives.”
For Mr Mackie, leading through this environment requires more than technical expertise or a strong grasp of a single portfolio. It asks public servants to lift their gaze, understand the wider system they are operating in, and help others make sense of uncertainty.
Three skills for anticipating and leading through change
Mr Mackie identifies three capabilities public leaders need to develop in themselves and their organisations:
Critical and systems thinking
Stewardship and integrity
The ability to tell a clear and purposeful story
Public servants need stronger critical and systems thinking.
The problems governments are dealing with rarely sit neatly within one agency, portfolio or policy lever. A systems view is essential if leaders are to anticipate change rather than simply respond to it.
Leaders need to understand how services, institutions, legislation, communities and delivery systems interact, and how a decision in one part of the system can create consequences elsewhere.
“There’s an expectation of all public servants to understand the ecosystem much better than what we may have done in the past,” Mr Mackie says.
“The struggle we have with the Westminster system and its lateral siloed way of operating in government, is how we lift people's eyes to a systems level that's actually institutionalised across government, where we do see more mobilisation of people around their capabilities to deliver on key outcomes.”
Stewardship and integrity are becoming even more important as public trust declines and new technologies reshape service delivery.
AI creates opportunities to improve capability and reduce routine administrative work, but it also raises significant questions about privacy, transparency and the integrity of government decision-making.
Mr Mackie is optimistic about AI’s potential, but cautious about assuming it will be simple or fast to implement across government. He expects public services to take a test-and-trial approach, with the discipline to pull back where technology begins to touch core public sector obligations such as privacy, fairness and trust.
“I think we have to think of further ways now about how we demonstrate integrity, how we demonstrate transparency in our decisions, and particularly with AI and what it might do to service delivery in the public sector,” Mr Mackie says.
Senior leaders need to become better storytellers.
In complex environments, people need more than instructions. They need to understand why decisions are being made, how those decisions connect to public value, and what outcomes they are working towards.
“A lot of people tell you what you’re doing,” he says. “There’s not many people that can really articulate why you’re doing it.”
For Mr Mackie, storytelling is not spin. It is sense-making: the work of bringing together complex information and giving teams a coherent account of purpose, value and direction.
Learning from crisis response
Some of the strongest examples of these capabilities in action, Mr Mackie says, can be found in the way governments respond to natural disasters.
In his home jurisdiction of Queensland, where cyclones, floods and bushfires are a recurring reality, the public sector has developed mature governance arrangements for disaster response. These events require agencies to work together, understand the broader ecosystem, mobilise capability quickly and focus on practical problem-solving under pressure.
Mr Mackie says this offers an important benchmark for the broader public service. Disaster response shows that government can bring together people, authority and capability around urgent priorities. The challenge is translating that maturity into day-to-day public sector work, where the problems may not be declared emergencies but still require coordinated, system-wide responses.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided another example of agencies mobilising quickly around shared priorities. For Mr Mackie, the lesson is not that crisis conditions should become normal. It is that public services can work differently when there is a clear authorising environment, shared purpose and permission to prioritise progress over perfection.
Creating the conditions for progress
Mr Mackie warns that risk aversion can stagnate progress and opportunities for innovation. In highly scrutinised environments, public servants can be pushed towards doing things the way they have always been done because it feels safer.
But he says leaders need to create conditions where careful experimentation is possible. “We’ve got to create an environment where perfection doesn’t override progress,” he says.
That requires a strong authorising environment, including support from senior leaders and productive relationships between chief executives and the executive arm of government. It also requires clarity that experimentation is being undertaken in the public interest, with appropriate safeguards and transparency.
In Mr Mackie’s view, resilience in the public sector will increasingly depend on the ability to mobilise people around capabilities, not just fixed tasks or functions.
He says “if I had to compare what I'm saying to ball sports, like cricket, golf and football. They're very technical sports in terms of learning the skills, but the one thing they all have in common is this high level about hand-eye coordination. So, you find that people who can play cricket can swing a golf club and people who can swing a golf club can possibly play cricket or tennis, etc.”
“I think that's sort of one of the capability adaptions that we need going into the future around the public service - is you're less about your task, function and the techniques of what you're doing, and you're more about that higher level capability to deal with more systems issues.”
This means helping people see beyond their immediate role or portfolio. Senior leaders, Mr Mackie says, have a responsibility to share the system view they gain from working across agencies, with Ministers and with other senior leaders. Without that, organisations risk assuming everyone can see the same horizon.
The value of learning with peers
As public sectors across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand face similar pressures at slightly different times, Mr Mackie says there is significant untapped value in public servants learning from one another.
He sees ANZSOG’s role in bringing public sector leaders together across jurisdictions as a valuable mechanism for professional development. While external perspectives can be useful, he argues the public sector already holds a deep reservoir of knowledge, experience and practical wisdom that is not always harnessed effectively.
“We’ve got some incredible people that work in the public sector for long periods of time through different regimes, through different eras of change,” he says. “There is a lot of lessons to be learned ourselves from our own people.”
That peer learning is central to ANZSOG’s new Leading Through Exponential Change program, which is designed for senior executives operating at a system level. The program focuses on helping leaders anticipate change, test practical responses and apply what they learn through a tangible change audit and action plan.
For leaders facing uncertainty, Mr Mackie’s advice is both practical and human. Stay calm. Avoid the pull of perfection. Build integrity into change from the start. Help people understand the why. And remember that the public sector’s greatest source of capability may already be within the system itself.
Learn more about Leading Through Exponential Change
Register here to attend the online information session on 5 August 2026.