ANZSOG’s PLDA25: building leadership literacy for the digital age

ANZSOG’s Public Leadership in the Digital Age (PLDA) program began in 2024, as a unique development opportunity for senior leaders wanting to make sense of how the digital age is changing public sector leadership. 

PLDA looks at the tools and mindsets leaders need, and weaves together disparate threads of change to help leaders understand the opportunities and risks of the new landscape. 

In this article, Martin Stewart-Weeks, ANZSOG Practice Fellow and Public Leadership for the Digital Age Program Director, explains the changes that led to the creation of the program and how it can help public sector leaders adapt their missions to the digital age. 

There was a time when public sector leadership and public sector digital transformation were like railway tracks with gauges that didn’t match, which meant that moving between them was tedious and tiring.

The relationship still sometimes resembles a dialogue of the deeply disconnected and terminally confused.

But things are changing.

For example, the COVID pandemic’s crash course in digital skills and the pyrotechnic explosion of generative AI’s debut have both done more than anyone or anything else to make that disconnection untenable.

Governments at all levels face a complex tangle of public policy and service delivery challenges. Trying to solve them amidst stuttering productivity, cratering budgets and draining reserves of trust cries out for a change of attitude and a change of practice.

The need now is to get serious, not just about the tools and techniques, but the underlying mindset and culture of the digital age. If you are a public leader intent on wrangling these new tools and culture into your leadership practice, you need to put thinking yourself into new approaches to work and leadership on your agenda.

In other words, you need to become familiar with new leadership literacy in, and for, the digital age.

PLDA25 takes a bundle of ideas from public administration research and public sector leadership theory and practice (from Northcote-Trevelyan to positive public administration), adds some of the big pieces of new digital capability (data and AI, cybersecurity, digital ID, information access and privacy) and gives some structure around how that combination plays out in policy, decision making, strategic planning and innovation.

It combines these elements in a program that is basically a search for coherence. What is the emerging story about modern and effective public leadership in and for the digital age? What happens when you put all of these pieces together?

Expertise and experience

PLDA draws on experts from both inside and outside the public sector, uses the experience and expertise of the cohort itself, and always anchors the discussions back to practical ways to change individual leadership practice

The program brings the cohort together for two two-day intensive sessions in Sydney and Canberra, supplemented by self-paced online learning and research. PLDA draws on a wonderful, and wonderfully diverse, group of thinkers, leaders and practitioners from here and around the world:

• Pradeep Philip Lead Partner at Deloitte Access Economics and former Deputy Secretary and Secretary in Canberra and Melbourne
• Janine O’Flynn Head of the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy
• Amanda Smith a London-based director with Public Digital
• Jordan Hatch General Manager for Customer and Staff Digital Programs at Services Australia 
• Ian Oppermann Former NSW Chief Data Scientist and head of the federal government’s data standards board 
• Kate Pounder former CEO of the Tech Council of Australia and a consulting and advisor on technology, innovation and public policy
• Nick Davis co-lead of the UTS Human Technology Institute and former head of innovation at the World Economic Forum 
• Anthea Roberts Professor of Global Governance at the ANU and director of Dragonfly Thinking based on the ‘risk, reward and resilience’ framework for decision making in uncertainty and volatile change 
• Pia Andrews former Chief Data Office at the federal Department of Home Affairs and a policy reformer in and for digital transformation in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and for the UN Development Program 
• Frances Foster-Thorpe and Scott Perugini-Kelly Leading the NSW Cabinet Office strategic futures and foresight team 
• Elizabeth Tydd Australian Information Commissioner and former NSW Information Commissioner and head of the NSW Information and Privacy Commission
• Brenton Caffin Executive director in the South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet and founder and CEO of States of Change 
• Laura Christie NSW Chief Digital and Information Officer and head of Digital NSW
• John Shepherd leads the digital ID and data role in the federal Department of Finance and head of the Digital ID Taskforce 
• Sir Geoff Mulgan Professor of Collective Intelligence, Social Innovation and Public Policy at University College, London 
• James Plunkett Writer and advisor on public sector reform and emerging ways of working and leading for the digital age in policy, regulation and service delivery
• Charlie Leadbeater Writer, practitioner and advisor on systems change 
• Silva Mertsola  Lead analyst and research on ‘humble government’ with Demos Helsinki 

“The point of digital transformation in government is that digital transformation isn’t the point. The point is the transformation of government and the work of the public sector.”

PLDA’s emerging story –  three things that define leading in the Digital Age

We start with the assumption that, when it comes to absorbing the capabilities and potential of the digital age, mindset – attitudes, assumptions and expectations – is as important as tools and techniques. How you behave as a leader and how you think about your role and purpose is as much about embracing digital culture as it is about wrangling the techniques of specific tools and platforms.  

We think there’s an emerging story anchored by three propositions, Much of PLDA25 will be spent interrogating and adding to that story.  

#1 The digital age is characterised by speed, intensity and connectedness  

It’s an age whose defining characteristics remain the speed with which it moves, changes and innovates, the relentless intensity with which all of that happens, and the connectedness of everyone to everyone and everything to everything it has both introduced and amplified. This brings new opportunity and novel risk to the work of public leaders. 

#2 Leaders need to learn, experiment and collaborate to thrive in the digital age 

If speed, intensity and connectedness are the characteristics of the world public leaders now work in,  the only way to thrive is to become exceptionally good at learning, experimenting and collaborating. And doing all of that with an unnerving combination of speed and discernment, that balances risk taking and good judgement. 

That means that, in a world that has grown “too big to know” and where “the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere and the smartest person in the room is the room”, public leaders need to become adept and fast learners, experimenting and testing with others.  

#3 Public leaders need to be humble, human and hopeful  

The third proposition is a consequence of the first two.   

Humility is the natural corollary of learning.  Some people prefer the word “curious”; perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. We learn because we know we don’t know – indeed, we can’t possibly know – everything we need to know. That increasingly means trying something new or different.  Experimenting, in other words 

But the test is the impact on people, on the human dimension of policy, regulation and service.  As digital spins the world into faster cycles of change and invention the reflexive response of the thoughtful public leader has to be people and their desire for opportunity, safety, recognition, justice, equality and a chance to live lives they have reason to value.  

Finally, public leaders have to be realistic and optimistic; it might sometimes feel difficult in the context of uncertainty and chaotic change, but there are good reasons to be positive about the work and impact of good government done well and the role of an effective public sector in these conditions. 

The PLDA25 experience: what can you expect?

The PLDA experience is built around three elements:

Foundations and frameworks 

Everything is grounded first and foremost in understanding the context and conditions of an uncertain world of transitions and change. The program starts with the implications of a changing and uncertain world, explores past, current and emerging theories of public administration and spends time understanding something about the defining values and principles of an emerging philosophy of public leadership.  

Tools, method and mindsets 

The program takes a practical leadership perspective on the significance of some of the tools and methods of the digital age, including particularly data and AI, digital identity, cybersecurity and information access and privacy. It also looks at some of the new ways of working and leading that these tools and methods bring to key public leadership functions – service delivery, decision making in uncertainty and complexity, planning, innovation and strategic analysis and policy making.   

Reflection and practical application 

The program includes Australian and global examples of the new ways of working which are already happening and draws on the experience of participants too.  It draws out practical implications and applications and challenges participants to think about how this lands for their own leadership practice. 

And through the program run themes about the role of adaptive leadership, insights from First Nations principles and frameworks and an anchoring focus on public value.  

Public Leadership in the Digital Age 2025 runs in two residential workshops of two days each: 

• Workshop 1: Thursday 7 and Friday 8 August in Sydney. 
• Workshop 2: Tuesday 2 September and Wednesday 3 September in Canberra. 

There is some self-paced online learning for participants ahead of the first workshop and between the two workshops.   

More details about this year’s PLDA program and registration details are here.