Shifting to ‘governing human’: James Plunkett visit shapes debate on public sector future 

Governments around the world are tackling a tangle of intractable problems whose dimensions and intensity don’t fit well with many of the institutional reflexes and capabilities of government and the public sector, or with the orthodoxy of new public management.

Trust and confidence in democracy’s ability to deliver are both cratering, fuelling populist responses, and making big picture changes more difficult to achieve.

ANZSOG recently hosted British public sector thinker and author James Plunkett, for a series of three roundtables with Australian public sector leaders on the theme of “governing human” – finding more human ways of governing our lives together in conditions of uncertainty and complexity – as a new framework for the practice of government.

Roundtables in Sydney and Canberra engaged a mix of government leaders, thinkers and practitioners from the NGO sector, universities and think tanks, while the Melbourne event focused on public sector regulators from a range of policy domains.

The discussions explored the extent to which some of the risk “settings” that defined the working context for public servants (and politicians too) were poorly aligned with the nature of the challenges they were now tackling and the tools and methods, often agile, experimental and iterative, they were being urged to adopt.

Mr Plunkett said that there was a sense in Britain that the machinery of government was either broken or needed to be rebalanced, and that reform was underway through a range of initiatives.

He said the technical challenges of the 19th century, such as providing drinkable water and a range of public health measures, that had shaped the current public sector had been replaced by problems that required a more human approach.

“We built these bureaucratic capabilities with certain qualities to them. They are very consistent, procedural, scalable, hierarchical. Partly due to our success in making headway on the technical challenges, different challenges start to loom larger, loneliness, mental illness, chronic health conditions, community cohesion” he said.

He said that in Britain reforms undertaken by the new Labour Government were looking to focus on ‘missions’, place-based approaches that could drive change from the edges of the system rather than the centre, driving innovation across the economy and partnering with civil society in more dynamic ways.

“It’s not new public management, it’s not top-down targets, it’s a very different, more organic and dynamic conception of state capacity,” he said.

“This ‘test, learn and grow’ initiative, is essentially about taking agile methods, building small mixed discipline teams around complex problems to work iteratively to try something, see if it works, and improve on it in quick cycles.”

“They are setting up small mixed discipline teams in localities across Britain to work on complex social problems in an iterative way, see what progress they can make in 12 weeks, in sprints.  The whole purpose of that program is to try and work in that way, knowing that it will be difficult, and when you hit barriers, put pressure further up through the system for changes to make these ways of working easier and more fluent.”

Mr Plunkett said that a lot of the work that needed to be done involved ‘saving the system from its own worst instincts’ such as the idea that increased control was the way to reduce risk.

“We know in engineering that you build the building to withstand the earthquake by allowing the building to sway in response, not by making it perfectly rigid. The instinct to control is an instinct that we need to resist, and actually the way to manage risk in complexity is more iterative ways of working.

The need for rebalancing and new modes of leadership

Attendees at the forums came from a range of agencies including the federal Departments of Social Services and Home Affairs, Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Australian Public Service Commission, with NSW represented by the Department of Communities and Justice, Customer Service and The Cabinet Office. They were able to discuss these issues and the similarities and differences between Britain and their jurisdictions, and the broader need to reimagine government.  

Three core themes emerged from the discussions:  

1. Transitions   

The way we govern and the way we approach public policy and public management are in a major phase of transition and change away from settled assumptions and principles, that reflects larger forces for social, economic, cultural and institutional change across society and the global and national economy.    

In the UK and Australia, the transitions are reflected in innovations like the adoption of “mission-led” approaches to big policy and delivery challenges, the use of “test, learn and grow” methods to both innovate method and tools of policy and service delivery and to devolve power and authority much more substantially to communities and the rise of various forms of “place” approaches to local policy and service design and decision making.   

Much of that work is being done from the edge and from outside government.  But it is being done, and it is impacting too the centre of government.  In the process, it is asking big questions about the mix of principles, values and practices that define modern government and the way we design and run systems of policy and public problem solving.   

2. Rebalancing   

A second theme of the conversations was the need in different dimensions of the discussion about government and policy for re-balancing.   

Our governing reflexes need to rediscover some of the ‘right brain’ capabilities – human, empathetic, relational, adaptive – that had in the past few decades become sidelined by left-brain instincts for rational, transactional and linear thinking.    

This has become more urgent given the changing nature of the problems governments are trying to solve, and the shift away from technical problems to more complex and interconnected ones such as ageing well, new approaches to work, loneliness and isolation, mental health and climate adaptation.   

Part of the shift is the need to rebalance the role of the edge and the role of the centre. Both are important pieces of the puzzle, But the relative distribution of power, authority, resources and skills needs to shift to reflect the emerging energy for often rapid change in local communities at the ‘edge’ of larger systems of governing and decision-making.   

Similarly, the divide between policy making and delivery has become too stark and often difficult to bridge.  Finding better ways to bring those two parts of the process of problem solving into a better and more functional balance has become a major goal for reform in many jurisdictions, including Australia.   

3. Changing practice, changing leadership    

The third theme was a focus on both new practice in government and the public sector and new forms of leadership enabling those new practices.   

New practices are emerging that privilege agility, flexible problem-solving teams, the capacity to take sensible risks, and a culture of testing and scaling small-scale responses to big challenges.   

All of these shifts in practice and performance imply consequent and enabling shifts in leadership purpose and practice. Everything is in the mix – recruiting and retaining talent, taking decisions, business case development and procurement, nurturing team dynamics, effective communication, ensuring accountability and a focus on outcomes and delivering results.    

Reflecting on the visit in a blogpost written on his return, Mr Plunkett said that Britain had lessons for Australia from its increasingly mature movement for community-led development and the support networks that have grown up around this, which were enabling place-based approaches to problems.  

Britain could learn from Australia’s approaches to the role of community in disaster resilience, and its civic engagement with Indigenous communities, which offered more general lessons for how to do true power-sharing.   

Mr Plunkett said that public discourse in Britain had become increasingly negative compared to Australia, which had a comparative sense of stability and confidence in its political system after the  decisive result in the 2025 election. He said that the big risk for Australia was complacency, and the possibility that the re-elected government would ‘waste the opportunity of their mandate to drive public service reform’.   

Britain could learn from Australia’s approaches to the role of community in disaster resilience, and its civic engagement with Indigenous communities, which offered more general lessons for how to do true power-sharing.   

Mr Plunkett said that public discourse in Britain had become increasingly negative compared to Australia, which had a comparative sense of stability and confidence in its political system after the  decisive result in the 2025 election. He said that the big risk for Australia was complacency, and the possibility that the re-elected government would ‘waste the opportunity of their mandate to drive public service reform’.