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Small steps and bold moves: building futures thinking into leadership and public governance

19 February 2025

● News and media

This article first appeared in The Mandarin and is republished with their permission.

A new year is the time to look forward. But how far ahead? In this article Sally Washington, ANZSOG Practice Fellow Policy Capability & Public Management, and Jim Scully, co-founder of ThinkPlace WāhiWhakaaro in Aotearoa New Zealand, argue that public leaders need to exercise their stewardship responsibilities and think well into the future. They explore how senior officials can build futures thinking into public governance, and the benefits of doing so.

Anticipatory governance is crucial for taking care of tomorrow, today

Governments increasingly recognise that they need to build a future focus into policy and governance. Some have dedicated institutions for this, like Wales’ Future Generations Commissioner or Singapore’s Center for Strategic Futures. Others have introduced ‘commitment devices’ like regular reports on the future, such as Finland’s Futures Report.

Both Aotearoa and Australia have introduced ‘long-term insights briefings’ and have added ‘stewardship’ into public service legislation and accountability arrangements. In Aotearoa public service chief executives are required to produce one every three years, while in Australia (which adopted the idea from Aotearoa) the Secretaries Board sponsors one whole of government LTIB every year. Both are now in their second round of production. The jury is still out on the impact of LTIBs. In Aotearoa, Parliamentary scrutiny of the original crop of LTIBs was largely perfunctory, and there is scant evidence that the Aotearoa Public Service, currently challenged by significant cuts, is investing significantly in futures and foresight.

While these are all important interventions, any system change usually requires a range of initiatives firing in sync, from system enablers (like legislated futures reports or LTIBs), to dedicated units or institutions, to improved capability and foresight skills supported by access to methods and tools. All public servants don’t need to become expert futurists, but they need to bring a futures mindset into their work.

How do we get people to think differently, to lift their sights from a sole focus on today’s pressures to future challenges and opportunities? Leaders are crucial in this equation: not only do they need to open their own mindsets, they are also key to providing the authorising environment for futures thinking, including by providing time, resources and permission to think beyond the urgent and immediate demands of their teams, organisations and political masters. As a collective, public service leaders are also responsible for shaping an overall future-focused public governance system.

Leaders take a walk into the future

At a recent ANZSOG Executive Fellows Program, senior officials from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand explored the tools, capabilities and mindsets for building foresight and a future focus into public governance, policy processes and leadership. This was the third session of its kind we’ve facilitated. It followed a similar EFP session in 2023 and a much earlier session for New Zealand Deputy Secretaries in 2015.

In each of those sessions, participants co-created a future policy ‘Heat Map’. To catalyse that thinking, we provided mega-trend analysis derived from the range of existing sources from local and international public sector organisations, private sector consultancies and international think tanks. There are plenty of offerings to choose from; you don’t need to reinvent the wheel in a short-sharp exercise like this. In the latter two sessions, to make it personal and more experiential, we introduced participants to their future selves by getting them to view themselves through an ‘aging APP’ – quite confronting for most, but an effective way of leaping headfirst into thinking about the future.

We then used a mega-trend card-sorting exercise to help identify what participants saw as the most important trends deserving collective attention over time. We asked them to call out cross-cutting policy issues that tend to fall through the administrative cracks (departmental or portfolio) because they are everyone’s and no-one’s. We also asked them to identify weak signals stemming from seemingly disconnected pieces of information that may point to a significant emergent policy issue.

We threw in some ‘perspectives cards’, like ‘nature’ and particular personas (a child with both Māori and Aboriginal parents – where would be the best place to grow up between Australia and Aotearoa?) to create empathy and disrupt unconscious bias, and to see if that perspective changed the equation of relative importance (using personas is a powerful way to ‘walk in the shoes’ of others). Once the issues were clustered, we leaned on the group’s collective knowledge to undertake rapid ranking. The co-created ‘Heat Map’ ranked issues based on their relative urgency and their relative impact. All of this was done at pace; the 48 participants achieved this collective cross-cutting heat-map and related discussion in half a day.

Figure 1. A raw ‘Heat Map’

Figure 2. A polished version of a Heat Map (with connections and size of dot reflecting relative ‘heat’)

Exercises like this can have immediate benefits by shifting some common public service ‘thinking pitfalls’: they can help shift risk-aversion (foresight helps to see risk in a broader longer-term context and focus on opportunities or what’s possible); and encourage thinking from other perspectives (those of diverse current and future ‘users’ of public services, and non-Western notions of wellbeing and stewardship).

Some insights from participants illustrated the impact of this Heat Map exercise:

“We seem very focused on the negative. Risk-based. The negative trends stand out. Is there a link to our jobs as public servants where we have to do so much risk assessment [that we don’t think more about positive trends and opportunities]?”

“We need to ensure diverse lived experience informs our response to these cross-cutting mega-trends.”

“What we’ve got here (these mega trends) is a very much a western view of our world…”

Over the three sessions covering a decade of change, we can see that some of what were considered weak signals in 2015 now require urgent attention (like AI which sparked minimal interest as ‘machine learning’ in 2015, or misinformation and disinformation, which have increased exponentially in their relative ‘heat’ for governments today). Notably ‘increasing inequality’ and ‘climate change’ featured across all three sessions steadily moving from looming towards more urgently ‘hot’.

But identifying ‘hot’ issues wasn’t the most important part of the exercise – that requires deep and regular foresight work to keep abreast of trends. The main point was for senior officials to consider how to build capability for anticipatory governance. We challenged them to think: how might we build future considerations into our government work? How do we start to take care of tomorrow, today?

Bold moves and small steps – what to target and who’s responsible

Participants identified possible ‘bold moves’ and ‘small steps’ they could take as leaders to increase anticipatory capability: What could they do themselves? What could they do in their teams and in their organisations? And what needs to change at a system level in their jurisdictions to build a future focus into decision-making and governance?

In the most recent session, proposed initiatives included things like supporting foresight training, and “form a futures unit in my organization”. A bold move was “create a Ministry of the Future”. When we listed these on a whiteboard and categorized them as ‘you’, ‘your team’, ‘your organisation’, “the system’, most offered changes at the system level rather than at the closer to home personal ‘what can I do’. The irony was not lost on the group that as senior leaders they are the system.

System change – an infrastructure for anticipatory governance.

Both small steps and bold moves are required to create a system approach to anticipatory governance. A previous ANZSOG report, the result of a curated conversation between people working directly on futures in the public service across ANZSOG jurisdictions highlighted some common themes in the diversity of approaches. Some common futures infrastructure elements include:

Proactively providing intelligence and insights on future trends from foresight exercises and supporting others with foresight analysis to feed into policy and strategy processes (e.g. NSW Futures Atlas, CSIRO’s Our Future World)
Providing frameworks, tools, and other collateral that public servants can use to build foresight and futures thinking into their day-to-day work (Australia PM&C’s Futures Primer, OECD’s Strategic Futures Toolkit)
Helping to build foresight literacy across the public service through learning and development sessions, workshops etc (ANZSOG’s masterclasses, curated conversations)
Building networks and communities of practice for current and emerging foresight practitioners (Christchurch based Think Beyond, Speculative Futures Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland) and the forthcoming Oceania futures and Foresight Symposium)
Socialising foresight as a key ingredient of good policy and strategy (NZ Policy Project policy toolbox, ANZSOG publications).

System change requires a range of mutually reinforcing initiatives, at various levels of intervention, from system enablers to individual mindsets. It requires a deliberate infrastructure for anticipatory governance (Figure 1.) and ongoing effort.

Figure 3 Anticipatory governance infrastructure (Source: S.Washington)

Where to start?

Public service leaders can take the first steps into anticipatory governance by deliberately holding conversations in their teams, organisations, and jurisdictions. As a starting point they can ask:

WHAT are the few significant long-term areas that matter most? WHAT are some weak signals that might require some attention? Where are the gaps in our focus? Where should we concentrate our efforts? WHAT does this mean for how we operate and WHO we work with?
HOW could we approach foresight and futures thinking to maximise success? What would that require in terms of capability (internal and external), skills, methods and tools?
HOW might we catalyse collective strategic conversations with senior leaders across the system and with Ministers on cross-cutting issues that will bite us in future if we don’t start tackling them today.

A Māori whakatauki (proverb) “A ka mua, ka muri” (walking backwards into the future) is apt in this context. It challenges us to learn from the past, understand the present, and anticipate the future. Foresight and anticipatory governance is crucial for good public governance.