Turbulence, change and punk rock: A conversation about the public service with Executive Fellows Program co-ordinator Robin Ryde

Robin Ryde is a former Chief Executive of the UK National School of Government, who has consulted widely across the public, corporate and public purpose sectors, and written several books on management and other subjects.

Since 2009, he has been one of the co-ordinators of ANZSOG’s Executive Fellows Program (EFP), a unique program which has given hundreds of senior public servants new understandings and a space to reflect on their own leadership and the role of their organisations.

The 2025 iteration of the EFP will be held in July, and ANZSOG spoke to Mr Ryde about the changes that have affected the work of public servants over the last 15 years. Our conversation covered the increasing pace of change across the public sector, what the attack on the public service in the USA means for us, what public servants can learn from punk rock, and why declining trust in governments may not be a bad thing.

Robin, I want to start by asking what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in the last 15 years, in terms of the work of public services and the challenges they face?

For me, the single biggest change has been the increasing turbulence and the pace of change in the operating environment, particularly the amount of external change that is happening.

Just in terms of tech and social media alone, the platform Instagram was launched the year that I started working with ANZSOG, and now has two billion followers, and only a few years before that YouTube, and three years before I started, the first iPhone came out. That change in social media and technology is really relevant to public services and the work that ANZSOG has been doing in Australia and New Zealand.

We’ve experienced other world events over my time; we’ve had the 2008 global financial crisis, which Australia weathered particularly well. We’ve had a global pandemic in the form of COVID 19, and in the last few years, we’ve had the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, it’s been a really turbulent time over the last 15 years, massively turbulent, and those things I’ve mentioned are a small portion. The operating environment has changed profoundly and public servants have had to work out how they respond to that huge melee of challenge, turbulence, opportunity, and questioning of what we’re about.

What are some of the ways that public servants need to think differently to deal with this changing environment? 

I think there’s a need for them to be much more tech savvy, to be digitally literate in ways that no one was 20 years ago. It’s not enough anymore to think someone else will handle the tech side of things.  There’s something about being attuned to a more diverse populace too. Not only in terms of demographic groups or ethnicities, but just a recognition that the citizenry is not a monolith. It’s a very complicated web of different perspectives and constituencies, so as a public servant you need to be attuned to those differences and understand ‘one size fits all’ doesn’t apply.

This change and turbulence we’ve just talked about requires a capability to be able to learn very quickly, to be able to experiment with new possibilities and new ideas. That experimentation could be with new tech, or with data capabilities, or with different means of delivering public services.  It’s not like those things weren’t valuable skills 20 or 30 years ago, but they’re so much more important now.

Given this turbulence and change, is there something structurally wrong, or perhaps outdated, with the way the public services are currently set up?

I work a lot with organisations across the world in the public and private sectors and I find that structure, within organisations, is often overstated in terms of its importance as to how organisations operate. I think that structures find a way of bending, leaning and adapting without having to be readdressed or restructured. At that level of government departments and what they’re set up to do, I don’t think there’s a need for fundamental change there.

But I do think there’s a broader need to think differently. For example, the presumption from 30 years ago that, for example, tackling homelessness was the job of government departments, or that tackling education was the job of government departments, needs to be rethought. What you’ve seen now is a proliferation of public purpose, community, not-for-profit and commercial organisations that can take over from what public service used to do traditionally. The question now is about who is best placed to meet the needs of citizens and communities. Let’s not presume that it’s a public service department that needs to solve the problem, let’s think about who’s there now and able to respond – regardless of sector.

We are seeing the public service under unprecedented attack in the USA. How do public servants maintain their impartiality and do their jobs under such difficult conditions and how do they deal with the longer-term change that their politicians are getting advice from many sources, not just the public service?

Part of my answer is to say I don’t know because the rule book has been thrown away in recent years, particularly in the recent months. I feel that what’s going on in the US is a test case all public servants around the world should be looking towards.

Public servants are here for the long-term, or at least the public service as an institution is, so there’s something important about how they see the role they have to play in holding a course for a longer term than the next electoral cycle, and the courage it takes to think about the longevity of things. All of which I recognise is very, very difficult.

I think we need to keep our eyes on the US, but we need to think about what fundamentally is different, enduring and valuable about the public service and how do we hang on to that? That’s not a great answer but it’s genuinely difficult in this current context.

What are the core skills that public servants need to make a positive impact in this environment?

Keeping a clear head around the evidence base for what it is you’re proposing or recommending. Arguably that’s been enhanced by the increasing availability of data and what we can do with it, so one skill is being really clear about being evidence-based and being very capable about our use of data.

The second thing is to be highly connected to or aware of these elements in the operating environment that are changing. I think that means being a very outward-looking public servant whereas 20 or 30 years ago we could afford to be much more inward-looking.

The legitimacy that public servants have now comes from a more complex web of interest groups and so if you’re a public servant you need to be more politically astute. The old idea that public servants should be politically impartial is still true but they need to be much more politically aware and astute and savvy in order to execute what they’re doing.

We’ve probably lost some of the fundamental features of leadership which are about showing courage and stepping forward in pursuit of the things that we think are right. For public servants, that is about finding the courage in themselves to recommend what’s right, to bring the body of their analysis to back that up, and not being pushed aside by political or other pressures from saying what is, for them, important and right.

Surveys continually show a decline in trust in governments and other institutions. Is that irreversible? And if it is, how do public services work in that environment?

I’ve got a view on trust which is a little bit different to the one that I think most people might adopt, although it’s an issue where more than one narrative can exist at once. What I would challenge is the narrative that the decline in trust is a bad thing. The arrival of the internet and the arrival of social media and extremely powerful search engines and now AI, have meant that members of the public can suddenly become incredibly well-informed in ways that they weren’t 30 years ago.

So, the conduct of governments and the public service and the business is made much more transparent, and the inevitable consequence of that is that the public will be much more questioning of those institutions that hold power. You now have a population that is more challenging, more questioning, more engaged, more willing to put public services in a position of having to offer great accountability.

I recognise that’s not the end of the story because at the same time we do need to have trust in those institutions that are spending our money etc, but I don’t think it’s all bad. Public servants need to toughen themselves and recognise that the more public servants are held accountable, the more public servants are going to have to understand what they’re doing themselves, to question themselves, and to be sure when they deliver something that it’s being done in the best way possible.

You’ve co-written a history of the punk movement (The Truth of Revolution, Brother: An Exploration of the Philosophy of Punk)– which might be seen as an unusual interest for a public sector expert – is there anything that public servants can learn from the punk movement?

One of the other books I wrote was called Never Mind the Bosses – a skit on the Sex Pistols album, Never Mind the Bollocks – and that was about in part what I was saying about the value in the decline of trust, which is it generates questioning of public institutions which essentially is what punk was doing.

Punk was questioning, it was pushing back, it was shouting back at public institutions and that makes public institutions self-reflect and be more accountable. There’s a connection in my mind between what punks were doing and what we see happening now as a result of the internet and challenging of deference towards public institutions.

There’s also something that sits at the heart of the punk ethic, which is this notion of DIY, Do It Yourself. The idea was you don’t have to come from the right background to progress in life, or studied violin for years to make music. You can just pick up an instrument and do it, you can create your own record label, or your own magazines. Punks did all of those things and there was a level of ingenuity and resourcefulness and experimentation and hubris and kind of hope that was built into all of that.

I think there’s something that the public service could learn from that. Could the public service be more inventive and experimental? Could it try things that it hasn’t done before and recognise that the initial iteration won’t be beautiful, but the subsequent iterations could be game-changing.

I think most people would agree that innovation is something that the public sector needs to do more of. How do public sector leaders encourage people to do new things or try new ways of working?

I actually think that we have been innovating in the public service for some time. It does happen quite a bit, but it probably doesn’t happen at the pace that we want it to and the scale we want it to.

There’s a whole range of things that can be tried. For example, experimentation in de-risked ways where we encourage people to try out new things in areas where the results won’t be too dramatic if it doesn’t work too well. I like the idea of us trying to encourage greater learning and taking different perspectives from the commercial sector or from the not-for-profit sector. There are also things we can do around removing some of the long chains of hierarchies within public services, or creating units within units that are flexible and changeable and can do different things, rather than the same thing they have been doing for decades.

All of these things do happen and are happening. But I work a lot with commercial organisations and they don’t regard innovation and keeping up with new developments as a kind of ‘we’ll do it if we have time’, it’s central to what they’re about. There’s something important about how the leaders in public service organisations convey to their people in that it’s not: ‘let’s innovate if we have the time or innovate in a small number of areas’, but it’s ‘this is part of our DNA, actually innovation is us, it’s not just something we occasionally do’.

Finally, what have you personally learnt from 15 years of teaching the EFP? 

That the work that public servants do has got immeasurably harder in the last 15 years and almost everything that Public Servants have come to take for granted has changed, at least over the last 20-30 years. There was once a notion that the expertise of public servants would be just taken for granted whereas now it’s contested on a daily basis.

The value of programs like the EFP has grown much more over time because I think you need a place where people who are very experienced can come together to say ‘what the hell is going on?’ I don’t mean that to be as dramatic as it sounds but so much is changing. You need a space for people to get out of the work environment to talk to very smart peers and say what do we do with this? How do we respond to this? In a way which we just don’t have the opportunity to do normally.

The EFP program is not simply about building capabilities and building skills it’s about a complete space to rethink what we are here to do, what our value is and how we respond to this very changeable environment. I’ve learnt these opportunities and programs are needed more than they were 15 years ago.

I think that the last thing that I’ve learnt is that the value of diversity and I mean that in the very fullest sense of the word. We get a particular perspective on life and work from what we do but to really test ourselves and build our capability we need to have difference presented to us. Encountering difference is one of the most powerful ways to think about whether what we’re doing is good enough, and it invites us to see a picture that we would otherwise only see partially.

ANZSOG’s Executive Fellows Program is designed for high performing leaders and public sector senior executives, such as: Deputy Chief Executive Officers (CEO), Deputy Director-Generals, Deputy Secretaries, and executives two levels below CEO, Director-General or Secretary. Applications are now open for the 2025 delivery, which will be led by Robin Ryde and features a range of guest presenters. The orientation session will be held on 7 July and the program consists of two immersive five-day modules, in Sydney from 14-18 July, and in Brisbane from 21-25 July.