Ep 7. How can I be ready for the future of work in the public service?

The public service is changing fast. From new technologies to different ways of working, it can feel overwhelming to keep up. So, how do you prepare for what's coming next?

IPAA Insiders Host Jo Rose sits down with two guests who've been thinking deeply about this challenge. They share practical ideas about staying relevant, embracing change, and finding opportunities to innovate from within government.

Key Insights

• Why the mindset you bring to work matters more than any specific skill
• How to create space for new ideas in your team or department
• What past waves of change can teach us about navigating the current moment
• Simple ways to start experimenting with emerging technologies
• Why curiosity beats expertise when it comes to preparing for the future

Guests
Megan Maletic - Partner at Deloitte Consulting and lead consulting partner for NSW Government. With a background spanning nursing, community health education, and senior public sector roles, Megan brings unique insights on transformation and change management in government.

Mark Webb - President of IPAA NSW and Chief Executive of Parliamentary Services. With an engineering and computer science background, Mark offers a historical perspective on technological change and practical advice for navigating emerging technologies.

Whether you're early in your career or a seasoned leader, this conversation offers actionable insights you can apply right away.

No overwhelming predictions - just honest talk about how to thrive in a changing workplace.

SHOW CREDITS
Host: Jo Rose
Writers: Alessia Campagna, Nicola Hardy and Jo Rose
Producer and Editor: Alessia Campagna
Technical Producer: Anthony Watson
Executive Producers: Jo Rose and Nicola Hardy

Music Credits:
Let The Good Times Roll: Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/ra/let-good-times-roll
License code: DNAIHKYCKOUU6HBT

Enchanted Puzzle: Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/andrey-rossi/enchanted-puzzle
License code: YTN0OYX8RBDDUQ73

Easy Flow: Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/hybridas/easy-flow
License code: R2FTWOYRCB7YOW21

Not That Easy: Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/not-that-easy
License code: MYQOVXXWAFZULECH

On Tiptoes: Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/on-tiptoes

We would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the podcast is taking place today. We pay our deep respects to all Elders past, present and emerging. We would also like to extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.

Transcript

Episode 7 – The future of work in the public service

Play Tape | Acknowledgement of Country

IPAA NSW acknowledges the traditional owners of the lands and waters this podcast is recorded on and pay our respects to elders past and present.  Through sharing stories on IPAA Insiders, we pay homage to the rich story telling history of the world’s oldest living culture, the traditional custodians of the lands on which we live, work and play. We extend our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People listening today.

Music Break

Standard Intro Script – Music Underlay

Welcome to IPAA Insiders, the podcast that takes the topics that are top of mind and shares unique perspectives and actionable advice from senior leaders, blue sky thinkers, and IPAA members across the sector.

Play Tape – You’re listening to IPAA Insiders voice roll

Jo Rose 

Hi, I'm Jo Rose, Host of IPAA Insiders. I'm also the CEO of IPAA NSW. And at the time of recording, we are organising our 90th birthday celebration.

As we’ve been preparing, I came across what I affectionately call IPAA NSW’s birth certificate. 

It's the address given at the inaugural NSW Meeting of Public Servants by The Honourable Sir Phillip Whistler-Street, the state's Lieutenant Governor, on 3rd of October 1935. 

In it, he talks about the value of public servants coming together to share, and I quote, "the stores of knowledge and thought and experience which are found among the members."

That principle of sharing knowledge and experience, of connecting people and ideas, to help each other navigate the ins and outs of public service life has remained unchanged since 1935. 

What has changed is the NATURE of the challenges we're helping our members face and the ways in which we DO the work.

While our commitment to the NSW Public Service hasn't changed, the way we've delivered our courses, resources and events certainly has.

These changes have always reflected what's happening across the entire public service at the time.

From economic reform to technological revolutions and the global pandemic, IPAA’s always adapted to meet the moment.

It's safe to say that the public service is changing at a remarkably fast pace.

Departments are implementing emerging technologies, agencies are redesigning service delivery, and we're all being asked to think and act more innovatively within our roles.

It's an exciting time, but it can also be daunting.

In today's episode, we want to explore a few ideas that can help you prepare for what's coming next.

Episode 7 – How can I be ready for the future of work in the public service?

Megan Maletic 

My name is Megan Maletic and I am a partner at Deloitte Consulting. I actually am the lead consulting partner for New South Wales Government. So from a sector perspective, my specialty is the New South Wales Government. I'm incredibly passionate about it. But I actually sit within our human capital team, which is really the part of our consulting practice that looks at the people side of transformation and that spans everything from change management, capability, org design, leadership and everything else in between culture. And so it's a really interesting place for those, guess, two Venn diagrams to come together of New South Wales public sector and people related elements of that.

Jo Rose 

Megan's journey started with her parents, who met working in the public service back in the 1970s.

Growing up in a household committed to public service shaped her understanding that government work isn't just a job, it's genuine service to the community.

When she was young, her mum became quite unwell, and the family experienced firsthand the support of the healthcare system. 

That experience led Megan to study nursing, straight out of school. 

But as she progressed through her degree, she began asking a different question: What if people didn’t need to end up in hospitals in the first place? What if they could live healthier lives and reduce the strain on the system?

With that in mind, she transferred into a Bachelor of Community Education, focusing on health promotion.

This led to senior public sector positions where she implemented reform, including Road Safety Regulations for VicRoads.

After 10 years in the sector, Megan took all that impactful experience and moved into consulting.

It's that combination of deep public sector experience and transformation expertise that makes Megan’s perspective on preparing for the future of work so valuable.

Megan Maletic 

But I've really, I guess, discovered an opportunity to try to do accelerated transformation and change when I moved into consulting. How do I help the system find those opportunities to truly create change? BAU is hard. I'm sure many people experience that at the moment when they're trying to do their day job and they're trying to do transformational work. And so I've thought, well, I can hope lean into that transformation side of things, create positive change, help those workforces to enable a better BAU for them, which is how I've ended up really in Deloitte and into public sector as a focus. And I do still really love just actually being in the offices and with public sector employees doing that work, you know, really with my sleeves rolled up and right into it.

Jo Rose

We know innovation and transformation are critical for the public sector in NSW. We see it in the medical advances from NSW Health,

In the way new technologies are being used in Transport and Service NSW,

And in clever policy design, whether that's climate change, housing affordability or other big challenges.

True transformation is about fundamentally rethinking how we deliver services

solve problems, and create value for the community. 

It’s what turns a great idea into something that actually works in the real world.

And innovation without transformation or meaningful, system change? 

Well, you might be adding something new but nothing really changes. 

Our current pace and quality of innovation aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. 

What’s more, I’d say it’s essential for the future of public service delivery. 

And this has very real implications for the way that we work.

One key way we can sustain this innovation is through what I call intrapreneurship. 

Intrapreneurship is just like entrepreneurship but it happens inside an organisation. It's the same spirit of curiosity, creativity, and drive, but directed from within.

We often think of entrepreneurs as having big personalities. 

But most entrepreneurs, real ones, are people driven by purpose. They love the process of creating something new. These are all qualities I recognise in so many within the public service.

Fostering intrapreneurship starts with something simple: seeing that something could be better, fixed, or maybe even entirely reimagined. Rather than letting the moment pass, the intrapreneur asks, "HOW do I make that change?"

I know that it’s a bit of a buzzword for some people. And while the concept has existed for a long time, the label is still new and sometimes misunderstood. Perhaps it’s a little like “mobility,” which has been linked to redundancy or restructuring lately, even though it’s really more about career growth and the flexibility to develop new skills.

Side note here. We’ve got a great episode on Mobility – it’s Episode number 5 so make sure you check it out.

But back to the topic at hand… we want to demystify intrapreneurship so everyone can participate. And show how any Portfolio or Agency that embraces it, stands to benefit.

This is exactly what Megan has been thinking about in her work. When I asked her about intrapreneurship in the public sector, she had a refreshingly practical take.

Megan Maletic 

I mean, I think for starters, the word intrapreneurship is challenging enough to pronounce. Let's just start there. But also let's just recognize that it is, I guess, a concept that is not new, I don't think, to government, but perhaps the word is. The behaviour itself, I think, has been something that we've observed for a really long time. For me, the definition of intrapreneurship is the ability to create create solutions internally that effectively improve, whether it's a process, an experience, a context that helps move it, I guess, from its current context to its future context. And that's leveraging knowledge, experience and points of view internally within your organisation to do that.

Jo Rose

So, if this mindset already exists in parts of government, the question becomes, What does it take to support intrapreneurship in a more deliberate, structured way?

Megan Maletic 

I think there's two component parts to successful intrapreneurship. One is the conditions to foster it and two are the capabilities within the employees and leaders to do it effectively. so I think creating the conditions is kind of step one. How in your organization are you creating those moments where people can connect and converse openly? often in a psychologically safe way to articulate where things aren't going well because often it requires a spark in the how do we improve something that's not going well or indeed just a great idea but in order to sort of solve for that first element you need to have the space to be able to call things out that maybe aren't going so well and create the space and the conditions where that's okay to talk about and okay to share and and really it can be a simple as do we need to set up a regular meeting conversation where we ideate. It's just an open conversation where thoughts are open and welcome, diversity of thought is fostered and that we do something with those insights because I think that's the other critical part where people think I've contributed some thinking and I feel like we're on the momentum train and we're going to go somewhere but unless it's captured and fosteredpeople lose trust in those conditions. 

Jo Rose

Once that environment is in place, where people feel safe speaking up and sharing ideas, it really comes down to capability. What skills help people take initiative, solve problems, and turn ideas into action?

Megan Maletic

The capabilities themselves, I think, really stem in a couple of buckets. One, I mean, we can talk about visionary thinking, but what is visionary thinking? know, I think it's really for me, it's thinking about what the possibilities could be. And that doesn't have to be, you know, this grand 10 year vision, you know, that everyone needs to buy into, can be actually, I think things could be improved in these following ways. So, and that can feel visionary, a little v visionary perhaps, but I think that's really key. I think collaboration is the sort of crux of it all. How do we bring people together with diverse thinking, with diverse thoughts and collaborate and really foster, that as a behaviour and a way of working. And collaboration capability, I think comes from good communication skills.

Megan Maletic

It comes from good listening skills at the heart of it. And I think it also really is that sort of open mindset to change an opportunity. The final thing I'll quickly say about that is it also relies on risk aversion. There is a sort of propensity for risk. And I understand why that's the case. But actually shifting our risk aversion to a place where we pilot or we test or we do little experiments and see how they go and that that's not punitive if it doesn't go well that it's actually something that you know we we explore the capability around you know agility of thought agility and behaviour I think is really probably key.

Jo Rose

Megan brings that outside-in consulting perspective, but I wanted to hear from someone living this change from within the public service. Is it just a buzzword we’ve borrowed from the consulting space, and how does intrapraneurship actually translate for the public sector? 

So, I called IPAA NSW President Mark Webb, who's also the Chief Executive of Parliamentary Services, to get his take.

Mark Webb 

Internal consulting, whether it be that or... Intrapreneurship, however you want to refer to it, that it is a different mindset to sort of look at the problems facing the public sector, facing the people of New South Wales and thinking differently and creatively about how to pull together sort of solutions and maybe things that are a little bit out of box rather than letting somebody else do that and then just focusing on the implementation. There are some inherent tensions in that.

Jo Rose

Mark sees intrapreneurship not just as a mindset shift, but as a creative response to the challenges facing the state. Like Megan, he also brings up the idea of risk. But here’s the catch: while the private sector celebrates risk, things look a little different when you’re operating under political scrutiny.

Mark Webb 

If you talk to anyone about entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship in the private sector, there'll be phrases like fail cheap, fail fast, move to the next thing, learn what you can. But there's this real failure tolerance in the language of that kind of work. I find that really quite fascinating because there is a political reality to working in the public sector.

which moves more towards a risk minimisation perspective. And sometimes that tolerance of failure versus political risk minimisation tension, I think, can get in the way. My best advice is... to be working with your senior managers, and if you are a senior manager or a senior leader in the organisation, working with your minister to really put the parameters around what failure tolerance looks like in the spaces that you're working. Have those conversations upfront, not once a perceived failure is happening. Ministers are excellent public communicators on the whole, and if they are prepped for it,

The idea of going out and saying, yes, I have taken an entrepreneurial approach to this. We have tried a series of ideas, some of which have worked, some which haven't, but this is what we've learned from them. This is how it's shaping our forward agenda. There is a pathway to communicating that publicly, which most ministers can get on board with if they're prepped for it. But the time to have that conversation is not after there's been a...article in the paper saying this initiative failed in inverted commas, then everyone goes into damage control mode and it's kind of too late. You almost want to prep for what the failure states will look like in advance because failure is a necessary part of that kind of internal consulting, that kind of intrepreneurshipthere are techniques for innovation and there is a whole bunch of stuff that you do, but I personally think grappling with what does productive failure look like in the public sector is probably the biggest individual barrier to us getting to a point where we can do that kind of work more solidly into the future.

<MUSIC BREAK>

Jo Rose

I think it’s fair to say that you can’t talk about innovation and the future of work in the public service without talking about automation and AI. I asked Mark how he thought this new tech fits into the future of public service.

Mark Webb 

One of the big topics in public administration at the moment is emerging technology, how it's going to affect roles into the future. I think some listeners might know that my undergraduate degrees in engineering and computer science. I started off my career in the technology space at uni in the early 90s through the mid 90s. And through that time, there was a lot of talk about desktop computers being the death of jobs in the industry. Like you're saying every single person is going to have a computer on their desk and people are going to be using them all the time? no, our systems will not handle this. The way we do work will not handle this. This is going to be an absolute disaster. So, I think the first observation I have about the current wave of emerging technology is that it is not the first wave of emerging technology which people have worried will completely destroy the fabric of the way that the public sector works. These things come in waves all the way through. do you jump on early? you let other people take those early risks?. These are issues that the public sector have been facing for a long time. So I guess when I, and this makes me feel a bit old, but when I sort of first start listening to people talk about AI, my first instinct is to say, yes, this is the latest wave in what will be a. continuing series of waves. Probably after this, there'll be holograms that will do all our work for us and everyone will be concerned about that. Who knows what the future will bring, but there is going to be always change coming through.

Jo Rose

Holograms aside, I like how Mark has defined this period as a “new wave of change.” When we put it in that context, the question becomes, what do I need to know to help me navigate this?

Mark Webb 

I was listening to someone much smarter than I am, much more knowledgeable about AI talk a few months ago. And one of the things they said, which really stuck with me is that AI is not necessarily coming for your job, but it is coming for your job description. And the way you do your work could fundamentally shift. I think sometimes the starting point for these conversations can be, is my job going to completely go or?  or do I have to find a completely different line of work or a completely different skill sets and move into a completely different area? Whereas I really think that the first instinct should be, how is this going to shift and change the way that I do my current job? What are the problems that I solve at the moment or that my kind of work solves? And how could that be adjusted by the use of AI?

Mark Webb 

If you go back far enough in the public sector, back before computers when everything was typed out and had to be done in triplicate and there were typing pools and the like, and if you wanted to edit a document, was a pretty much re-write, re-type the entire document kind of world. You can imagine that someone who was having to re-type the same letter for the fifth time because their boss kept changing their mind about exactly what word they wanted to use on line three and there wasn't enough white out in the world to sort of fix it on the fly. The advent of a desktop computer and a word processing package would have taken that really boring part of their job, automated it in a way that let them focus on the content of the letter and this is telling the story getting the point across in the way that we want to and that we need to and move into that more exciting space. There seems to be so much potential for AI to automate some of the things that are not particularly exciting about the work that we do.

Jo Rose

I often think that most new technologies make a lot of huge promises early on – massive productivity shifts, fundamentally new ways of doing things. These new waves of technology promise to automate the most mundane parts of our jobs. But they also have their limitations.

Mark Webb

The potential for AI to hallucinate, to make up answers to questions and to say it in a particularly confident way. every single person listening to this has that friend, that friend that always has an answer to everything and says it with such confidence that you think it must be right. It absolutely must be right because they're so confident. It's very disappointing to find out that they're probably only right 50 % of the time. AI reminds me of that friend.

It says things with such confidence, so definitive in its answers to things. I think the ability to critically engage with that and evaluate it, what is this AI platform being trained on? Where does that data go? How could that affect the way that it comes together and brings together answers? All these kinds of things, all of these limitations, all of this practical work, this is where I think a lot of the work in the public sector will be in the next little while.

Jo Rose

So, how does Mark think about AI, particularly in his role as Chief Executive of Parliamentary Services?

Mark Webb

I've just set up a flexible team that is just going to play with AI in a parliamentary space to try and really pull together what are the benefits, what are the potential, the opportunities, the limitations, how would that all work in a parliamentary environment. And doing that in a way that doesn't necessarily go straight to outcomes, but really helps us understand the technology and what we might do with it going forward.

Jo Rose

After hearing Mark's take on AI reshaping job descriptions rather than eliminating jobs, I had to ask the obvious follow-up question every listener is probably thinking. What should I be focusing on to stay relevant?

Mark Webb 

I think is a really interesting area. mean, I could talk about things like prompt engineering and AI and, and the various things, but I'm not the biggest expert in that kind of space. What I've noticed in terms of the people that are thriving in this new space are the people that are showing intellectual curiosity, people who are open to the idea that it is better for us to shape the change that is happening than have the change shape us further down the track. That kind of deep curiosity, how could this be used? How could it be used well?

What are the risks and limitations, but also what are the opportunities and the way forward? But people with a mindset that engage with the subject matter in that kind of way seem to be thriving in this new world. 

I've mentioned previously on the podcast that my original background was in engineering and computer science. And when I was doing those courses, they taught us a lot about the history of computing. Even though I was doing the course in the early nineties, they were telling us about things that happened in the sixties and in the seventies and exposing us to computer equipment that by any modern standard seemed ancient. We literally had punch cards that we had to put into machines to load them up. And at first I thought to myself, why on earth are we learning about all this kind of stuff? Why are we doing all this kind of work? This is the 1990s, you know, we should be listening to Eminem while we write advanced software for our new Windows 95 machines, 

But what I realized eventually is that understanding how something is put together in a way helps you understand how to best use it. So in terms of specific skills, absolutely. How do large language models work? What's the best way of constructing prompt so that you can get the best out of an AI system? What applications can have into particular domains? All of that kind of stuff is incredibly important. But I think intellectual curiosity and the ability to really think openly about how things might change and the ability to shape that change, they're going to be the characteristics of the successful people moving forward, not any particular course that you do on AI 

Jo Episode Summary

So, where does that leave us? Well, I think the answer to "How can I be ready for the future of work in the public service?" isn't about mastering every new technology or predicting exactly what's coming next.

Intellectual curiosity is the most important skill we can bring to the future. Not technical expertise, but the mindset to keep asking questions, exploring new ideas, and being open to change.

Whether you're exploring AI tools, fostering innovation in your team, or simply questioning how things could be done better, you're already preparing for what comes next.

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Preparing for the future of work is such a huge topic and I know we only discussed a few ideas in our time together, but that's by design.

Part of the joy in leading IPAA NSW is that we are in daily dialogue with our members and I wanted this episode to act as conversation starters.

Take these ideas back to your teams, discuss them with your colleagues, and see where they lead you.

And if you're keen to dive deeper into these topics, check out our events, courses, and resources at nsw.ipaa.org.au.

See you next time for our final episode of season one.