A path to transformative Public Services
As Diamond Sponsor of Innovation 2025, we engaged with leaders across government to explore the future of public service. In this article, five of our public sector experts share their key takeaways, covering leadership, strategy, culture, storytelling, and AI to offer practical insights on building a more agile, outcomes-focused state.
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In today’s rapidly evolving public sector landscape, innovation can no longer be viewed as a buzzword – it must be seen as a strategic necessity. This was the prevailing sentiment at Innovation 2025, where our team engaged with leaders across government and public services to discuss the complex challenges ahead.
A shared ambition emerged: to build a more “productive and agile” state.
We asked our Q5 attendees to share their key takeaway on how to make that a reality.
Leadership mindset for delivering bigger outcomes
Leaders’ mindset is crucial for delivering a different kind of outcome in public services. This approach focuses on the end results rather than the process, ensuring that services meet the needs of citizens effectively. To cultivate this mindset, public sector leaders must encourage creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to experiment. By prioritising outcomes, governments can design services that are more responsive and impactful.
Key strategies include:
- Questions: Having the confidence to ask questions is an effective move as a leader, as it gives people the stimulus and permission to begin thinking for themselves and collaborating on how you could go about this challenge.
- Connections: If your ‘circle of trust’ is generally confined to your own organisation (even your own function), that can be a barrier when it comes to building the broader alliances needed to deliver the Missions. Your network tells you something about who you are as a leader – and who you might need to become.
- Experiments: The Missions are described as bringing a “re-wiring’’ of Government. That feels daunting – given that any one of us is a small part in a huge system. So where can you begin? Experimentation is a powerful way to learn by doing, to control the risk, and take steps towards the end solution.
Adopting this mindset enables leaders to develop the agency and empowerment required across the public sector, crucial for driving innovation. It creates an environment where employees feel valued, trusted, and capable of making decisions. Moreover, by enhancing agency, public sector leaders can ensure that employees are motivated and engaged, leading to better service delivery.
Is Leadership an interest of yours? Check out Tim’s talk on Leading BAU and missions together, here.
Building an outcomes-based operating model for government
Understanding how the UK Government should deliver the Missions and where they can draw inspiration from, are harder questions than aligning on what they could and should do. Major programme delivery has been a challenge for governments all over the world, and there is no direct comparison for the UK Government to emulate.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t learn from others – the Vision Realization Programs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are useful in their scale, and governments such as Estonia offer insights in agile and innovative strategic delivery.
Perhaps the best example though comes from an arm’s length body of government – NASA, who established arguably the world’s most effective outcomes-based operating model during the Apollo Programme. The organisation was tasked with one mission – “to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely”. They configured their whole organisation, down to the values and culture, around this. Even the janitor saw it as his role to “put a man on the moon”.
Our view is that the UK Government can and should create its own version of 1960s NASA – an organisation built specifically to deliver the five missions, managed at Cabinet Office level, which is responsible for breaking down the siloes that have affected our national programmes for so long, with the accountability, resources, and capability to drive change.
A Strategy Management Office (SMO) can play this pivotal role. An SMO ensures that all initiatives, stakeholders, and delivery elements align with the overarching Missions, providing a structured approach to managing and executing strategies. This office acts as a central hub for coordinating delivery efforts, tracking performance, and building and maintaining accountability.
Adam Lewis, Principal Consultant
Learn more about Strategy Management Offices in Adam’s talk, here.
Building a supportive, inclusive culture
Organisational culture plays a critical role in determining the success of innovation efforts – particularly in complex public sector environments where fragmentation, siloed thinking, and limited psychological safety often hold back progress. When teams operate in isolation or fear the consequences of failure, creativity and collaboration suffer. To overcome these barriers, leaders must take deliberate steps to foster a culture that is supportive, inclusive, and aligned with the principles of innovation.
Key strategies to build such a culture include:
- Promoting open communication – Encouraging transparent dialogue across all levels of the organisation to break down silos and enable knowledge-sharing.
- Building trust and psychological Safety – Creating an environment where individuals feel safe to share bold ideas, challenge assumptions, and take thoughtful risks without fear of blame or reprisal.
- Fostering inclusivity – Proactively including diverse voices in decision-making to drive better outcomes and ensure solutions reflect the communities they serve.
When these cultural conditions are in place, they create the foundation for a productive and agile state – one that can embrace technology, adopt digital public infrastructure, and respond more effectively to citizen needs. A cohesive culture not only supports innovation but also enables systemic improvements: streamlining processes, reducing bureaucracy, and improving user experiences across services.
By actively reducing fragmentation and promoting better coordination between agencies, government organisations can minimise duplication, close service gaps, and deliver more seamless and efficient outcomes for the public.
Importance of success stories and lessons learnt
Sharing success stories and lessons learned is essential for embedding a culture of continuous improvement – one where people are encouraged to take informed risks, learn from experience, and embrace innovation as part of their daily work.
Success stories offer more than celebration – they provide proof of what’s possible and show the real-world value of new approaches. Lessons from failure offer critical insights that can sharpen decision-making, reduce avoidable mistakes, and build organisational resilience.
Importantly, this practice helps normalise failure as a necessary part of innovation, creating psychological safety across teams.
To fully realise the benefits, organisations should consider the following practices:
- Documenting and showcasing impact – Capturing compelling stories of innovation – including the journey, not just the outcomes – to inspire and educate others across the organisation.
- Structured post-initiative reviews – Embedding reflective reviews into project lifecycles to systematically capture what worked, what didn’t, and why. These should involve diverse perspectives to surface blind spots and generate richer insights.
- Accessible knowledge-sharing platforms – Establishing centralised, searchable repositories for case studies, playbooks, and lessons learned to support reuse and scale. This can be complemented by regular peer learning sessions or innovation forums.
- Storytelling as a leadership tool – Encouraging leaders to model openness by sharing their own learning journeys, successes, and setbacks – helping shift mindsets from risk aversion to constructive experimentation.
- Recognition and incentives – Celebrating individuals and teams who contribute to shared learning, reinforcing the idea that knowledge-sharing is not only valued but rewarded.
When these practices are embedded, organisations accelerate learning, avoid reinventing the wheel, and empower people to lead change. They also strengthen pride and purpose in public service -connecting day-to-day innovation efforts with broader impact on citizens and communities.
Kate Carmichael, Head of Public Sector
Organisational design that empowers employees to experiment with AI
Organisational design that empowers people to experiment with AI can act as a powerful catalyst for innovation. When employees are encouraged and supported to explore emerging technologies, organisations unlock new levels of creativity, efficiency, and problem-solving capability.
But they need support to enable this. Government organisations can start by creating:
- Integrated AI frameworks – Embedding AI into existing workflows through adaptable, scalable frameworks that align with organisational objectives.
- Cross-functional AI teams – Forming diverse, multidisciplinary teams to drive AI experimentation and adoption across departments.
- AI governance and ethics committees – Establishing clear oversight mechanisms to ensure responsible, ethical, and transparent implementation of AI technologies.
Empowering teams with AI doesn’t just automate routine tasks – it frees up time for strategic thinking, innovation, and high-value activities. It equips people with data-driven insights to make faster, smarter decisions. And crucially, by giving employees the autonomy to test and apply AI in their own context, organisations uncover novel solutions that top-down strategies often miss.
Ken Earle, Central Government and Agencies Lead
Check out our podcast on Applications of Gen AI in the Public Sector, here.
Conclusion
The themes from Innovation 2025 made one thing clear: creating a more responsive, efficient, and innovative public sector demands action across five fronts – fostering an outcomes mindset, delivering strategy effectively, building adaptive organisational cultures, learning from what works (and what doesn’t), and empowering employees through AI.
We’re already working with public sector organisations to turn these principles into practice – whether through operating model redesign, leadership development, strategy execution support, or culture change programmes.
If you’re facing similar challenges, we’d welcome a conversation about how we can help, contact us here.
We are all about organisational health, which separates good organisations from the great. Whether our clients are at the top of their game (and want to remain there) or are in ‘turnaround’ mode, we all need to work on our organisational health.
Whatever the situation, be it a strategic conundrum, a market opportunity, or an operational gripe, we combine the art and science of organisational health to help our clients improve and excel.
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