By the APS Academy
The APS Academy sat down with Letitia Hope, Deputy Secretary for the Department of Social Services, to have a yarn about her experience as a Sir James Wolfensohn Public Service Scholarship winner. The scholarship to the Harvard Kennedy Business School in the United States was established in 2012 and is awarded to senior Australian public servants with an aim to promote the development and delivery of good public policy.
What made THIS the right time to apply for the opportunity?
I was originally selected in June 2022, and was enrolled to go in October 2022. However, with the then change of government, their key priorities on constitutional reform and the particular role I was doing at the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA), coupled with my growing family of grand babies, I decided to defer to the following year in May 2023.
I’m convinced there is never a perfect time to take on this type of opportunity. People often have something big going on in their lives either personally or professionally or both - and of course you need to consider all aspects of your world before you take something like this on. For example, I wouldn't have applied for this type of opportunity 15 years ago when I had three young kids, as I wouldn't have been able to or wanted to commit to being away overseas from my family for over a month. I think that you need to make sure that you know, you and your family, are in a space where you can commit fully to the program. It is a big commitment for you and a big commitment for them as well.
In terms of your professional considerations - there is never an ideal time. There will always be another priority, another deliverable, another wicked policy problem. However, I do firmly believe that is where we as leaders in the public sector need to make sure we ‘lean into’ to support people to develop, grow and release them to go and experience these kinds of learning investment opportunities. I am certainly very grateful for the Executive leadership and sponsorship I received from Jody Broun (Chief Executive Officer at the National Indigenous Australians Agency), Glynn Davis (Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) and Ray Griggs (Secretary of the Department of Social Services).
The timing for me to apply was serendipitous in some ways. I recently had conversations with Secretary Davis, the then APS Commissioner, and a few other senior colleagues – I felt that I was ready for a move or something different to stretch and reenergise me. I had been in my role for over five years at that point. There was a strong consensus that this type of learning experience would be beneficial for me and so I put my hat in the ring, and I was fortunate enough to be selected.
I believe we are always learning, and we are always teaching in every role that we do, and I think you've got to continue to lean into things that feel a little unfamiliar and scary. To me the scholarship experience and going to Harvard did feel a little scary. Having not done any real formal education for nearly a decade and to travel across the other side of the world for a month to do it - felt both exciting and a little scary. I think it is easy to get in the momentum of working hard every day and sometimes that momentum doesn’t allow you to break the routine of busyness and think deeply. Having something like the Harvard experience was a great and positive disruptor, which really challenged my pre-set thought processes and ways of working.
A few things I’d say about the course itself - Harvard is hard work. They load you up with an extraordinary volume of the most deep and considered material. It feels a lot like being in Senate Estimates for a solid straight month. There is a huge volume of material to digest and no opportunity to skip any of it as they will and do ‘cold call’ in lectures seeking your views on this or that issue. So, you have to engage with and know the material, but it is an incredible learning experience.
That said, the privilege of doing this scholarship is not lost on me. I mean seriously – when, ever in your adult life do you ever get to spend a whole month at a prestigious school; full of thought leaders; with 70 international colleagues who understand your job intimately because they do the same job for their country; with a single focus and responsibility to think deeply, share widely and contest robustly the material in front of you; while living in and experiencing a foreign culture? It is like ‘boot camp’ for your brain! The experience was such an incredible intellectual indulgence and a real privilege.
What APS craft, skills and knowledge have you already acquired to make you ready for / better able to benefit from, the Harvard program?
The Harvard Kennedy Business School is designed to enhance the mastery of public administration and leadership, policymaking, program management and public delivery – it is the core of their mission and curriculum, and it is tailored for government officials from across the world. They approach their teaching and your learning through deeply researched and considered academic theories, practical and relatable case studies, forum debates and rigorous discussion, along with a few kinaesthetic field trips for a sensory experience, which is a bit fun.
As you work through all of these various methods, you draw on and enhance all six of the APS craft – Integrity; Working in Government; Engagement & Partnerships; Implementation & Service; Strategic Policy & Evaluation; and Leadership & Management.
You deep dive into case studies on real people, dealing with real situations and wicked problems within a range of geospatial political and socio-economic environments. You effectively step into their shoes and become one of the actors in the story, applying all your own personal lived and learned experience to the reconstruction of the public administration challenge that is before you.
For example, one unit was a ‘negotiation masterclass’. Using some of the methods outlined about, Kessley Hong (Senior Harvard Lecturer), taught though the theory of negotiation and concluded the unit with each student being assigned a role in a practical negotiation simulation. Each participant was given a set of confidential negotiation criteria and performance metrics that had a scoring system and had to negotiate ‘Better best’ outcomes – there was of course a really clever scoring system. Besides a fist full of chocolate and bragging rights - the real value was in the working through a process that challenges your own bias and approach to negotiations. Of course, these are essential skills when working with your boss; your teams; your ministers; stakeholders; community; industry or with academia. This helps you hone into your mastery of the art and craft of being a public servant.
How does the opportunity accelerate or affect your future contribution as a public servant in the medium and longer term?
Whenever you do these kinds of deep, immersive experiences, particularly in a foreign country, it fundamentally changes your worldview. Your lens gets both wider and sharper at the same time. I think about my current role within the Australian Government with a much bigger frame and broader geopolitical context. I frequently zoom my thinking out wide and back in again to consider how things hang together or not; what are those elected in power are trying to balance, how does the public sector provide good administrative advice ensuring integrity, probity and impartiality?
When you hold a ‘bigger world view’ and explore different ways of ‘thinking, knowing, doing and being’ it helps you frame a much more sophisticated set of thinking and drives different kinds of conversation on policy and program options. You explore different problem-solving skills and reframing how you approach to the 'every day'.
One of the lasting things I got out of the Harvard course, was a pattern of introspection. As an individual, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter and as a public service leader. The program makes you think very deeply about yourself, your purpose, passion and practice.
However, in my experience 'The juice is totally worth the squeeze'. It squeezes you intellectually, on your leadership values, on our personhood and on your sleep. They approach their mental model of learning through ensuring your ‘whole self’ is present and that you are traversing all the different things that are happening, physical fatigue, intellectual stimulation and what is going on for yourself emotionally. It is a very supportive environment to learn in but, it is challenging.
Were there any return to service in Australia challenges that made the program benefits harder to realise? Were your agency / SES colleagues / the APS learning ecosystem ready to absorb the benefit of your learning?
Well, I didn’t want was to be one of those people who came back from Harvard saying, “Well at Harvard…”, or “When I was at Harvard…” But of course, you want to share your learnings and implement them in your daily practice, and I have certainly done that informally through my everyday work and formally through speaking at various leadership forums etc.
On your first day, your will receive a red leather journal/notebook. This is where I captured my class notes, learnings, references, thoughts and further areas of exploration. I go back to this book all the time and flick through my learnings, questions, comments and thoughts. This process encourages me to revisit that deep thinking and check on how I’m going with applying the lessons learned, in my every day.
This practice was something that I implemented as soon as I got back to work. Naturally when I first got back to work, I looked at the book daily - now I look at it once a week, but the value of that shouldn’t be understated. I grab a cup of tea and flick through and recollect aspects of my time there and think about how I can apply the learnings and experiences today. I also make time to talk with other Harvard alumni in Australia and abroad and continue to invest in the sharing and contesting of ideas. This practice continues to reshape the way I think about my career, what I do and how I do it and my life more broadly.
It is my philosophy that you always have something to learn, and you always have something to teach. It really doesn't matter what level you are or the role you are in in the public service. We are the custodians of our system, and it is our responsibility to make sure that the knowledge we have learned is handed onto those who work with us and will come after us. I see my role in the public sector - every role that I've had - as being a steward of that portfolio at that point in time, and that somebody did amazing work before I got there, and somebody is going to do amazing work when I leave. Therefore, stewardship and passing on knowledge is a really important part of what we do in our craft of being a public servant.
What is Department of Social Services doing in ‘place-based approaches’ and how can we link this into craft work?
The Department is leading a range of key initiatives in place-based approaches. A current example is the work we are doing in partnership with Treasury and the Australian Bureau of Statistics to develop and deliver the Targeting Entrenched Disadvantage (TED) package. The TED package is a $199.8 million integrated package to address entrenched and concentrated disadvantage, laying the foundations for community-led change and place-based partnerships that complement universal social service offerings. The package includes extending place-based initiatives; partnerships with philanthropy; developing a whole-of-government framework to tackle disadvantage; supporting social impact investing initiatives, including the design of a $100 million Outcomes Fund; and ensuring that communities can access local level data needed to drive change.
A key component of the package is a Whole-of-Government Framework to Address Community Disadvantage (the Framework). The Framework will design the practical ways in which government can work with communities to better align programs and service delivery across governments and portfolios; put data in the hands of communities and give them a say in how funding is directed and expand the role of communities in decision-making over time.
Place-based approaches are about getting the right balance between universality of service responses and delivery and horizontal equity – it is adapting the uniqueness with the uniformity across our broad safety-netted system to close system gaps and create better coordination and cohesion of investment within a place.
The Commonwealth is currently delivering over 31 different programs in 200 specific placed based initiative in action and the Secretary’s Board subcommittee ‘Partnership Priorities Committee’ raises placed-based approaches to the highest levels of government administration.
At the heart of place-based approaches sits partnerships and shared decision-making. Working within your delegated authority and in close partnership with communities on the ground to design and deliver approaches that cut across a range of social-economic challenges in a specific location.
The maturity of place-based approaches relies on public servants being able to zoom in and out of the macro and micro geopolitical, economic and social policy lens – this means that ‘wide and sharp, deep and deliberative’ thinking I referred to earlier becomes a fundamental part of our daily craft.