Michael Wintringham
State Services Commisioner

Closing Remarks

Events such as this conference don’t happen by chance, but I’m not going to go through the list of thanks like the Oscar winner. I would like to acknowledge the organising committee, made up of senior managers and chief executives, who did an awful lot of work over the last number of months, and who made this happen supported by other people. I draw your attention to your programme for that information.

I would like to make a special acknowledgement to those chief executives who participated. It was not a matter of rolling up this afternoon and speaking. That was the result of work that had gone on over the last month or so, involving a real time commitment on the part of busy people.

I want to finish by going back to the beginning and repeating some of the things that I said this morning. What was the intention of today? It was to uplift, enjoy and inspire. Yes, we do good things. We ought to be proud of it. We ought to pat ourselves on the back.

An objective was to unify. The fact that we are here listening to the same things, sharing experiences and celebrating being part of the Public Service is by itself a unifying factor. Challenge - there is plenty of that and not necessarily unanimity. Here are hard things we do.

I was pleased with the question that Ian raised in the chief executives’ panel discussion. Yes, we can feel warm and fuzzy about the good things that we are doing out there. Many of us - many of you I should say - deal with the really hard end. What I refer to as the dark side of our society. You have my admiration for what you do in that regard.

Let me repeat a couple of things from this morning. I’ll go directly to my opening remarks: "You will hear little today about further refinement of our system of public management."

In the four and a half years that I have been State Services Commissioner my awareness and concerns about the performance of the Public Service have shifted away from matters of system and structure to things to do with values and people. Of course both are important, but good people with the right values can make imperfect systems and structures work, and the reverse is not the case.

Katrina, among others, echoed something that I referred to this morning. The barrier is less about structure than it is about silos of the mind. I want to refer you to one thing that Pete Hodgson said this morning. When you embark on the development of a project or a piece of policy work the question is: who can we bring in on this? That is a pretty powerful question for me and one that I am going to take back to my own organisation.

I think you will agree that the engagement of Ministers today was at a different level. It was a real engagement. Rather than coming along, giving us a talk and a bit of exhortation and moving on, it was talk about a level of engagement and an expectation about the possibilities of being able to work together.

In relation to Ministers I again want to go back to something I said this morning, to remind you of it and ask you to think about it: "We want to be innovative. Innovation means risk of failure, failure means political consequences, political consequences mean blame. Therefore, we are risk averse."

I invited you to think of a proposition. If you had had a chance to nobble one or other of those Ministers before you did that, why don’t you answer these questions, or consider these propositions: "Innovation is not about running with an ill-thought-through bright idea. Innovation is not about 'old is bad and new is good'. Risk aware and risk averse are two different things." (That wasn’t something that Hugh Logan and I cooked up beforehand.)

"We are better at policy development than we are at policy implementation. Big picture strategy is important, but my word, the devil is in the detail. Stakeholder management of the environment in which the project takes place cannot be separated from project management itself. Only when all of these and more have been squared away, tell me that the risks of innovation are too high or that the consequences are inevitable."

That is for you to take away, to place alongside the stories that you’ve heard about the case studies, the big picture that you’ve had from this morning and some of the invitations that you’ve had from Ministers.

I want to finish up at the end of the day with the way I finished up at the beginning. I referred this morning to the privilege of holding the position of State Services Commissioner. Although it is a job that as I said can be fraught from time to time: "The one thing that reassures me and keeps me going are the people to whom I am joined in the Public Service. I am a public servant, that is how I think of myself and describe myself where the box on the form says, ‘occupation’. As a public servant I am one of 29,000 people making a really important contribution to the success of this country. That is not a bad thing to take home every night."

I am going to continue to take that home every night and with the thought strengthened by what I have heard today.

My last thanks about this conference is thank you for the work that you are doing, making me feel proud of being joined to you as one of New Zealand’s 29,000 public servants. Thank you for the day.

New Zealand State Services Commission