Professor Deborah Blackman on the impact of systems, finding a shared purpose and building a culture that sticks.

In the lead up to our upcoming Stewards on the Couch event with David Mackie, IPAA Queensland Director, Andrew Wills, sat down with Professor Deborah Blackman who will take to the couch to facilitate an insightful conversation with Queensland’s Public Sector Commissioner about leadership, public service, reform and the highs and lows of his own professional career journey.

Before we talk about “Stewards on the couch”, we’d like to get to know you better. Could you tell us about your area of research?
The thing I’m probably most known for in the public sector area is performance management. I lead a successful project with the Australian Public Service Commission. As a result of that, we did quite a lot of research on employee performance management, and we had a lot of discussions as a result. What we realised was that people kept talking about needing more conversations but we said, no, we need different types of conversations!

The next stage from this work was about saying there’s actually four different types of conversations[1]. We adopted a typology of four: initiative, understanding, purpose and closure, but explained that the problem is that we tend to always start with the performance conversation, which is let’s get on with things and let’s make a plan. That assumes that there’s a shared understanding of what’s going on…and most of the time there isn’t.

Since then, over the last few years I’ve been looking more at the impact of systems and systems thinking and why that matters, including the concepts of where the leverage points are and where systems traps are.

I’ve always been interested in why things get stuck, the common theme has always been that something is supposed to work, and it doesn’t and I’m interested in why. The argument is let’s not just try and throw more of the same solutions at it because it’s not working, let’s try and understand how it got stuck.

So that’s why we now look at systems traps in particular and say, “Right, what is it?”. Why is this the systems level problem and not something else?

The classic example I use – people are always talking about needing to increase the numbers of women leaders and, as a result we need to provide more mentoring women. But there’s nothing wrong with women, they don’t need more mentoring. This is a systems problem, and the problem with mentoring women is you’re implying that somehow the woman can fix a systems level problem and they can’t. For me this a good example of trying to get individuals to fix something which is systemic.

Once you look at it from a systems perspective, it becomes really obvious what needs changing and that you’re trying to make the fix in the wrong place and you need to look somewhere else. So that’s why increasingly now I talk about systems and look at systems thinking.

You must have spoken to a few senior public sector leaders over the years and in the course of your research. Do you notice any themes or common traits, common approaches or traps that work against people?
I think for me one of the issues is still the belief that culture is magical.

When we think about systems, we realise that systems have what they call emergent properties, which are things that are created through the way that all the bits of a system interact. Thinking about this it is clear that culture is an emergent system property. The reason why that matters is it means that you can’t manage culture. You have to manage the system and shape the system and work out how to leverage the system so that over a period of time you achieve what you want.

One of the questions I always ask, David is “What does success look like?” and then “What behaviours will we need to achieve this. Then we need to ask how do we hold those behaviours in place? If we hold them in place for long enough, then we’ll get the culture that we require and then that will maintain what we want.

It’s not that culture isn’t important, it absolutely is; but the problem with talking about it is we end up talking about the end state and not what are the things that we need to be doing.

For example  if we take the current situation, regarding integrity.  We need an integrity culture and that’s fine.  But – What does that mean? What are the behaviours that we have encourage that will achieve that?

At the moment, we just come off the back of Robodebt. We don’t have people being brave. We don’t have a culture of open and honest. We don’t have psychological safety.

And there’s no point saying we’re not going to fix that and then do something else. We have to ask, “How do we create a system that does that, and hold it in place?”.

So I understand why it is a common thing that everybody always wants to talk about, but the reality is what we really need to create is shared purpose.

When you think in systems you recognise that the thing that holds a system together is a collective understanding of purpose, which is quite hard to do. But that will move you much further than anything else in the short to medium term.

So we need to rethink the famous quote – ‘Culture, eats strategy for breakfast’? Are we flipping that on its head?
A different way of thinking about it is that shared purpose trumps culture.  One of my colleagues, Dr Fiona Buick did a thesis on successful whole of government, working from the premise that it was going to be about culture. However, in the end she demonstrated that, in some cases, shared purpose was the thing that supported really good outcomes in a shorter period of time.

You don’t need shared culture necessarily.

When you’re researching these topics, do you still find things that surprise you in that research?
Well, people surprise me all the time. The thing about people is that every day we make a decisions about how we’re going to act. Managers consider the big decisions as being very important and they are. But people have to make lots and lots of decisions every day and actually it’s the little decisions that people make every day that make the difference between high performance and ordinary performance.

When you’re leading, you’re trying to shape the agentic decisions and systems will shape that because they encourage certain behaviours over others.

One of the things that surprises me is how often leaders don’t see themselves as leaders in a system. They don’t see that their job is to create and maintain system architecture; they talk about stewarding, but they don’t always recognise what it is that they’re stewarding.

I think this realisation helps frame change management as a knowledge management problem because you can’t change your behaviour if you don’t understand something new. The question then becomes what do people have to know that they don’t know now if they’re going to do something different? Because if they don’t have a new understanding, they can’t change their behaviour.

That is a really different paradigm for change management. You’re shifting leadership in that space to be about knowledge management. I would imagine that the extension of that is how you build knowledge, how you as a leader you shape that?
Yes, either people need to know something new, or they need a different understanding of what they already have.

I’ll give you a really simple example, which was actually a performance management example with somebody saying we’re going to have to have a talk with someone again because they know they’ve got to change and they haven’t changed. And I’m asking how many times have you had this conversation with this poor person and they said, well already three times, this would be the fourth time.

I said, so stop wasting your time and theirs, clearly there’s something fundamentally wrong here. I asked the question, which I often ask. “what does high performance look like?”. And they started to tell me all the things they didn’t want, and I said that’s not what I asked you. I asked you what high performance was. And by the end, it was really clear that this person needed two skills they just didn’t have, and nobody had ever given them the time to learn and equip them to do them. I asked – if they learn that now they can do what you want? However, there’s no point in keeping on telling them to change because they don’t know how to do the thing you want because you’ve never bothered to think it through yourself. So how can they?

That’s what I mean by knowledge management problem. It became really clear that this problem, this person’s underperformance was actually they just didn’t have the skills to be a good performer.

How do you think some of this knowledge will shape your “on the couch” with the Public Sector Commissioner, David Mackie?
What I would like to know is what he thinks is the most important learning from his previous career. What’s he bringing to the table? Because I do think that matters. What is he bringing and why does it matter for the context that he’s in?

I’m also interested in what he his long-term agenda is. How is he going to create a shared sense of purpose? Because there’s a lot of very diverse stakeholders and my argument would be that if he wants to make change, that’s what he has to do. He has to create shared mental models of the future and what success looks like. And so I’m interested to know how he’ll do that.

If people haven’t been exposed to systems thinking or complexity or other ways of thinking about the organisations and the broader ecosystem, what do you think shapes their thinking? Where are they coming from? 
A lot of it is about setting the norms and what are the stories that will let the people know?

The example I have often used when teaching is when one of the Secretaries changed in a Department. There been a very paternalistic, very focused, very top down Secretary and there was a scathing Capability Review.

There was a change of Secretary and two things happened on the same day. The first was that there was a big event where the new Secretary was talking about how things were going to be different with  a ‘no blame’ culture.

On the same day, there was a problem at Senate Estimates. Two thirds of the senior leadership changed with the secretary, s the reality was something was going to go wrong. There was going to be something they didn’t know.

At Senate Estimates, they should have apologise, saying that two thirds of the leaderships changed and we’re sorry, we don’t know. We’ll go find out. Except they didn’t.

They came back and had a witch hunt to find who hadn’t got the information. And there’s your story that’s gone wrong. They had one chance to show how different this new “no blame culture” would be, but instead everybody knew that nothing had changed.

It’s all about the immediate reaction in the story. And if you see one thing and you hear another, you will always go with what you see, this situation.

Our members are people who are genuinely invested in their craft, and they’re really interested in what’s going on in the sector and in pushing their own thinking. What do you hope that the audience may gain from this session? 
I’d like them to think about how they create shared purpose.

One of my favourite things to do in meetings particularly when I’m not chairing is to ask, “if we get this right, whatever it might be, what will it look like?”.

How will we know? What does an integrity culture actually look like? How will I be able to see it? If people are motivated, what does that actually mean?

I talk a lot at the moment about slowing down to speed up. To spend a bit more time at the beginning because we all think we know what we’re talking about and we don’t.

I’d like to think that if people just take that away, that would be a huge shift in thinking.

What is their role in finding that shared purpose?

You’re a leader yourself. You’re a leader in the field, and you’re a leader of a Business School in a leading university. What do you find most enjoyable and most challenging about being a leader?
I guess they’re quite related, but I mean, obviously my job is to make sure that everybody else can do theirs. That’s my job. If they all do their job well, I look really good.

For me, I guess the hard bit is knowing what makes people tick. What is the thing that is going to encourage them to do their work to the best of their ability and that comes back to the little decisions, right?

None of them come into work planning to do a bad job. Most people go to work to do a decent job, so my job is to work out how to enable them to do that. Whether it’s the skills that they need or the support that they need.

One of the things that drives me crazy is people keep saying we’re going to give you more time. Time is not a resource. You can’t collect it. I can’t collect five hours up and give it to somebody else. What you’re actually meaning is I’ve got to work out how to reallocate the work, reshape how you think, whatever it’s going to be, so that you prioritise things differently.

I guess that it’s about working out how to enable everybody else to do their job well.

If they do that, then we’ll all be good.

Want to learn more? Join us on 3 October for Stewards on the Couch with David Mackie who will be in-conversation with Professor Blackman.


[1] Deborah Ann Blackman, Fiona Buick, Michael Edward O’Donnell & Nabil Ilahee (2022) Changing the Conversation to Create Organizational Change, Journal of Change Management, 22:3, 252-272, DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2022.2040570


ABOUT ProFESSOR dEBORAH BLACKMAN

Professor Deborah Blackman is the Head of School, and a member of the Public Service Research Group, in the School of Business at UNSW, Canberra.

Deborah’s research interests include: Public Sector Policy Implementation, Systems Level Change, Employee Performance Management, Organisational Learning and Organisational Effectiveness. In 2021 Deborah coedited the Handbook on Performance Management in the Public Sector. She has published internationally in journals including Public Administration Review, Management Learning, Management Decision, Journal of Knowledge Management and the Human Resources Development Quarterly.

Deborah’s research knowledge transfer in a range of applied, real world contexts. Her primary interest is using philosophical and systems explanations to understand why things do not work when theory implies that they should. From those enhanced understandings, new theories and applications can be developed to support the implementation of change or reform.  The common theme of her work is developing effective knowledge acquisition and transfer in order to improve organisational effectiveness.