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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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 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:
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.
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.
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