Hope fuels collective aspiration and personal perseverance, providing a foundation for meaningful action amid cynicism.

Polls offer a veneer of certainty, masking complex, shifting human behaviour with seductive but misleading statistics.

A humble sausage, local camaraderie, and complex psychology blend into Australia’s uniquely relaxed voting culture.

Government decisions dictate changes in scale and priorities. The ideal size of the APS should be based on the nature and extent of the Australian Government’s activities and its preferred delivery model for executing them.

Talent management is fundamentally based on understanding human nature, abilities, and potential. Often overlooked, the philosophy behind talent management plays a critical role in the implementation and effectiveness of these programs. The challenges of talent management start here.

Impostor syndrome can be an invaluable signal—a nudge towards increased confidence, growth, and self-improvement.

In devoting our time to the efficient working order of the parts, we forget that all firms are just webs of relationships between people.

The drivers behind the consumer thirst for craft beer and employee desires for more open career paths are similar and worth exploring.

The principal barriers to workforce transformation are change-resistant leaders and insufficient knowledge and talent to reshape workforce structures and systems to meet the new environment. In a competitive labour market, the workforce won’t wait long.

The stock and flow of a workforce is a narrow and limited measure. The drivers of workforce capacity are behavioural.

We need to steer the conversation about APS workforce capability away from the extremes and focus on the actual problem.

The position of work in our lives is significant, so learning through work potentially makes a disproportionately large contribution to the growth and identity of the individual. Do we need a better approach to L&D at work?

The perfect culture promises unimaginable employee engagement, performance, and productivity benefits. However, the quest seems to have no end, and the longed-for benefits seem just as unattainable. What if our quest is based on a false assumption?

Reform, change and adaptation are sweeping the public and private sectors alike. We need a commonsense view of our organisations that doesn’t rely on the machine model.

Performance appraisal is a surprisingly recent but amazingly persistent management fad that remains in most organisations in nearly the same form as it originated.

Our organisations are much like the platypus, a collection of specialist adaptations.

Our greatest challenge is to think past the comfort of our own experience of work to entertain the possibility that the way we work could be better.

Can we better frame a conversation about accountability? A conversation that allows us to see accountability as a relationship rather than a penal code. And one where we can think about accountability as an organisational and leadership choice in managing control and delegation.

Have we designed work that distances people from participating meaningfully in work? If so, we may need to think more about what shapes how work is done and our relationship with work.

It is not uncommon to hear that the intransigence of middle managers is the principal barrier to implementing change in organisations. Is that fair?