Public sector leaders urged to embrace current uncertainty

Public sector leaders must design digital delivery in response to one of the most disruptive operating environments in years, according to speakers at this week’s Think Digital Government in London.

Industry and public sector experts discussed the current AI-driven infrastructure shortages, geopolitical uncertainty and outdated funding processes, alongside the need for leaders to take greater risks.

“We’re in the middle of more uncertainty and disruption than I’ve actually seen in a long time,” said Andrew Puddephat, director of UK public sector at Nutanix (pictured).

He pointed to surging AI demand for compute, GPUs and storage as a major pressure on infrastructure costs, alongside changing supplier commercial models and wider geopolitical tensions affecting confidence in technology supply chains.

“One of the more negative impacts of AI has been a huge amount of demand on GPU, on compute, and storage. That is really starting to filter through, and they are now at unprecedented levels,” he said.

Building models for change

Tina Churcher, chief digital and information officer at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), argued that organisations should stop behaving as though uncertainty is unexpected.

“The world is very vocal at the moment, it is very volatile,” she said. “There is an awful lot going on.”

But she warned against allowing instability to become an excuse for inaction. Referencing a quote by journalist and broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, Churcher said: “Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.”

She argued that organisations already know disruption is happening and should build delivery models that expect change rather than resist it.

“The notion that we can’t plan and that we can’t move through that is our own making, because it’s a known known,” she said.

Churcher also challenged how government often talks about agile delivery, arguing that many organisations still misunderstand what agility means.

“There is no such thing as an agile project,” she said. “You do not do agile, you either are or you are not agile.”

Madeline Hoskin, chief technology officer at North Yorkshire Council, said many leaders still appear tied to old delivery models despite recognising that the environment around them has fundamentally changed.

“One of my favourite phrases at the minute is, ‘if you blink slightly too long, by the time you open your eyes, the world’s changed’,” she said.

Why traditional planning no longer works

Much of the discussion focused on the growing mismatch between traditional public sector planning processes and the pace of modern digital delivery. Hoskin argued that procurement, licensing and supply chain conditions now shift so rapidly that long-term planning assumptions quickly become obsolete.

“Prices move by the hour,” she said. “Costs, licences, licence models are kind of incomprehensible at the minute.”

The panel criticised lengthy business cases, rigid funding models and governance processes that can take months to approve programmes before delivery has even begun. Churcher questioned the logic of spending months producing five-year business cases in rapidly changing environments.

“The obvious thing is to fill in an OBC and an FBC over five years for £70 million and spend six months at Treasury while you’re getting it approved, because that’s going to work,” she said.

Meanwhile, Hoskin said many organisations continue producing extensive requirement specifications and governance documents partly because leaders want protection if programmes fail.

“We also end up filling in 97-page requirement specifications to buy the thing, just to make sure we’ve got someone else to blame,” she said.

But she warned that those approaches now create more risk rather than less.

“Trying to do it the way we’ve done it before in the world now is just dumb,” said Hoskin.

Instead, speakers argued for breaking programmes into smaller, more adaptable delivery phases with iterative funding and greater flexibility to pivot as conditions change.

Leaders must create psychological safety

Alongside delivery reform, speakers stressed the importance of leadership culture and psychological safety during periods of continuous disruption. Hoskin said leaders need to create environments where experimentation and intelligent mistakes are accepted rather than punished.

“The phrase is building psychological safety,” she said.

That means moving away from blame-based cultures and recognising that failure is an inevitable part of innovation and rapid delivery.

The panel also discussed how technology change can create anxiety among workers whose roles are evolving rapidly because of AI and automation. Puddephat said organisations must ensure staff feel invested in, rather than threatened by change.

“We are going to help you to upskill, give them the tools and the capabilities that they need and the training to bring them into the new world,” he said.