The Westminster Tradition
In 2019, after three years, Robodebt was found to be unlawful. The Royal Commission process found it was also immoral and wildly inaccurate.
The Westminster Tradition
Buzzword Bingo
In this Christmas special, Caroline, Alison and Danielle unwrap the public service’s most gear-grinding buzzwords, what they’re supposed to mean and what they have now quietly become. With words crowdsourced from the fine listeners of TWT, we talk:
- Big serious words and how their technical meanings have drifted
- The corporate visitors who arrived and never left
- Words that hide fear or indecision
- How co-design can be a handbrake, and why government struggles to set boundaries on what is genuinely up for shaping.
- Word of the year: nature-positive
The brilliant book that Alison refers to is ‘The Right Kind of Wrong’ by Amy Edmondson: https://www.dymocks.com.au/right-kind-of-wrong-by-amy-edmondson-9781847943781
This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.
Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....
While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.
Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at thewestminstertraditionpod@gmail.com.
Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music.
'Til next time!
Welcome to the Westminster Tradition, where we unpack lessons for the public service. I'm Alison Lloyd Wright, Recovering Public Servant and Managing Director of the Good Trouble Group. Joining me today on Garner Land are my fellow Recovering Public Servants, Caroline Crozer Barlow.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, Alison.
SPEAKER_02:And Danielle Elston, Managing Director of Good Government Advisory.
SPEAKER_04:Hello, Alison.
SPEAKER_02:Now, when we asked our listeners, you on LinkedIn and by email for the words, labels, and catchphrases grinding your gears in 2025, the response was instant chaos. Our inboxes exploded, and you gave us more buzzwords than any one podcast should responsibly hold. So today is our third Christmas together. We are giving you our buzzword bingo Christmas special. And this is not our last episode for the year. We will bring you one more after this: a chance to reflect on your incredible feedback, what we have learnt, and maybe even what we've changed our minds on after nearly 70 episodes. Wild.
SPEAKER_04:Sometimes I listen to the recording before we publish it, and I'm like, I've already disagree with myself.
SPEAKER_02:Strong views loosely held. Exactly.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, nailed it, nailed it.
SPEAKER_02:That's how I describe myself to people. So we've split this into a couple of sections, and we're gonna start. Our first section is uh called Big Serious Words. These are words that turn up in legislation, policy frameworks, and those glossy documents with stop photos of uh diverse people laughing around post-it notes. Uh here's the long list of big serious words co-design, psychological safety, nature positive, commissioning, capability, evidence-informed, and intersectionality. Before we get into them, all these terms do have slightly different legislative or policy definitions across jurisdictions, uh, but in general, we can describe them like this. We'll describe what they're meant to mean, uh, and then we'll describe how people are actually using them. Let's pick them off one by one. With a word I violently oppose, co-design. Across Australia, governments describe co-design in fairly similar terms, designing policy, programs, or services with the people who use them or are affected by them. The common definition is the government and the affected community work together to understand the need, shape the problem, generate options and test solutions with lived experience and professional expertise having equal weight.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think um I've been doing a little bit of work in the disability policy space where co-design has like a very strong and embedded meaning that falls out of some of the obligations under the UNCRPD. And I think this has to be one of the least helpful words uh going around at the moment. So unhelpful. Because the kind of breadth from which, like you just described, it can be from understanding the need, shaping the problem, generating the options and testing solutions. And one of the things I observe is that people come into the conversation at different points in time. They mightn't have been involved in early points, or they might be starting now, and they're like, oh, co-design. So we're gonna start at understanding the need and move all the way through. And you're like, oh, buddy, like, no, there was like a whole three-year process before that has generated the options and now we're at the options part. And people rightly say, hang on, didn't you say we were gonna co-design this? Like, I have not been involved in this process up to this point. And government is exceptionally bad at saying what it will and won't be kind of engaging with an on, and it feels icky to say, no, no, I'm getting a boundary around here. I am going to, we're only focusing on this part, or even, and I've heard this from various um people, God, I'm really on a roll here. Sorry. I've heard this from various people that I work with who talk about like even the idea of inserting particular ideas to test in a co-design process can be viewed as like naughty, like, you know, it's like as though that is um breaking the co-design. And I'm like, but hang on a second.
SPEAKER_02:The rules of co-design. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Hang on a second. Like, we are the people who kind of do and run these systems all the time. We might actually have some useful thoughts to test with people. We can't just expect all of the ideas to bubble up with people who are only at the coal face. Like, there are kind of there are other perspectives that would be useful to bring in here. So I just think it's like there's a lot of performative stuff happening in government around co-design. I think it is corrosive.
SPEAKER_02:Daniel and I are nodding furiously.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I really, you know, and I was always a bit rude about busted. Yeah, sorry. All of the community engagement people who talked about the spectrum of, you know, like from you know, consult through to whatever. But like I do actually think a little bit of clarity is very helpful. And co-design has taken us backwards from being clear about where we are on the participation spectrum. Anyway, end rant.
SPEAKER_04:Well, insert mine. Um so I do a lot of stakeholder consultation, and so can I just point out before we keep going that I use a number of the words that I think should be banned, but we'll just keep rolling. But you have to because the government asks you to. Yeah, this is hypocrite 101, this whole potentially half of this episode. But um one of I I just so you're right about the process. Like I have twice this year been in a pla in places where there's an excellent opportunity to do something, and the idea has come from lived experience and the frontline workforce, and all that's left is these two processes of finding some money or whatever else. And someone in each of those rooms will say, Well, we need to use all the rules of co-design, and so we'll have to start from the beginning. And and and my like, it's becoming a handbrake on doing sensible shit in government. Where I'm like, it was co-designed. The idea originally came from this process, this process, and this process. This is what the community told us they wanted. We have now figured out how to do it. We should definitely go back and check. No, it should not take 18 months because one of the things communities, no matter who they are, always tell us is how slow we are. Yes. And it's becoming a handbrake on doing stuff. I you will never find me saying that experts and bureaucrats should be making, identifying the problems on their own and testing the solutions on their own. Like that is how we have broken things for a long time. That said, we've turned this into a religion as opposed to like a way to do things better, and it's ideological as opposed to practical. And again, just like what you say, Caroline, assumes that wherever the point at which you're standing in front of right now has not had lots of co-design and input from the either the lived experience or the frontline workshop. So I think it's been weaponized as a way as a way to not be able to try things quickly, lest someone anywhere say, I thought the government was committed to co-design and I was never asked what I thought. So I am very pro the idea of designing things with lived experience and frontline workers all the time. I think the rules are too academic and to take too long to deliver and trial things that we need to do quickly that we cannot do in three years' time and we need to do today.
SPEAKER_01:Can I just say when I agreed? Sorry, sorry, sorry, but just when I agreed with the weaponized, what I wanted to say is I think it is being weaponized by parts of the government who want to do things slowly. So like I think it's like when a treasury is like, oh, but have you co-designed that? Or when like it's like to me, it is uh it's become a tactic inside government to say that that is required before you can move to the next step. And I just think that is like the worst public servicing, and it makes me very cross.
SPEAKER_02:Uh so I have two beefs with this. The first is it's become a fancy word that people use in lieu of consultation. They're not actually doing co-design, they're doing consultation, but they want to sound like hit with the kids. Uh so they're using the word co-design. 6-7. Wild that. Uh, we may need to cut this a bit out, but I have the most interesting ontological Foucault take on 6-7 for you, Caroline, that you are the only person who would truly appreciate. Um my second beef is this. And it's the the part of the thing I read out before lived experience and professional expertise having equal weight. And I think the way that we practice co-design, and this is, I acknowledge, going to make me sound like the most appalling elitist snob, but let's go for it anyway, uh, overweights lived experience and doesn't counterweight professional expertise. Designing public policy is a professional skill that not every person on the street is good at in terms of identifying ramifications, implications, trade-offs. Uh, and I think that sometimes we use co-design uh in a way that biases uh lived experience over actually what we know and understand to be good policy practice.
SPEAKER_01:I don't think it's elitist, Alison. I think for me it's like what are the bits that you're good at, right? And so lived experience is brilliant at telling you how current services are experienced, what is good and bad about current services, and how people want to live their lives. Although with the caveat, I would say that often when people say, This is how I want something to happen, they and I did this disability funding reform. We want every child to have a functional needs assessment before we put disability funding into schools. And then when every teacher had to write a disability functional needs assessment, it turned out that was like really, really cumbersome. So, you know, that's like a kind of lived experience kind of wisdom, which is we want the funding to match what a child actually needs. That's the insight, right? And then there's a policy design piece of how do we translate that into policy. So I think it's like being really clear about you have to honor and preference and overweight the lived experience voice of what works and what doesn't in the interaction. And then you have to listen to the policymakers who are like, yep. So what we know is when we marketise this or when we put this out in this particular way, it tends to see X and Y happen. So you want this outcome. How are we going to design this so that this is the outcome that's prioritized? And I think it's like that dialogue. And I agree, we at the moment we get this thing where it's like, oh well, everyone says they want X, and you're like, Yep, but my experience of X is that X leads to lots of things they don't want.
SPEAKER_02:Say in running stakeholder workshops across multiple different subject matters, I've now had three separate groups suggest to me that the answer to their problem would be to have Chris Hemsworth be the spokesperson. Oh my god, me too! I've had that one too!
SPEAKER_05:Genuinely, genuinely, yes.
SPEAKER_04:Hang on, hang on, hang on. I know we have to move on. I just wanted to say that for all of this, everywhere you turn, it's being co-designed. I was looking at a frontline type of service delivery this morning that has been co-designed and is landing really, really badly. So I think the other thing is we are not actually building lived experience and frontline Intel despite this incredibly cumbersome co-design process. I'm again the performative part, back to you, Caroline. We are still seeing programs where I don't know how you co-designed it, but there is no way a elderly person checked it or whatever else.
SPEAKER_01:Like But this is the test and learn thing, right, Dee, which is if you you actually have to let things have a little bit of contact with reality and then learn from that. And part of what happens is we get so caught in we've co-designed this thing, now we can't change it. And you're like, but it's not working, like people are really miserable. Can't we change it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:All right, so we're we're gonna have to pick up the pace here, ladies, or we'll be doing this for the next three and a half hours. Uh, our next word is psychological safety. Uh, all jurisdictions now have psychosocial risk obligations, and the guidance material defines a psychologically safe workplace as one where people can raise concerns, admit mistakes, or challenge decisions without fear of punishment, humiliation, or negative consequences. It's the idea of having a system of work that makes it safe to tell the truth.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, I'm jumping straight in here. I have a couple of problems with this. Um, one is uh how one person feels safe is not actually a collective definition. And so we have individualized how people feel and respond. So sorry, as a premise, everyone should be psychologically safe at work. I have no problem with all of that. I have no problem with it being a legislative requirement. However, what we have done is we haven't designed what a psychologically safe team looks like, and we have allowed every individual to self-identify. To self-identify safety. And so what I am seeing around the country as this has been rolled out is individuals who don't want to change policy direction, individuals who have to digitize, individuals who have to do all sorts of things, that most of their duties as required. Are the duties as required, um, that most of their team are like moving along happily with, are saying, I'm unable to do that because it doesn't feel psychologically safe. So it's a collective versus individual issue for me. We don't identify And a weaponization again. Yeah, like we don't identify what collectively safe workplaces look like. We identify what they are individually because that's how the IR and the legal system works. Except, how can you have a team of 30 people all defining like, I don't like any jokes, I like this, I like that, like what is safe, and it allows individuals to kind of, and if there's a really strong legislative framework, but not a lot of definition of what good looks like and what not good looks like. Um, and I think we have to find a way to flip it from being individual to collective because we all know vile, toxic places, we all know excellently safe places. That will not be how an individual who moves through those places necessarily identifies it. So I think the risk is we actually miss hideous bosses and hideous safety issues by creating such a loose, like, I don't feel safe going to a stakeholder workshop, I don't feel safe talking about that policy area type.
SPEAKER_02:And interestingly, it is collective in the in the academic literature that this springs from, which is mostly the work of Amy Edmondston, who I adore, and uh a book called The Right Kind of Wrong, which we'll link to in the show notes, um, isn't that kind of individualist take, and yet that's somehow where we've ended up. Any takes on this one from you, Caroline?
SPEAKER_01:Uh, just to say that actually um I have found the concept of psychological safety, exactly as you say, kind of woolly and diffuse and often associated with I don't like being uncomfortable, which is definitely not the same thing. But that psychosocial hazards are really helpful as a construct. Like I'm just looking at uh the list now high or low job demands, role ambiguity, remote or isolated work, organizational change, work-face conflict, uh, bullying behaviors, low job control, etc. And I'm like, I actually think there's a really helpful framework in that, but people um people haven't had time to get those categories in their head, I think is probably the fairest way of talking about it. And so I think there's a big piece of work to say, no, these are the collective elements that we've agreed on that make for a psychologically safe workplace. And we should definitely consider all of those, but also it is not psychologically unsafe to say this program is not delivering what we need and we need to change how we're doing it, right? Like that's just uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_04:Yep. Can I just go? Can I follow up on that? Which is I think the other challenge is it's slotted into our WHS system, which was historically built for individuals not falling off of cranes and like quite physical injuries. And the training of the people who operate in that space has been individual hazard and individual risk. Um, and that's all been very effective. Australia has some of the safest physical workplaces in the world. I'm not sure that the people who run these systems or the systems that we set up, like uh hazard notifications and stuff, is actually built for this, like this level of subjectivity. Like, you know, a uh a whipper snipper without a cover on it is clearly, you know, unsafe. Very black and white goes. Yeah. Very black and white. Um, and you can report it and put a cover on it. Um, I'm not sure that we've done enough work on this type of part of it, and we've just crammed it into a system which is quite different to what the system was designed to deliver.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Word number three. This one is new to me actually. Nature positive. The Commonwealth has landed a formal definition, which is an improvement in the diversity, abundance, resilience, and integrity of ecosystems from a baseline. Or in plain English, it's basically the campsite principle. Leave it better than you found it, uh, and be somehow able to measure that improvement. Uh, how's it were?
SPEAKER_01:Uh this has clearly been suggested by a listener who was like clear sick of being used, having this kind of bandied at them, right? And when you're a little bit further out of the system, I've haven't worked in environment for a while. I was thinking about all the different it was ecosystem services for a while. There were like there have been various phrases, framings of this in the past. And I know it's very annoying when you're in them, but I do think when you're dealing with big bureaucratic institutions that find it hard to take intangible things seriously, it is interesting the way that we kind of have to keep rebranding these ideas in a new way that speaks to a new set of values. So I'm sure it's just as annoying as uh co-design is for me uh in various ways. But I do, with the little bit of distance, I'm like, ah, interesting. That's the new version of the last, the precautionary principle it was 10 years before that. Like, so I just think there's something, um, it's an observation, not a not a feeling.
SPEAKER_04:So I have knocked around in this portfolio a few times this year. And the other thing I love about this is where like some people in the room have discovered that we've gone from the precautionary principle to nature positive, but others like me are like, sorry, what? Um and everyone is talking as though they know what's going on. And I'm like, what's the opposite? Like, what's nature pos what's the opposite of nature positive? Uh don't look too dumb in it positive, or is it industry positive? Technological positive?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, like what are we talking about?
SPEAKER_04:So I just I someone someone is obviously working in this space who suggested it, but I actually like elevated it in the script.
SPEAKER_02:Like, seriously.
SPEAKER_04:I I stumbled into the portfolio mode, understood most of it because I like Caroline have been in it before, but this one I was just like, what? Like, I would have thought the very nature of environment portfolio. Where we are trying to do good things for the environment means we are trying to be positive about nature. And uh this one is currently you cannot move in that portfolio without someone throwing it at you as though you understand what it is that that means for this consultation or this policy or this word. But when you look at that definition, everyone does.
SPEAKER_01:When you look at that definition, I cannot see that a single policy we have ever done ever does this. Like I mean, maybe some of the rewilding we do, but like the idea that we're returning ecosystems above a baseline of where we are when we're in a warming climate. And like I just, it's wild to me that this is the standard. It feels like a very high standard, but anyway.
SPEAKER_04:I do think if we were to do um like the 2025 word of the year, I do think that would be like, you know how when they do the new words in the dictionary? Yeah. Yep. Like co-design was around last year, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think nature positive would be the public sector. Like it's one that didn't exist a year ago, and now you can't. If you work across four or five portfolios, you must include it in every briefing. So I reckon that wins the kind of new word of the public. Oh, we could do a public service dictionary. Anyway.
SPEAKER_02:Nerd. Uh uh let's go to the fourth and final of our big serious words. Uh commissioning. Here's the general definition across jurisdictions. The ACT calls it a way of designing, funding, and delivering a human services system so that services meet community needs. New South Wales describes it as identifying the outcomes to be achieved and designing and managing a system to deliver them in the most effective way. Commonwealth reviews describe it as prioritizing outcomes and entrusting somebody with responsibility and resources to deliver them. Uh and at the end of the reading, that I'm none the wiser.
SPEAKER_04:Buying stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, right. Buying better. Buying stuff. Buying people to deliver stuff.
SPEAKER_01:See, I love the rise of commissioning, and I love the woolliness of the language about commissioning as well as the rise of it. Because to me, it's a way of sort of saying, oh, we should be intentional about when we put money out. Like and we should think about and there's lots of different, you know. Of course, darling, but like I hate to say it to you, certainly in my favorite space of ECEC, for a good decade. The Commonwealth put out$12 billion in market subsidies and did nothing to think about what and they will say this themselves, right? So, like, there's something for me about the idea of commissioning gives you a sense that like you are stewarding, you are thinking more broadly about what you are. It's not just the the individual thing, like you're thinking about how it nests in the system. I like that it makes you think about that.
SPEAKER_02:It gives you a market interpretation, right? It it says that you are interfering in a market.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Potentially for good, potentially not. But I wonder if actually using phrases like buying things might help you get closer to that sense of market interpretation.
SPEAKER_04:Can I also point out that the people we buy things from, the inherent, like the fundamental of this definition and everything else is we're buying it from someone who's not government, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So we create words, and I do a lot of work in the social services sector on contracting and commissioning as a concept. Yep. Um and they will tell you that it was the word of the day for a year when they didn't realise that they were the people being bought. So we do, like we should be putting out a glossary at the beginning of the year. There's a fad. We're now calling what we used to call a contract or whatever else, a commissioning process. We used to call it a procurement or a grant. And I know that they're not all the same thing, Caroline, before you jump in, but we change our language, but we don't ever kind of announce it. And the particularly bad ones when we do it in relation to commissioning is the other half where the money goes, isn't inside us. They're on the outside. And so it becomes incredibly important that we are more clear about what the heck it is that we are doing. I I'm with you. I like that it's intentional, etc. Again, I feel like the that the space is about a bridge between um non-government on private sector and and public sector, and that is a space where we do not do well in being clear, and we cover ourselves because we're worried about audit and procurement in lots of words that mean nothing to the outside. I'm still a very, you can take the girl out of the service, we're not the service out of the girl. I got sent two procurements last week and I opened them, read them, and went, I have no idea what they want to buy. I don't know why they sent this to me. So I definitely can't deliver it because I don't know what it is. Shut them again and deleted them. So it's all well and good that we're spending lots of time being intentional, but the intentional is very much about us, not hugely about.
SPEAKER_01:And I know that in your space it can be a bit different, but yeah, that's my Can I jump in on this because I think Alison named the thing that I like about commissioning and like, you know, whatever. Um I think commissioning is a way of getting us to think beyond a transactional relationship with our human services providers. I think it's about getting us away from this idea that we are buying a service, and actually we're buying a group of people who work in a space of human services to do things with complex clients who don't always fit into an individual side.
SPEAKER_02:We might build capability in those people and in those services and exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So, what I like about a commissioning framework is that it gives you that that ability to kind of not just think about it as a contract, not just think I'm buying X and Y and Z, which is very transactional, it moves you into relational. It is hilarious that I got scored by the absolutely brilliant later. Well, let me let me tell the story then because uh so in the NDIS review, Professor Bruce Bonahady and Lisa Paul, among their co-chairs, recommended that they do something called relational contracting in NDIS, which I think we might have flagged before. And I had very nautily in my day job been kind of co-conflating this with the idea of co-commissioning between the states and the Commonwealth to kind of build disability capacity, which is an idea that's come out through the Productivity Commission. And Bruce, bless him, called me and said, Caroline, you're misunderstanding it. You've got these two ideas confused. I'm like, I mean, have I though? Because actually, all I'm trying to say is we need to be more thoughtful about what the ecosystem is that we are building with our money. And there's lots of different levers that we are using in our ecosystem of providers. I'm happy to use it again, give me a better word, but more thoughtful about who is providing services, how we're building their capability, and we're going to use lots of different ways, but I just I like the complexification. Another bingo of this yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Uh and I'm not going to job in some other things that you have confused as being the same thing before, but they are hilarious. Oh no, you definitely are.
SPEAKER_04:So let's Caroline, I was following most of that. I I get the gist of moving from transactional to relational, etc. I still feel like your answer was wildly wonky. And for a uh 8 FTE DV service in the burbs or uh a country um men's mental health program, we got to find a less word-salad way to say that. I knew most of what you were saying, and I spent a lot of time in this space, and I wasn't disagreeing with what you were getting at from a conceptual perspective.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:But this commissioning stuff, like we've like you added relational ecosystem and leaves, and I'm not trying to have a go. I'm just trying to say the batch of providers in a room, I'm not sure they'd know what the hell you were talking about. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And they'd be like, bugger off home, because you're still gonna ask me to fill out 30 KPIs on my$2 computer.
SPEAKER_04:Not if Danielle gets her way.
SPEAKER_02:Um, we're moving to section two, the corporate visitors who moved in permanently. Uh, these are things like value add, bandwidth, roadmap, ecosystem, transformational, relational, and amplify. Let's cherry pick a couple. Uh bandwidths. Supposed to mean capacity, time, focus, energy available to take on additional work. How are we actually using that?
SPEAKER_04:I don't have time.
SPEAKER_02:Like, it's just the intro seems fancy, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04:It is. And then the problem is if you've come in from the outside or you're a frontliner who's come in to do something else, you're like, what? Like, it it's it's also a way of kind of it's an exclusive way that we go about things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, corporate jargon.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Uh, all right, then let's go to another one roadmap. I mean, we know what it should be setting out direction and stages over time without drowning everyone in microscopic tasks. In practice, what's happening?
SPEAKER_04:It's becoming almost the outcome, like just doing that's enough.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we couldn't land an agreement on either a thing to do, a specific thing to do, or something that could be called a strategy because we are aware it's not high level envisionary or whatever enough for a strategy. So we called it a roadmap and then the minister's office signed off on it.
SPEAKER_04:Yep. It's a stalling tactic as well. Yes. Like it's it's like uh shit. If we can't do the actual thing, let's do a roadmap, and then a few people will think we're onto it. And while they still think that, we might figure out what we can do.
SPEAKER_02:Value add. Officially, it means the additional benefit you create on top of the basic expected output, the thing that improves quality or experience. How are you seeing value add used in the public sector at the moment?
SPEAKER_01:I feel like question it sometimes. Yeah, Caroline. I was gonna say I feel like treasury sometimes use it in that kind of additionality way, which I find very annoying. Like a kind of like um, you know, what are we getting extra for this dollar that we don't just get for our basic dollar? But actually, I don't hear it a huge amount, I've got to say.
SPEAKER_04:Um I yeah, I think you're right about what it is, is like we pay for something, but we get something extra. I also am saying it a little bit in like executive performance and even management performance. And I'm like, It's not value add. But yeah, but I think the flip of it is for me, it's not what's the value add, it's what's the value. Like what value are you bringing? Yes. Because it worries me. It's like it's worries me if what you don't really know what most of the things you do are, but your value add is you're very good at building high-performing teams. I'm like, what's the rest of your job if that's the ad? Like oh, I see. And it's okay if that's it. Yeah, yeah. It's okay if that is the thing you do, right? Like I'm like, what's your value or what's the value of your team, or like what do you do? What do you do?
SPEAKER_02:So I use it to mean like you should only be touching something if you're making it better. Oh, I love that. And if you're making it materially better, otherwise, get your hands off and let it keep going.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, that's very good. That is very good.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, like because there's a whole lot of control freak execs in the world who want their hands on everything but are not adding value to everything they touch.
SPEAKER_04:Do you know how AI is gonna kill those people? Um uh so there is some AI being worked on inside various jurisdictions in government. Um, and so for instance, there is some AI being built to do uh role descriptions and role classifications up against industrial systems. Winner. Uh the one I am really hoping that they realise is the biggest productivity gain is the briefings, which is if you set the standard, and by that I mean like you know exactly what the decisions are grammatically, Australian Government Style Guide or New South Wales Government Style Guide, you know exactly you know where M-dash is should or shouldn't be, and that's all been preset. Um, what I'm really looking forward to is that that'll be happening at a junior officer level, and you'll have the senior person overwriting the rules that have been to write. And it's the same with the job descriptions. So the people Allison's talking about who can't bloody send anything through without touching it because they think that their job is to like move a comma and whatever else, who get 10 job descriptions in a restructure, will effectively, it's like, well, if you move all of that around, this is what the best practice has been designed to be. It's correct language up against that classification level. So you're actually not value adding because the AI already did that. So I reckon that your example, Alison, is gonna be really tested by internal systems of AI.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, they're already not value adding, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh can I add up, can I can I just do a shout out to one of my favourite old bosses, uh, Ben Wilson, who I'm sure will not mind me saying this story. But well before AI, when he used to get briefs from a baby Caroline, he would he had a macro in word, which I tend to find sentences that were more than 50 words long, and it turned red.
SPEAKER_00:And he used to just add me. 50-word sentences. I'm a very wordy person, Danielle.
SPEAKER_02:She just came to the public service from academia. I don't know what you expected.
SPEAKER_04:Oh my god, my macro would be set at like 15, 10. Um exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, I just I just wanted to shout out what was a beautiful piece of coaching because he didn't change it. He would just literally be like, look at the web. I'm like, okay, I'll go deal with that.
SPEAKER_02:Uh let's move on to our next category of words, uh, which we've called words hard, fear, indecision, or the fact that we've not got plan. Uh and here's the list. Uh, and definitely a number of these have made it out of my mouth before. Evolving priorities, uh, governance, critical path, development, opportunity, actionable insights. Um let's pick a couple. Uh, evolving priorities. This one is usually about acknowledging that policy environments change and priorities might need shift in response to new risks uh or new information. And I would love if those new risks and new information were macro evidence-based, but sometimes they're just a caller on AM radio in the morning.
SPEAKER_04:I was just gonna say, so this one's really cool. Talkback radios and talkback radio and who your minister spoke to on the weekend. Like and the problem is you can't say that ministers and governments are changing their mind all the time because it looks unstable. Um, and so you I reckon you tend to use evolving priorities inside the public service when you're talking to the outside world or trying to keep your team a bit calm about the fact that last week we were making yellow buildings and this week we're making blue ones, and you don't really know why. So you have to put some kind of words over the top, and you're like, the government's priorities have evolved, and we're now heading in this direction. Because what you can't say is, as I said, the minister went to a barbecue and someone said blah blah and now, because we don't know we're doing something different. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I have nothing to add to that excellent answer, except that when you said unstable, all that came into my head was I am a very stable genius.
SPEAKER_02:So I would just I mean if you have to say it. Uh let's do another one that gives me the eek critical path. It does have a very specific project management definition. It's the sequence of things that sequence of tasks that have to be completed on time, or the whole project slits. But how's it actually getting used?
SPEAKER_01:Uh my pet peeve about this whole project must be resolved as part of the critical path before I agree to what the like it's one of those, right? It's on the critical path that we need to allocate uh the blue toilets. Yep.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I don't know what I reckon you just touched on something really interesting though, Alison, where something started with a very technical definition from a particular might be the law, another one, yeah. Project management, it might be executive coaching. And the thing is, like it's only the four people who read the book who know what it was supposed to mean, and the rest of us have just made it up over time, like around it. Um, sometimes I Google them. I'm like, I bet you this one hasn't, like, while I'm in a meeting, I'm like, why is everybody saying nature positive? Let me find out what that means. And then you find the source, but then you're in the room and you're like, no one's using it in the same way that the internet just told me that the academics put it like, now what?
SPEAKER_02:Like I once had to uh mediate a dispute between a chief executive and a minister who were both using the same niche phrase, which I actually can't remember now, but to mean in practice quite different things. Oh no, oh no, this is literally and they've been talking to each other for like months and thought they were aggressively on the same page and they were really not.
SPEAKER_01:Um then there's also the embarrassment of like someone's using a technical word wrong, and so there's like a whole ego management. Oh, oh, that is like genuinely giving them the heebie-dutties.
SPEAKER_00:Um the best of all case.
SPEAKER_02:Uh may I just offer you uh a moment though, if you're ever in a meeting and you think I don't know what this word is, but I've got my device in front of me and I might Google it. Um if you are in any way a screen industries or animal management, just don't Google it. You don't want to know what mulesing means. You don't. Uh so let's let's get into some of the other words uh that we threaten to ban every year. Uh here's a long list. Lean in, socialize the deck. Touch base, future-proof, low-hanging fruit, end-to end, moving feast, deep dive, and blue sky thinking. How are we going to future proof things, ladies? What does it mean? It means designing a space.
SPEAKER_04:People think we're doing that anyway. Like they think that we do that like they really do think that when we're designing stuff that it has some legs to it.
SPEAKER_02:Like We probably ought to have turned our mind to some of the future scenarios.
SPEAKER_01:It feels so out of date to me because like all of the kind of you know, the Barney or the VUCA, you know, all of those kind of full casting frameworks. Um, sorry, Barney being brittle, anxious, non-linear, and something else, um, and VUCA being volatile. Oh, I'm not gonna get it.
SPEAKER_02:But you know, uncertain complex and ambiguous.
SPEAKER_01:Perfect, excellent. And I did listen to an interesting podcast on Barney the other day, which is why it was in my head as it went. But all of those sort of say to you, like literally the only thing we know about the future is you can't proof yourself against the future, right? Like you, it's uh it feels to me like such a kind of 1960s idea of kind of we are going to design for the certain future that's coming in. Like it's much more, you know, I would use more buzzwords like adaptable and resilient.
SPEAKER_04:It feels really old-fashioned to me. Resilient is like the list. Oh, it's like it would just skate apart. No, resilient has to be on the list when it should be banned across the board.
SPEAKER_01:I wrote my thesis on resilience. Anyway, I know.
SPEAKER_04:Well, you know, and that was ages ago. No, but resilient. Resilience is like you're gonna get flooded, so just get used to it and be resilient. It's like, were you being bullied at school? Get some good feelings about it. Like it's become a massive systems resiliency. Like, you know, we're gonna hope this ICT system doesn't fall over anymore. It it has flipped all the responsibility onto the ICT system, the kid, the community. I appreciate that as like a bit of a toughen the F up kind of person, my general position is like everyone should toughen up. Um, I'm just not sure that shouting be resilient at poor people or people in drought or whatever is kind of helping, quite frankly. I don't think shouting at the ICT is. I wish to say I do not stand at the side of roads and shout at poor people to be resilient. I know, but that is a little bit where resilient is going, right? Like, I think we have lost our resilience, but I think that our policy response to using the word over and over again is to shout be more resilient in kind of five different word-salad ways. Sorry, I'm banning resilience for 2026. Sorry, everyone who's gotten in their job title, you're not personally banned. You are not personally banned.
SPEAKER_00:You can do a change management process around that, Daddy L.
SPEAKER_02:No, I know I've just realized that. Here's one that we use on the pod, actually, deep dive. Deep dive meant to be a detailed examination of an issue going beyond the surface level to understand root causes and patterns. But what does it actually mean when you're in a meeting and someone says, let's do a deep dive?
SPEAKER_01:It means we're gonna spend more than five minutes. We're gonna allow each other to ask questions about it. We're not just gonna rely on the paper. We might actually get an expert who knows something about it to come into the room so we can have a conversation. So, like I actually I like what deep dives have become because they've become like the proxy for showing curiosity and actually learning a thing.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. When I say deep dive, what I mean personally that myself is I read beyond the executive summary and recommendations. You maybe read the attack. Sorry, I've read the attachments. That's my version of a deep dive. Not yours, Caroline.
SPEAKER_01:Again, we use the same words.
SPEAKER_04:The permission to different things, right?
SPEAKER_01:But don't you think a deep dive is like a permission to say, I don't know as much about this as I might, and I am interested to know more. Like I think I quite like it in that context. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Uh we're just gonna do one more and then wrap up uh because I particularly object to this one. Lean in. Let's just lean in.
SPEAKER_00:Well, lean in is shouting at the ladies to say, stop being so overwhelmed by the misogyny and just lean in, ladies.
SPEAKER_02:It's not your fault that there are structures and systems that disadvantage you. Like it is your fault that there are structures and systems that disadvantage you, and it's your fault for not being confident enough.
SPEAKER_04:Lean in and be more resilient. Um, I think it's also got a second meaning that is used quite a lot, which what they actually mean is we're going to prioritize this right now, or it's going to become important to us. So it's like we're going to lean into our services sector or whatever. And what they are actually saying is in the list of things we are not going to get to and are going to get to in the next few months, this one is going to be on the top of the list.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Um, but we say lean into, and then all the junior people are like, does that mean we're supposed to pay more attention to that?
SPEAKER_01:Or what are you asking me to do? It's such a good point. It's like um, it's the sense that something might be optional, like it might be optional to engage deeply in this or not, and we're making a conscious choice to lean towards it, which again I quite like. Because I like prioritization, right? Like I like the idea of the thing.
SPEAKER_02:So do I, but I wish people would actually just say we're prioritizing this.
unknown:Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Makes it much less ambiguous for people to work out what we're supposed to do.
SPEAKER_01:Focus on this. No, no, no, no. Guys, guys, like literally PhD, sociology, actor network theory. It is very useful if people have slightly different but overlapping understandings of terms or words. Like, we would very rarely come to agreement to do anything if we actually all really spent the time dialing in on exactly the specifics of what it is that we're doing. And like, you know this, because actually you ladies make use of this ambiguity all the freaking time in your day jobs, right? And so I just think precision is important in some contexts, but in other contexts, it's useful to have catch all words that kind of let us broadly move in a direction. And then when you need to get precise, you do.
SPEAKER_04:I agree with that, but my one of my proudest moments this year, this is very self-indulgent, but was when someone emailed me to say that they had read the attachment to the Royal Commission report that we wrote, or that I wrote, and that was GGA authored, and their comments weren't on the everything on it. They said I couldn't believe I could understand all of it. I'm on the outside of government, I could understand all of it, and it was written in a very plain way. And I swear to God, of all the compliments or stuff, the work I've done this year, like I was like, that was what I was trying to do, and somebody got it, which was each time I was writing in the way that this you know, we we all use the words that we've just laughed our heads off about, right? Like, I think I even use resilient. So for my shouty, poor audio person for this pod who's probably gonna have to turn my mic down. Um, I'm I realize it's like hypocrites stay out here, but um, I was that the proudest moment I had was actually got two emails about that report from people who aren't in government but are very important to the DV sector who said who were who commented on the writing, and I was like, see, it can be done. And it was still smart, just had lots less of these words in it. That's all.
SPEAKER_01:I think Danielle, like I love this, and also it's like time and place, right? Like there's a thing where who are you trying to corral and for what? And like it's sometimes helpful to have strategic ambiguity or woolly concepts when you're trying to get treasury on board.
SPEAKER_02:Wooly everything. On that note, uh, we are going to, in using another buzzword, park the buzzword bingo there for today. Uh, we will be back with one more episode before the end of the year where we step back, reflect on your extraordinary feedback, and talk about what this little pod has shown us about public service life. And this week our mug winner is Courtney Donellan for a message that beautifully captured what this little community is about. Till next time.
SPEAKER_01:Just some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers. While we've tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full-time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don't guarantee that we've got all the details right. Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else at the Westminster Tradition Pod at gmail.com. Thanks to Pampo Audio for our intro and outro music. Till next time.