Shift to Policy Advocacy through Public Consultation and Engagement In the attempt to win back votes from those who felt left out and rebuild legitimacy of its regime, the PAP government for the first time shifted away from the pragmatic approach, to consult and engage the public to promote co-creation and coproduction in policy design and service delivery, making policy making change from top-down mandate to bottom-up collaboration (Lee, Ma and Zhou 2017). Post-NPM approaches, such as “joined-up government” and “whole-of-government” programmes, have also been adopted to build collaborative ICT environments in government by hierarchical strengthening of the center (Klievink & Janssen, 2009; Ojo et. al., 2011). This prompted a mindset change in the government and consequently in its leadership development strategy in the public sector to move away from its elitist exclusive approach. Talent Management Strategies to Attract, Develop and Retain the ‘Best and Brightest’ Public Service LeadersReforms in the Public Service are changes in government processes or structures that help to achieve economic developments and address key public policy challenges. Some processes are directly linked to citizens with regards to the mode of service delivery, while others are less visible to citizens but are no less salient to those working ‘on the inside’ of government (Lee, 2021). As the public sector is responsible for designing and monitoring policies practices, decisions made by the public sector will have an impact on the people and credibility of the government (Taylor and Wright, 2004). Therefore, it is important to attract, In conjunction with the move, In August 2012, the Public Service unveiled the Public Sector Transformation initiative. The Public Service Division (PSD), the personnel arm of the bureaucracy, announced the Public Service’s aspiration to be the “One Trusted Public Service with Citizens at the Centre” (PSD, 2018). In pursuit of that vision, the Public Service would “design citizen-centric policies, services, and partner the community”. A month later, the government launched Our Singapore Conversation or OSC. This was described as “a national conversation among Singaporeans … to engage Singaporeans on their desired future for the nation and to establish broad consensus on the key issues that should be addressed” (Khoo and Yee, 2014). For the Public Service, the resources required to staff OSC were substantial. officers from 10 agencies were drawn together to set up a OSC Secretariat. The skills needed to facilitate small group dialogues were not the usual competencies found among public officers. The Public Service was also eager to explore fresh insights into policies and processes, especially integrating design thinking into policy formulation. A group of civil servants from diverse backgrounds were hence sent to the Policy Lab in the UK and MindLab in Denmark to learn and study the design approach in policy formulation. Design thinking challenges traditional public policy formulation and decision making, and it requires specific skills such as ethnography, behavioural sciences, communication and design and architecture, as well as the breaking down of organizational and procedural silos, contesting hierarchies and bureaucracies. Over a period of one year, the Public Service conducted 660 OSC sessions involving a total of 47,000 Singaporeans (Low, 2018). Subsequently, the design thinking approach was to be infused into the policy-making process. The Human Experience Lab (THE Lab) was set up as a new unit in 2012 under the Public Service Division (PSD) of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to adopt Design Thinking to help agencies design and develop public policies, services and experiences that are more citizen-centric (Lee and Ma, 2019). As the Innovation Lab works to help the public sector transform, it has itself changed. Since 2016, the Lab has provided consultancy and coaching to grow public officers’ skills and mindsets in three areas for public service innovation: empathy, collaboration and experimentation (PSD Challenge, 2019). In 2017, with a new role to boost public sector transformation, the unit was officially renamed Innovation Lab to coach public service officers to do the projects themselves. As a hub and incubator to generate and circulate policy evidence and ideas across government, the lab also fuelled the whole-of-nation approach that brought in the Public, Private and People sectors together. To inject new modes of policy decision-making, the public service is enthusiastic about engaging citizens and other stakeholders, as well as collaboration within and across sectors. These endeavours are helpful in consolidating their policy coalitions and has also led to spin-offs of other innovation labs in and beyond the public service.131
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