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Public Sector

Building System-Wide Workforce Capability

Building shared capability across complex systems so people and organisations can deliver more consistently at scale.

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Workforce strategy
Capability frameworks
Co-design and facilitation
Organisational and role design
Learning and capability development
System implementation

The challenge.

Major reforms and service improvements ultimately depend on people having the capability to deliver them.

Yet workforce capability is often approached too narrowly — as training to be delivered or competencies to be documented after the wider strategy has been developed.

At system scale, the challenge is different. Multiple organisations, professions and workforces may contribute to the same outcomes while operating with different mandates, practices and levels of capability. No single organisation controls the whole system.

Building capability therefore requires a shared understanding of what good looks like, what people need to know and be able to do, and how organisations can collectively support those expectations in practice.

Workforce capability is not something that simply follows system change. It is one of the ways system change is achieved.

Our role

Our experience spans national workforce strategy, system-wide capability development, organisational design and large-scale workforce implementation.

A defining example was development of New Zealand's Family Violence and Sexual Violence Workforce Capability Framework.

This required bringing together expertise from across a complex system to establish a shared view of the capabilities required by the diverse workforces that encounter, respond to and seek to prevent family and sexual violence.

The work included establishing and facilitating a national Expert Design Group, developing the capability framework and building cross-agency support for system-wide implementation.

Our experience also includes workforce transformation associated with the Youth Justice Raising the Age reforms, where legislative change needed to translate into organisational design, capability requirements and national implementation affecting more than 200 frontline roles.

Strategic workforce work within health provides another perspective, including national workforce initiatives and development of the Health Workforce Development Fund.

Relevant capabilities

Workforce strategy
Capability frameworks
Co-design and facilitation
Organisational and role design
Learning and capability development
System implementation

How the work was done.

Our approach starts by looking beyond individual organisations and asking what the system needs people to be capable of doing differently.

In family and sexual violence, effective responses depend on many organisations and professional groups. A national Expert Design Group brought different perspectives and expertise together to establish a shared capability architecture.

The work required navigating different professional contexts and organisational interests while maintaining focus on a common question: what capability does the workforce need if the system is to deliver better responses for people?

The resulting framework created a common foundation while recognising that different roles require different levels and applications of capability.

Developing the framework was only part of the task. Building cross-agency ownership and the conditions for implementation mattered equally — because a framework has little value if it remains a document rather than influencing practice.

Raising the Age demonstrates the implementation end of the same challenge. Legislative reform created implications for organisational structures, more than 200 frontline roles and workforce practice, requiring capability development and a national training rollout.

Across these settings, the emphasis has been on connecting strategy, roles, capability and implementation, bringing different perspectives into a coherent design and keeping capability development connected to the wider system outcome.

What changed.

The work created stronger foundations for workforce capability at both system and organisational scale.

In family and sexual violence, it established a shared national capability framework around which diverse agencies and workforces could develop greater consistency in the knowledge, skills and behaviours required for effective responses.

In Youth Justice, workforce capability became part of the practical implementation of legislative reform — connecting organisational design, frontline roles and national learning and development with changes required in practice.

The enduring value lies in creating shared expectations, stronger organisational capability and greater alignment between what a system is trying to achieve and what its people are equipped to deliver.

Our conviction

Experience creates perspective. Perspective shapes better decisions.

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