Join us to understand and explore how we can encourage creativity in the public service.

Building on the insights we gather in our session on Tuesday 25 March, we invite design practitioners, creative bureaucrats, innovative thinkers, and those who want to do things differently to come along to explore the identified barriers in more depth, share experiences, and start to co-create ideas for fostering more creativity.

Across Australia, we see pockets of creatives in the public service and we notice it too. We share with each other where ‘the good creative stuff happens’ and where good practice is well received and appreciated. But what we all want is for this to be more widespread. For the public, private and third sectors to ‘do more creative thinking’.

Join us to explore these questions:

• How are we coming together to push for a greater enabling environment?

• Are we understanding what policy, strategy, program, regulatory, and ‘transformation’ teams are up against in adopting these methodologies?

• How might we overcome the ‘they just don’t get it’?

The public service, as many of us have observed, faces immense challenges in becoming design mature and fostering creativity. But until we as practitioners work together to help foster the enablers, we may be slamming heads on brick walls for a while yet.

This session hopes to start understanding the depth of barriers faced by those not yet on our bandwagon and begin to co-create the enabling environment that we need.  We also hope to use this session as the start of a community in NSW that bridges the gap between people who aren’t comfortable with ‘creativity’ and those who are and want to bring their whole selves to their roles. 

We are also inviting attendees to share what’s worked for them through concept posters. Concept posters can showcase:

• Where creativity has been used in non-traditional contexts (legislation reform for example)

• Successful collaborations where creativity has brought people in to think differently about a challenge 

• How enabling environments for creativity to occur have been created 

If you are interested in contributing a concept poster, we encourage you to create one and bring it along on the day. Posters should be in physical form (A4 pieces of paper, poster boards) and we encourage you to get out the stickers / glitter / glue / ribbon! We’ll also have some materials in case you get inspired in the moment.

We want this to be an inclusive and accessible event, so if cost (or anything else) is a barrier to attend, please let us know so we can find a way for you to join us.