Keynote address by Oonagh McPhillips, Secretary General to National Public Sector Innovation Week 2022 Event

Keynote address by Oonagh McPhillips, Secretary General, Department of Justice at the National Public Sector Innovation Week 2022 Event: Using diversity to drive innovation in the public service hosted by KPMG and the 30% Club.

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A dhaoine uaisle, a chairde, friends and colleagues,

Thanks to Shawna and Triona and colleagues for the invitation. I’m really honoured to here with you all today.

I’m delighted to be speaking to a topic that I’m passionate about, one that encapsulates really well the opportunity and benefits that embracing diversity offers us all. It’s great to see colleagues from UCD’s Innovation Academy on the clár here today. At our justice leaders’ roundtable a few weeks ago, they really got the room buzzing! At that meeting, we reflected on how an innovation culture is all about ‘the hinterland of conversation’, creating time and opportunities in our heavily programmed, over-committed lives to really listen and learn from both the public and our colleagues, to convey implicit and explicit permission to explore, innovate and, importantly, to get things wrong and try again.

So today is important and it’s great to have the chance to meet some people that I only know and admire from afar - including Siobhan McKenna from the Public Appointments Service who’s working to ensure we can attract a much more diverse range of people to the civil and public service. And my neighbour, Jonny Cooper, well qualified to speak on high performing teams – I’m really looking forward to today’s session.

For me, the 30% Club is not just about a worthy or aspirational destination.

I see it as a movement demonstrating how a focused and extremely practical approach can make rapid progress, by making diversity a leadership imperative, activating all senior leaders and influencing those with power to drive change and enable future women leaders.

And while that may seem ambitious, if we look back to when the Club was founded just 12 years ago, the idea of achieving 30% gender balance was very much an aspiration. But the top 20 ISEQ-listed companies have now all broken through the 30% barrier.

I know full well that there is more road to travel, especially in senior executive roles, and there is a real challenge to maintain the ground gained.

But we should still pause to acknowledge the distance we have come, if only to give us renewed confidence to press on, and reflect on the power of what can be achieved when we put our minds to it. Within the Department of Justice, over 57% of my senior management colleagues identify as female. That is a huge change. But as we know, gender is only one aspect – albeit an important aspect - of diversity.

There is a small - but increasing - number of people of colour working in the organisation which is also increasingly comprised of people who have varied experiences in life and work outside the civil service. The department has worked with the PAS and other colleagues to develop a paid internship programme for Travellers, creating pathways to employment for our most disadvantaged community.

We have a very active LGBT network, who have led amazing work over the last four years in helping the whole organization to understand and value diversity.

Some colleagues identify as non-binary and, thankfully, feel safe in doing so.

And we have a vibrant social enterprise policy working with employers on opportunities for people with criminal convictions. We really try to listen to those with lived experience in our policy space.

All this represents significant change and a little bit of creativity and innovation too.

Another key thing that gives me great hope is the number of people, including women, who have risen through the ranks both in business and the public service, and who in turn recognise their responsibility – really our sacred duty – to mentor women and other underrepresented groups.

I’ve benefitted hugely from this myself and it’s one of the most impactful things I can do – formally and informally. It’s enjoyable too because you can see a visible impact on people’s confidence and realisation of their potential and I invariably learn something in every conversation. I’m sure many of you find that too.

Once built up, momentum for change is a powerful resource and we have, in my view, reached a critical mass in most large organisations. There can be no going back.

A fully diverse workforce, by its very nature, invites us to be more open to new ideas, new ways of working and new structures.

Just as with gender equality, there is a strong business case for every organisation to strengthen its internal resources and its capacity to innovate through fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.

I frequently say in my own organisation that Justice is a people business - we are blessed with work that has meaning and purpose because it has so much direct impact on the public. So our department’s vision of a safe, fair and inclusive Ireland really resonates with me personally, and I hope across the organisation.

The vision carries with it enormous responsibility, but also a great sense of purpose and pride in the contribution that the department makes to the delivery of a just and democratic society.

As new colleagues join us, the vision really helps to communicate the purpose: that everyone we serve, whether they live in Cork, Buncrana, Limerick or Dublin’s Northside; whether they’re awaiting an important immigration or court decision that will change their family’s life; whether they were born here or arrived more recently; whether they’re online or a victim of crime, or indeed whether they are in prison; is included in the same vision.

The Public Sector Innovation Strategy, which was published at the end of 2020, defines innovation as ‘finding new means of delivering services and policy responses in ways that can add value to the people we serve.'

I think our experience over the last couple of years in particular has brought home to all of us how vital it is to be dynamic and agile in how we work, think, manage and collaborate.

In recent years, my own department has re-organised our structure quite radically, to equip us to respond to the challenges of our volatile and ever-changing environment. We occupy quite a VUCA world!

And while we certainly hadn’t foreseen the pandemic, we do feel that our new functional structure gave us more organisational resilience when that crisis landed. Equally, over recent months, it has strengthened our approach to innovating and collaborating across Government in response to the Ukraine crisis.

We are now in a position to embed the positive practices of flexible working, digitisation and collaboration that have served us during the crisis.

Although a crisis in every sense of the word, both on an organisational and human level, we all recognise the momentum for change and innovation that COVID-19 brought with it.

And I think we are now arguably better equipped to imagine new ways to combat some of the issues that have hampered equality and diversity in the past.

We should not let a desire ‘to get back to normal’ blind us to the problems that existed in the ‘normal’ before the pandemic. And equally we can’t simply ignore the new problems that will doubtless emerge from the new dispensation.

In my own organisation and across the civil service, we are deeply committed to monitoring any potential disparities in our evolving blended workplace.

I should mention the work of colleagues in An Garda Síochána and my own department as co-sponsors of Action 16 under OPS, the framework for development and innovation in the public service.

This action promotes equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the public service, and recognises the importance of a diverse, inclusive, work environment that protects and fulfils the human rights and potential of its staff.

It also recognises that to be responsive to the public, the public service must reflect the diversity of the communities it serves, and that to be innovative, the public service must seek out and learn from multiple perspectives. We are piloting a maturity model that sets out a range – from compliant to leading – of characteristics and practices to support an organisation in their diversity journey.

This is also a feature of my department’s EDI Strategy, which we published in March. We don’t claim to be in the ‘leading’ category yet; the organisation is very much on a journey.

But we are using the maturity model both for internal HR and EDI practices and, just as importantly, to assess how we implement our policies and develop our laws.

The important new Hate Crime Bill that Minister McEntee published today will be a really practical tool to combat racism and hate speech. It was developed using these criteria and through listening to the lived experiences of those who are most likely to experience hate crime.

The current Garda recruitment competition will also use the maturity model to assess how, why and where people may falter in their journey through the recruitment process, with a view to addressing any barriers next time out.

This commitment to EDI is also embedded in the Civil Service Renewal 2030 Strategy, which highlights that “nurturing a workforce for the future involves bringing equality and inclusivity to the fore of our organisational design.”

Taking action on equality and diversity helps us to retain the public’s trust and maintain and strengthen legitimacy in key public services. It gives us confidence in our ability to shape policies and services that meet the needs of a diverse population.

We have been putting the finishing touches to an Innovation Strategy for the justice sector – encompassing over 27,000 people - in the department and our agencies.

That Strategy is published this week and will share ideas on how we can bring innovation into every aspect of the way we work, scaling existing models and practices, and fostering new ones, to address the many challenges we face.

We learn when we listen. And when we learn, we change.

I have a little mindful picture on my desk of a blue footed Booby, a bird from the Galapagos Islands, with a quote from Darwin: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.’

Diversity drives innovation by bringing something new, something different, to the table.

It brings unpredictability - that can be a scary word for some of us.

It brings the risk of failure, a scary word for everyone.

But it also brings opportunity.

Digital transformation, Brexit, climate change and COVID-19 have been the global disruptors of our times, sadly also joined this year by the war in Ukraine.

Our ability to respond, to move with these kinds of disruptive events, has been - and will be - further strengthened by our ability to listen and to innovate.

Focusing on innovation does not mean we can foresee every issue that lies ahead.

But empowering our people to be their agile, creative, innovative selves is essential to build our capacity and resilience to deal with the unknown, and indeed to develop the confidence to dare to seek uncharted paths.

Over the last several years, the department has taken steps towards building a culture of innovation across the organisation.

Our Innovation Network has hosted countless innovation events, cross-sectoral ‘hackathons’ and established groups of really enthusiastic Innovation Ambassadors.

It has also supported teams and agencies in applying for and securing public sector innovation funding.

This has helped us develop technology change and smaller but really impactful initiatives, like supporting frontline agencies to roll out the JAM (Just a Minute) card, which helps people with hidden disabilities such as a learning disability or autism to ask for a minute of patience when accessing services.

So just to finish:

We must remain open to new ideas from wherever they come.

We must continue to collaborate and support each other both within and across traditional sectoral boundaries.

And we must be brave in our commitment to seek ever-better means to deliver our public services.

The success of our innovations will be measured by how much our customers – the public we serve – benefit from better outcomes. But this is not just about delivering better public services, important as that is.

Diversity is core to our country’s values and innovation is essential to sustaining Ireland’s success and our national interests: a safe, welcoming, more efficient place to live and work, a place where it’s easier to do business and build much needed housing and critical infrastructure, delivered by a diverse skilled public service that reflects and safeguards the country as it is now and will be in future.

Thank you all for the opportunity to say a few words and I really look forward to the rest of the day.