Collaboration under pressure: What today’s context demands of APS leaders

Geopolitical volatility, fiscal constraint and heightened scrutiny are not new pressures on the public service. But their combined intensity is changing how leadership feels, how it operates, and how attempts at collaboration succeed or fail. At Nous, we work extensively with APS leaders at all levels. This is our take on the current operating environment and why joined-up work is harder now, yet more essential than ever.

Across the APS, many leaders describe a familiar pattern: the work is getting more complex, the stakes feel higher, community expectations (and their own pressures) are growing, and the margin for error feels wafer thin. 

As mentioned above, none of those forces are, strictly speaking, new. What is new is the way the pressures are converging – each feeding into and amplifying the others – so that even well-run parts of the system are experiencing more friction, and responding with increased defensiveness and go-to-ground behaviour.

Leaders are being asked to take decisions in an environment commonly described as the most dangerous since the Second World War, with consequences that are felt across domestic policy agencies (e.g. in relation to fuel prices) as well as national security agencies. Dealing simultaneously with new risks and high uncertainty increases the premium on preparedness, horizon scanning, and coordinated action across portfolios.

What makes this moment even more challenging is the rapid disruption of knowledge itself, fuelled by the rise of artificial intelligence. AI is transforming how information is created, shared and understood, upending long-standing assumptions about expertise and decision-making. As geopolitical volatility intensifies, APS leaders must not only respond to events but adapt to a world in which the foundations of knowledge are constantly evolving.

Budget pressures reduce available resourcing and change behaviours. When teams are stretched, collaboration can be perceived as extra work rather than core work. The result is a rational retreat into mandate, function, and jurisdiction, precisely when cross-cutting problems demand shared ownership.

Leaders note higher expectations for responsiveness: more ad hoc information requests, more Estimates pressure, more demands for fast explanations. At the same time, the public accountability environment is increasingly shaped by clip-able, shareable moments. That can shift incentives from “get to the best answer” to “avoid the worst media outcome,” reinforcing risk aversion and encouraging short time-horizons.

Together these conditions create a simple but powerful pattern where stress goes up, and risk tolerance goes down. People seek certainty through process, boundaries, and control. That response is understandable. It is also one of the main reasons joined-up government or effective system stewardship becomes harder, exactly when it is most needed.

Most public servants do not need to be convinced that collaboration is desirable. In fact, it has traditionally been one of public sector’s key strengths. The challenge is that in high-pressure environments, the system and the need for rapid progress can unintentionally foster and reward behaviours that undermine it: siloed thinking and decision-making, rapid escalation, defensive briefing, my-function-first thinking, and a gradual narrowing vision of what counts as success.

When the stakes feel high, even small differences in perspective can take on greater weight. Leaders are noticing more tension, incivility, and risk- and ownership-aversion, as teams try to manage competing demands and rapidly shifting priorities. In these conditions, collaboration can start to feel discretionary and as though it is delaying progress: valuable, but something to be returned to when pressures ease. In practice, however, it is precisely under pressure that collaboration matters most as a signal of how well the system is working as a whole.

One pattern that often emerges is pressure concentrating in the middle layers of APS leadership. Senior leaders may share a strong sense of the national interest and a clear view of constraints and trade‑offs. At the delivery front line – particularly at the EL1/EL2 level – teams are working hard to honour mandates, interpret policy intent, and balance multiple accountabilities. Where these demands collide across agencies, friction can build, slowing delivery and creating duplication, even when there is shared commitment to the same outcomes.

There is a trap in writing about leadership under pressure: it is easy to produce another list of leadership behaviours that reads well and upsets no one but ultimately changes little. A more useful starting point is a consideration of posture: how leaders make sense of the moment, and what they signal as “normal” and “expected” when the system is under strain.

The APS and its people are operating within real constraints: intensified scrutiny, competing priorities, limited time, and ambiguous signals. If we “other” our colleagues – or imply the system is broken because people lack commitment – we miss the point. The challenge is structural and behavioural, and it shows up most sharply when pressure peaks.

The APS has lived through recurring cycles of reform, scrutiny, and capability debates. It may be true that the world is on fire – the cartoon dog in the burning building, claiming that “This is fine,” pops up everywhere these days – but it is rarely the most helpful story for leaders to tell, especially when they still need to deliver. A more compelling narrative is this: conditions are tougher, therefore the disciplines of collaboration and adaptive leadership matter more, and we can get better at them.

Values-led decision making under scrutiny. Clarifying what you won’t trade off when the pressure rises.

• Networked leadership. Investing in relationships and cross-agency channels before they are urgently required.
• Preparedness and scenario thinking. Treating foresight as a shared, system-wide responsibility, not a boutique exercise.
• Adaptive skill. Distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges and creating space for learning as opposed to controlling.
• Taking a system-wide perspective. Recognising how incentives, accountabilities and information flows shape outcomes, and working with a wider range of system actors to promote collective, aligned effort.

If collaboration is approached as ‘nice to have’, it will always lose out to urgent delivery and immediate risk management. In the public sector’s current context, collaboration should be treated more like critical infrastructure: the capability that allows the system to absorb shocks, share trade-offs, and act coherently when problems cut across portfolios.

The question for leaders is how to put collaboration into practice and make its benefits real and tangible when stress is high and risk tolerance low. In the second piece of this series, we turn from what’s happening to what actually works: practical moves to help middle-tier leaders to build and leverage cross-agency (and cross-government and cross-jurisdictional) networks and build a more joined-up operating rhythm.

Get in touch to discuss how leaders can actively build and nurture collaborative habits, embedding them as core capabilities that help the APS respond effectively in challenging times.

Connect with Kelly Samson, Philippa Prothero, and Tanya Smith on LinkedIn.

Written with input from David Hallinan and Stewart Howard.

Read the second article in our two-part series on collaboration in the APS here.