The Public Sector Podcast: Dreaming Big – Where Playfulness Meets Performance

Episode Overview

This isn't a story about AI, data, or sophisticated frameworks. It's a candid account of the organisational conditions that make experimentation possible inside a large public sector body.

Adrian Clutterbuck, Executive Director Strategy and Transformation, Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service walks through Children's Health Queensland's three-year journey with its Imagination Fund - 303 staff ideas, 20 funded - including the missteps, and the conclusion that permission is scarcer than funding. Context matters: this is a statewide paediatric service with 6,000 staff and a $1.2 billion turnover, where the frontline workforce are clinicians, not project people.

Two Case Studies

Complex asthma - a digitally enabled model of care funded with under $30k. Trained 300+ clinicians statewide, extended remote monitoring as far as Darwin, and delivered a ~50% reduction in long-term steroid use and ED returns.

AI scribe - ambient listening AI writing clinical notes straight into the medical record. Outpatient correspondence turnaround fell from 7.9 days to 14 minutes, and it's now scaling to 2,000+ clinicians. The hard part wasn't proving benefit - it was governance and the question of whose budget pays for it.

Key Takeaways

Permission beats funding. The ideas that flourished weren't the ones asking for the most money.

Capability is the real investment. Mentoring, skills and sponsorship outside a person's own business unit.

Experiments are hard in systems built for control. Less a digital sandpit than a governance one, with a different risk appetite.

Leaders must hold uncertainty. Static business cases with predicted year-one benefits don't fit this work.

Don't over-filter too early. Several year-one ideas that looked like non-starters became the strongest performers.

Why You Should Listen

For leaders in government, health and public services being asked to adopt AI but hitting organisational rather than technical barriers - plus reassurance that if this feels hard, you're not alone.