• DL New Zealand
• Innovation
• Government

Written by Ben Hayman, Digital Leaders New Zealand

Late last month a group of people with an interest in digital leadership held a kickoff meeting in Wellington for the network and came up with a set of ideas that could be used as themes for us to focus on in our first DL Wellington events.

The themes have a strong government sector focus in some areas due to so many folk from the public sector being present. It was clear however that many of the themes relate just as well to both the public and private sectors.

One take out that is really worth highlighting is that given how small our community is here in NZ’s capital city, what’s good for government is also going to be good for Wellington as a whole. Any focus on raising government’s ability to engage in valuable digital service delivery will only be good for the digital job market, levels of digital skills in our small city and therefore good for the private sector as well. We felt it would make Wellington a more informed and attractive place for people to work and for other people to move to and get involved in.

We also felt that the NZ approach to federated service delivery by government and the focus on where the “digital boundary” of government meets the private sector is ripe for joined up thinking across all sectors. There’s lots of opportunity for us to explore valuable conversation and partnership between the private and public sector on this stuff.

So after the kickoff event we ended up with nine candidates for themes that DLNZ would then organise small events on and also ask people to start posting content about. Nine will be too many to act on at once so we need to narrow it down to no more than 3 to start with. This is the list – all views on which to do first will be most welcome:

• Growing local talent – How can we share information and lessons across sectors to foster creative differentiation in the Wellington digital market?
• Digital as the catalyst for business transformation – What are the steps to transform our organisations and how can we avoid them leading to it being “just about digital”?
• Organisational Immune Systems – How can we disrupt or change the way decision making is undertaken to allow new approaches to take hold?
• The Wellington Innovation landscape – Who’s doing what, where and how do we make the most of our digital village scale?
• Leading differently – How do we develop leaders with collaborative styles and the confidence to let go?
• Making learning the organisational priority – How do we get our organisations in the right state to take real value from learning and to value it (learning) as a result?
• Taking bigger steps – How can our orgs leapfrog their current position, how can we systematically get the most from the next set of disruptive new ideas and tech?
• Building a cross sector community – What do we need to do to create a safe and valuable space for real, open and valuable conversations between the sectors?
• Government procurement – Is everyone doing enough to make the most of the intersection between government’s need to innovate and the private sector’s desire for growth?

If you’ve got a view on which of these 9 ideas above you’d put in your top 3 then please comment below.

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