That's a great question.
There are a couple of core things for me, based on my takeaways from my experience. First, whole of government is the new normal. It has to be the way we approach these kinds of international engagements. You can no longer have these siloed approaches, where individual departments might share information with each other, but they're not actually developing an integrated approach to priority setting, planning, and contextual analysis. We absolutely have to come to this, understanding that these things require an integrated response.
But whole of government is really hard. Some people overestimate how difficult it is to pursue whole-of-government approaches. It's not because they genuinely don't want to, but the way our systems are designed, they don't always encourage horizontal engagement. A lot of our systems are established for vertical engagement. So you really have to make sure you're changing the culture across departments to encourage that shared strategic vision: the application of agreed criteria for engagement in circumstances, for instance; flexible staffing and governance. Procurement arrangements is another key takeaway, and the ability to rapidly have those capacities when we're in the field. There's comfort with delegation of authority to folks who are in the field so they can quickly respond to opportunities that arise, but also react to challenges and obstacles when we're faced with them.
We've been reflecting quite carefully within my bureau on some of these key takeaways. We are now trying to institutionalize some changes in our whole-of-government approach so that it doesn't depend on any individual who happens to be in a particular job. We're putting in place systems that encourage whole-of-government efforts. That's something I hope we can come back to in the future and elaborate on what we've been doing.