Change, technology and rugby

Charles Darwin said “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

Brendan Boyle learned the same thing from seven siblings, rugby, getting government services online and the Auckland Super City.

“It’s about getting things done through influence, collaboration and communication rather than command and control,” says Brendan, who took up the role of 
Chief Executive of the Ministry of Social Development in October this year.

The third of eight children, Brendan grew up on a sheep farm near Winton in Southland, and later on a 10-acre block outside Invercargill, close enough to bike to school.

“I’ve got five sisters so you can imagine what my life was like – and still is,” he says with a wry laugh as he recalls dinners with 10 people all trying to make themselves heard.

The large family, the close Southland community and schooling influenced by the Marist Brothers imparted lasting family, community and public service values. One thing Brendan values about sport, and being involved in his children’s sports 
clubs, is the diversity of people he knows in the community: "It keeps it real."

Brendan studied law at Otago University while working for the Justice Department in Dunedin. He stayed on, working as a solicitor for the Land Titles Office and becoming 
local registrar.

Then, in 1996 the office reorganised into Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). Brendan was offered the chance to go to Wellington as Registrar General for LINZ.

Career-wise Wellington was the clear choice, but it was hard to leave friends and connections in Dunedin. He and his wife Louise were expecting their first child. Brendan was also on the Otago Rugby Union board of directors. It was a dynamic time when rugby was moving to professionalism. Brendan relished the experience.

“I met some wonderful people and learned a heck of a lot about management, leadership and governance, sometimes from the way not to do things.”

The governance arrangements in rugby union mean that “the power resides largely with the feeders – the clubs and unions. 
So you were leading through influence and collaboration, as opposed to someone sitting there and saying this is the way we’re going to do it, and expecting everyone to go to it.

“It was also good preparation for the political side of life in Wellington,” Brendan adds with a laugh. “Rugby union politics would give the Beehive a run for its money. It really would. It’s extremely political.”

When Brendan joined LINZ in Wellington, the organisation was groaning under a weight of paper. “In 1996 the organisation was adding a mile a year of shelving for paper, so it didn’t take a genius to figure out it was not sustainable.”

As LINZ looked to solve its dilemma, the first moves were made towards the Landonline project, which would eventually see 
seven million physical records converted into digital records.

“That’s when I started to get a lot of exposure to IT and some ground-breaking innovative possibilities.”

In the midst of the dotcom boom, Brendan spent a year completing an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
at the Sloan School of Management. He and Louise also had their third child, who is now 11.

Surrounded by mostly private sector cohorts from major companies around the world, Brendan gained a global perspective on technology, leadership and innovation.

Returning with a thesis on e-government, Brendan became head of a small State Services Commission team charged with embedding 
IT across the public sector.

In 2003 Brendan moved back to LINZ as 
chief executive, picking up and completing the seven-year, $130 million Landonline project in 2007. The technology was complex, but Brendan says it was more about gaining people's buy-in to a new way of working and thinking.

The importance of collaboration around innovation was reinforced by Brendan’s next challenge. As chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs, he led the reforms which combined eight local councils into the single Auckland ‘Super City’. Brendan was also involved in the Canterbury civil defence emergency response, as the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management was part of his DIA responsibilities.

“One of the big lessons out of the Auckland experience is that you have to have a collaborative approach. It’s our role to explore the possibilities, innovate around better ways of doing things, and work with people so that they can see those possibilities.

“The customer is critical because that’s who you’re doing it for. But I always maintain that the customer is right up until the point where the customer is wrong. In Landonline, lots of lawyers didn’t want an electronic system and were happy to continue doing paper. Yet if you talk to the legal profession now they will say 
it was a complete no-brainer.

“At times it needs a sudden event or some leadership from the centre to be able 
to say: ‘Look there’s a better way of doing this. We want to work with you on the design; 
we want to work with you on making it happen. But we are quite clear that we think this is a better model.’

“Sometimes you’ve just got to have the courage to do that.”

In Christchurch, the February earthquake was the sudden event to spark change.

“What we’ve seen is a whole lot of 
people who realised that in order to be 
able to work better for Christchurch they 
needed to work better together.

“Some of that was brought about by co-location, some of it was because they deliberately decided to forge those connections and do something in a stronger way.

“The irony is that there’s no reason why any of those agencies couldn’t work together collaboratively in any part of the country at any point in time. But it took a cataclysmic event to make it happen.

“We in Wellington tend to stress about accountability and governance and reporting lines, whereas out there you’ve got people who are just making it work.

“They’ve got to be aware of risk and all those other things, but people quite rightly decided that they were better to ask forgiveness than permission – and the sky hasn’t fallen in.

“One of the challenges is how can we pick up some of that learning and innovation from Christchurch and apply it elsewhere.”

A quote hangs on the wall of Brendan’s office: Excellence is not for the faint of heart.

“[Former MSD chief executive] Peter Hughes gave me that. Of course you have worries about whether you might be doing it right but at some point you’ve just got to forge ahead and work with your customers and stakeholders to make it work. And if it’s not right you adapt, adjust and keep improving it until it is better.”