The report also finds a willingness to experiment and take risks to achieve long-term gains — an essential ingredient of agility — can clash with an overriding focus on short-term delivery, which makes risky or innovative behaviour less desirable than meeting targets.

"This is coupled with intolerance for failure. Reward systems continue to discourage risk taking, rewarding performance that hits tight performance targets without flexibility and experimentation.

"Appropriate risk taking is often an exception rather than the rule. This can particularly be the case for those in the front line of service delivery who may not always understand the boundaries of the risks in the operating environment. Instead there can be a default to a position of 'doing things the way they have always been done' rather than taking sensible risks within known boundaries," the report notes.

The complexity and uncertainty that the public sector faces is driving the need for governments to foster agility in its people, systems and outlook, the report finds, and governments are increasingly pursuing more flexible, responsive, and innovative solutions to a wide range of challenges across policy, regulatory, enforcement and service delivery functions to achieve results that make a difference.

"Agile governments are striving for short term responsiveness to day-to-day needs, medium-term adaptation to emerging opportunities and challenges, and long-term influence over the shape of future operating environments. Agile public sector agencies move constantly through an agility cycle, scanning and making sense of information, responding to stimuli, and shaping change. They apply public management practices that have emerged subsequent to the new public management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. These include personalizing services to individuals' needs, creating incentives for behavioural change to influence policy outcomes, and joining up across portfolios, jurisdictions, and sectors to address cross-cutting issues. Agility is a useful concept to conceptualize these public sector trends and practices that are shaping contemporary approaches to public management," the report says.