Co-create. Innovate. Collaborate. Three words that defined the day - and three challenges the public sector is still working hard to get right.
On Thursday, 4 June 2026, the Tactiv team had the privilege of attending and exhibiting at the Queensland Government Event, BiiG 2026, the annual public sector innovation conference held right here in Brisbane. Themed Co-Create, Innovate, Collaborate: Bringing people, purpose and partnerships together for better public outcomes, the event was a timely reminder of what it takes to move from good intentions to genuine, measurable change in the public sector.
What followed was a full day of honest conversation, challenge, and inspiration. Here are our key takeaways, and why they matter for how government agencies manage programs and measure their impact.
One of the most consistent messages of the day came from the session on co-creating solutions to complex challenges in public systems. Giselle Hodgson, Managing Director of Queensland Government Consulting Services, put it plainly: success depends on intentionally spending time defining and understanding the problem, before anything else.
"What follows from that are the measures of success and putting intentional steps in place to monitor."
Giselle Hodgson, MD, Queensland Government Consulting Services
This is something we see every day in our work with government clients. When program objectives are vague or misaligned from the outset, no reporting system in the world can rescue you. The KPIs you track, the outcomes you measure, the milestones you monitor - all of it flows from the quality of the original problem definition. Getting that right, with intentionality and stakeholder alignment, is foundational.
At Tactiv, our Enquire platform is designed to support exactly this kind of structured thinking: enabling agencies to define performance indicators at the program level from day one, so that every grant, contract and project rolls up into a coherent picture of impact.
Suzi Woodrow-Read offered a perspective that resonated deeply across the room: "We cannot break down the silos, but we can work across them - with persistence, effort and attention. Relationships are a key resource." And Adele Laughton, CEO of the Queensland Social Enterprise Council, went further: good collaboration is genuinely uncomfortable. The problems worth solving are the ones that cut across organisational boundaries - the ones you didn't know existed until you started talking to the right people.
"The problem you are trying to solve is something different, and a problem you didn't know existed."
Adele Laughton, CEO, Queensland Social Enterprise Council
This is a challenge that program management technology can help with. When you have a shared platform where government agencies, service providers, community organisations and funders can all see the same data - track the same milestones, report against the same indicators - you create the infrastructure for cross-silo collaboration. Technology doesn't replace human relationships, but it makes them easier to sustain at scale.
In the Leadership Lens panel, Ben Gales, Executive Officer for Social Impact at Queensland Treasury, gave one of the most practically grounded takes of the day on what genuine cross-sector collaboration actually requires. His starting point: you cannot assume that everyone around the table shares the same objectives - and pretending otherwise is where collaboration quietly breaks down.
"Firstly, understanding those different objectives is critical at the outset... Then you have to align those incentives. Now, that takes work, and it takes time to work with people... And the reason why you've spent time on this is because things will go wrong."
Ben Gales, Executive Officer Social Impact, Queensland Treasury
Ben was speaking from direct experience - working to blend government, private investment, philanthropy and community partners around shared social outcomes, where commercial returns, social returns and risk appetites all pull in different directions. His conclusion was clear: if you do that alignment work upfront and set honest expectations about failure, you build the resilience to get through the inevitable bumps.
"If you've got aligned incentives, you can typically get through that."
Ben Gales, Executive Officer Social Impact, Queensland Treasury
For program managers, this is a reminder that the tools you use need to support that alignment - making shared objectives visible, tracking progress against agreed indicators, and giving all parties a transparent view of what's working and what isn't. That's precisely what good program management infrastructure is designed to do.
A thread that ran throughout the day was the public sector's complex relationship with failure. As Ben Gales observed, government sometimes struggles with failure precisely because of a real and legitimate accountability to public funding - and doing nothing can feel safer than taking a risk that might not pay off.
But the answer isn't to avoid measuring - it's to map risk and reward from the outset, and build in the monitoring mechanisms that let you course-correct early. Director General Patricia O'Callaghan of the Department of Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation captured the ambition well:
"Not just leave concepts in the room, but take these ideas for innovation back and make real change for Queenslanders."
Patricia O'Callaghan, Director General, Dept of Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation
That kind of accountability - from concept to community impact - is what good program management infrastructure exists to support. Real-time performance measurement, configurable reporting indicators, and transparent audit trails aren't just administrative tools. They're how government demonstrates that public investment is working.
The day closed with a clear-eyed acknowledgement that technology is setting the pace, and the public sector needs to accelerate to keep up with the economic and social challenges ahead. But perhaps the most grounding insight of all came in a quieter observation: innovation emerges through human connection.
No platform, no dashboard, no reporting framework replaces the trust and relationships that make genuine collaboration possible. What good technology does is remove the friction - the manual processes, the scattered spreadsheets, the reporting bottlenecks - so that the people doing the important work can focus on the work that matters.
Define the problem first
Measures of success flow from clarity on what you're trying to solve - not the other way around.
Work across silos
You can't break them down, but shared platforms and persistent relationships make cross-boundary collaboration real.
BiiG 2026 reinforced for us why the work we do matters. The public sector is grappling with real and complex challenges - and the gap between intent and impact is still one of the hardest problems to close. That's why we keep building tools that help government agencies design programs with clear objectives, track outcomes in real time, and report on impact with confidence.
If you were at BiiG and we didn't get a chance to connect, or if the themes from last week's sessions resonate with challenges in your own programs, we'd love to continue the conversation.