Agile and Adaptive Leadership in the Public Sector

Few questions in public management have grown more consequential in recent years than this: how can leaders take positive actions when conditions keep changing? As Professor Mergel’s report highlights, the environment facing government leaders today has been captured in frameworks like VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) and, more recently, BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible).

These are not academic labels. They reflect the daily reality of managing agencies through demands that emerged from the pandemic era, digital transformation, and geopolitical disruption. Traditional command-and-control hierarchies were built for a different world. This report addresses leadership in the world today.

Professor Mergel brings scholarly depth and practical orientation to the topic. Drawing on extensive research in public administration and organizational behavior, she reframes agile as much more than a project management methodology borrowed from software development—rather, the agile paradigm represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about leadership. Many government efforts to adopt agile have focused on the mechanics of scrums and sprints while leaving untouched the deeper implications for leadership, which the report focuses on.

The report opens with an examination of why agile approaches have become so urgent for public sector organizations, and what this change demands of the government workforce. From there, the author explores agile leadership across several interconnected dimensions: the mindset required to lead in an adaptive fashion, the specific work practices that make agile teams function effectively, and the organizational conditions that either support or undermine those teams.

The report describes several key issues. First, Professor Mergel treats agile leadership as emanating from self-leadership, contending that leaders cannot create conditions for adaptive teams if they remain wedded to fixed thinking. Her discussion of growth versus fixed mindsets, and of promotion-focused versus prevention-focused orientations, gives leaders a framework for candid self-assessment rather than another checklist to complete.

Second, the report's attention to the need for flexibility deserves notice. Iterative learning, adjustments based on empirical data, and the willingness to surface failure and make changes early all require an environment that supports speaking up about problems to correct. These elements provide a structural precondition for agile work to function.

Third, the report points to specific leadership assignment worksheets. These practical guides translate the report's concepts into structured exercises that leaders and their teams can work through directly, connecting the analytical content to driving change inside government organizations.

This report represents the latest contribution to a sustained body of work on agile government that the IBM Center has developed, including several reports done in partnership with the National Academy of Public Administration’s Agile Government Center. Earlier reports in this series, Leadership Framework for an Agile Government, Human Centricity in Digital Delivery: Enhancing Agile Governance, The Future of Agile Government, and Learning: the Role of Public Affairs Education, include examinations of the application of agile principles to policy development and program implementation, government, digital modernization, and adaptive governance under conditions of disruption. Professor Mergel’s report complements and deepens this series by addressing the leadership dimensions that determine whether agile methods take root.

We hope this report will offer value to a broad audience, including senior executives working through the realities of organizational transformation, mid-level managers building cross-functional teams under resource constraints, and those responsible for developing the next generation of public sector leaders. Professor Mergel has brought rigor and clarity to a topic that can help improve government service delivery and mission impact in a complex age.