69. Beyond the Capability List
by Andrew Simon
In this article Yellow Edge explores the idea that capability is not simply about the individual skills people possess, but how effectively they combine them in response to the situation at hand. We consider what capability combinations could mean for public sector performance and leadership development, from sensemaking and wise judgement through to adaptive delivery and collective agency. We also explore how leadership maturity may increasingly be about orchestrating capability across people, teams and systems, rather than relying on the individual leader to have all the answers.
The Power of Capability Combinations in the Public Sector
Public sector organisations have invested considerable effort over many years in defining the capabilities their people need. Capability frameworks describe skills such as strategic thinking, communication, collaboration, stakeholder engagement, digital literacy, people management and leadership. These frameworks provide useful common language and help organisations think systematically about workforce development.
But there may be another question worth asking.
What if performance increasingly depends not simply on whether people possess particular capabilities, but on how well they combine them?
The challenges confronting public servants in today’s turbulent environment rarely arrive neatly packaged as a communication problem, a stakeholder problem, a policy problem or a leadership problem. They arrive as complex situations requiring people to draw upon several capabilities at once.
Perhaps, then, the next evolution in thinking about public sector capability is not another, longer list of capabilities. It is understanding capability combinations.
Part One: Capability Combinations and Everyday Public Sector Performance
Capabilities rarely operate alone
Consider an officer preparing advice on an emerging issue.
They need analytical capability to understand the evidence. But analysis alone will not produce good advice. They may also need to understand the broader system, recognise political and organisational context, exercise judgement about incomplete evidence, appreciate different stakeholder perspectives and communicate the resulting advice succinctly.
Good performance might therefore depend upon a combination such as analysis and systems thinking and contextual awareness and judgement and communication
Similarly, an officer working with stakeholders on a contested policy issue might require listening and empathy and evidence discernment and facilitation and influencing and judgement
Someone responsible for implementing a new initiative might draw upon planning and collaboration and experimentation and problem solving and adaptability
And someone using generative AI to accelerate their work increasingly needs AI literacy and subject-matter knowledge and critical thinking and curiosity and ethical awareness and human judgement
In each example, possessing the individual capabilities matters. But it is their combination in response to a particular situation that enables effective performance.
Capabilities as ingredients
One way of thinking about this is to regard individual capabilities as ingredients rather than finished products. A capable public servant develops an expanding repertoire of knowledge, skills, behaviours and human qualities. But expertise involves something more: recognising what a situation requires and assembling an appropriate combination from that repertoire.
The relationship might be expressed simply as: Individual capabilities enable capability combinations when applied in context with proper judgement has the potential for greater impact and public value.
This shifts the capability question. Rather than asking:
"Does this person have influencing skills?"
We might instead ask:
"Can this person combine evidence, empathy, systems awareness, judgement and influencing to help people with different interests make progress on a difficult issue?"
The second question is perhaps closer to the reality of work.
The same capability can create different outcomes
An intriguing feature of this idea is that an individual capability can contribute to very different outcomes depending upon what surrounds it. For example:
Courage and judgement can enable frank and fearless advice.
Courage and empathy can enable a difficult but respectful conversation.
Courage and experimentation can enable innovation.
Courage and stewardship can enable someone to speak up when an institutional practice needs to change.
Similarly, curiosity combined with data literacy might improve analysis; curiosity combined with empathy might deepen stakeholder understanding; and curiosity combined with systems thinking might reveal that an apparently straightforward problem is actually something quite different. Capability therefore becomes more dynamic and contextual.
From proficiency to coordination
This introduces another idea: capability coordination.
Capability coordination is the ability to recognise what a situation requires and bring together the right combination of knowledge, skills, perspectives and human qualities to respond effectively.
This may become increasingly important as public sector work becomes more complex.
It is particularly relevant in an environment characterised by rapid technological change, artificial intelligence, fiscal pressures, increasing citizen expectations, contested policy environments, cross-jurisdictional problems and issues that cannot be resolved by one profession, agency or sector acting alone.
The most capable person may therefore not be the person who scores highest against every individual capability in a 360-degree feedback process for example, it may be the person who can read the situation, identify what matters and mobilise an effective combination of capabilities.
Some combinations that might matter
Rather than constructing increasingly detailed capability frameworks, organisations could identify a smaller number of combinations that reflect the work their people increasingly need to perform.
For example:
Sensemaking
Systems thinking and curiosity and analysis and perspective-taking
Making sense of complexity and identifying what really matters.Wise Judgement
Evidence and critical thinking and ethics and experience and reflection
Making defensible decisions when there is no obvious answer.Adaptive Delivery
Implementation and experimentation and collaboration and learning and resilience
Turning intentions into outcomes while adapting as circumstances change.Collective Agency
Empathy and collaboration and influencing and facilitation and shared purpose
Mobilising people across organisational and sectoral boundaries.Human and Digital Intelligence
AI and data literacy and critical thinking and creativity and ethical awareness and judgement
Using technology intelligently while retaining human discernment.Courageous Stewardship
Integrity and courage and systems awareness and long-term thinking
Doing what is needed now while protecting and strengthening the institutions we leave behind.
These combinations do not need to become another rigid framework. Their value may be as lenses through which people can think about their work.
Implications for capability development
This approach also changes how capability might be developed. Traditional development can implicitly follow a sequence of learn, then practise to become proficient.
Capability combinations require something more dynamic; encounter, diagnose, combine, act, reflect and adapt (recombine). For example, rather than training people on stakeholder engagement as an isolated capability, participants could be presented with a contested scenario involving community interests, technical evidence, political sensitivities and competing organisational priorities. The developmental questions become:
What is actually happening here?
What does this situation require from me?
Which capabilities am I naturally reaching for?
What am I overlooking?
What combination would help me make progress?
What happened when I tried it?
This creates opportunities for simulations, case challenges, action learning, workplace experimentation and reflective practice. It also develops something increasingly valuable in contemporary public service which is the ability to think about how we are thinking and acting while the work is happening.
Part Two: Capability Combinations and Leadership Growth
The same idea has potentially even greater significance for leadership development. Leadership maturity is often described as becoming progressively better at individual leadership capabilities: becoming more strategic, more influential, more collaborative or better at leading people.
But perhaps mature leadership is characterised less by possessing more capabilities and more by an increasing ability to combine, balance and orchestrate them in response to complexity.
Leadership growth as increasing sophistication of combination
An emerging leader may initially learn individual capabilities separately. They learn how to give feedback, delegate, communicate expectations, manage priorities, facilitate meetings and engage stakeholders. As experience grows, however, leadership situations become less straightforward. For example,
Giving feedback may require clarity and courage and empathy and curiosity and judgement.
Leading change may require sensemaking and communication and empathy and systems thinking and experimentation and resilience.
Navigating a strategic dilemma may require foresight and evidence and political awareness and ethics and courage and judgement
The leader gradually discovers that there is rarely one "right" capability to deploy. Leadership becomes an exercise in combination, balance and choice.
From capability to orchestration
This suggests a different way of thinking about leadership maturity. For example, we can think of maturity as a series of stages:
Capability: at the capability stage, leaders develop individual skills and behaviours.
Combination: at the combination stage, they begin consciously bringing several capabilities together.
Adaption: at the adaptation stage, they recognise that different situations require different combinations and adjust accordingly.
Orchestration: at the orchestration stage, they are not only combining their own capabilities, but they are also mobilising the diverse capabilities of other people, teams, professions and networks.
Stewardship: at the level of stewardship, the leader considers not merely what will achieve an immediate result, but what their choices mean for the organisation, its people, the wider system and the future.
Leadership maturity therefore becomes less about accumulating capabilities and more about developing range, discernment and wisdom in their use.
The importance of apparent opposites
There is another dimension to mature leadership. Some of the most difficult leadership situations require leaders to hold capabilities that can appear contradictory. For an example a mature leader may need to be:
confident and humble
decisive and curious
courageous and empathetic
strategic and attentive to detail
optimistic and realistic
patient and urgent
consistent and adaptable
authoritative and willing to share power
strategic and tactical
Leadership maturity is not necessarily choosing one side it is developing the judgement to know which combination and balance the moment requires.
This moves leadership development away from the search for an ideal leadership style or set of capabilities and towards something more human and adaptive.
Part Three: From Capability Combination to Collective Capability
This extends the idea of capability combinations in an important way. At the individual level, we might describe capability orchestration as recognising what a situation requires and combining the knowledge, skills and qualities available to us.
At the collective level, it becomes recognising what a situation requires and bringing together the people, perspectives, relationships, experiences and capabilities needed to respond. The unit of capability therefore shifts from the person to the collective.
A team's capability is not simply the sum of the individual capabilities contained within it. A highly talented group can still perform poorly if people work in isolation, expertise is not sought, information is withheld, hierarchy inhibits contribution, disagreement is avoided or the same voices continually dominate.
Conversely, a group can become more capable than any of its individual members when people listen well, combine perspectives, challenge assumptions, build upon each other's ideas and adapt their contribution according to what the situation requires.
In this sense collective capability is not just capability that a group possesses. It is capability that a group can mobilise together.
Leadership as enabling the combination
This also changes how we might understand the role of the positional leader. There will always be circumstances where leaders need to decide, direct, provide clarity or take responsibility. Collective leadership does not remove accountability or make formal authority irrelevant.
But particularly in complex situations, the positional leader may add greater value by acting as coordinator, convener, connector, facilitator or enabler rather than assuming they must personally provide the answer. Their contribution may be to:
help the group understand the nature of the challenge before rushing to solutions;
identify whose knowledge, experience or perspective is missing;
create conditions in which people feel able to contribute, question and disagree;
connect people and ideas that would otherwise remain separated;
surface tensions, assumptions and competing interpretations;
help the group determine which capabilities are needed at different stages;
maintain a sense of shared purpose while allowing different perspectives to coexist;
coordinate action without unnecessarily controlling it; and
recognise when leadership needs to be exercised by someone else.
This last point is particularly important. In a genuinely collective conception of leadership, leadership can move.
At one moment the positional leader may need to provide direction. At another, a technical specialist may need to lead the group's thinking. Later, someone with strong stakeholder relationships may take the lead. At another point, a person with facilitation capability may help the group work through disagreement.
The formal leader does not disappear from this process. Their leadership may instead be demonstrated by their ability to enable leadership to emerge from others.
Leadership as a joint and shared effort
This suggests a subtle but important distinction between leaders and leadership. Leaders occupy roles but leadership is something people do together. Seen this way, leadership is produced through interactions and relationships: someone asks the question that changes the conversation; someone challenges an assumption; another brings evidence; another notices who has not been heard; someone connects the immediate decision to the wider system; another translates discussion into action. None of these contributions alone constitutes leadership. Leadership emerges through their combination.
This is especially relevant to contemporary public sector work because many of the hardest challenges cross organisational, professional and jurisdictional boundaries. Climate transition, digital transformation, service integration, workforce pressures, regulatory reform and complex social issues cannot readily be "led" by a single person or agency exercising positional authority. They require distributed intelligence and coordinated action.
The leadership task is therefore not simply to get people to follow. It is to enable people to think, contribute, learn and act together.
From the leader to leadership orchestration
There is a useful shift here from the traditional image of the capable, decisive individual leader towards the idea of leadership orchestration.
An orchestra provides an interesting metaphor because different instruments contribute differently at different moments. Not everyone plays the same thing. Not everyone leads all the time. Sometimes an individual contribution comes to the foreground, sometimes it recedes. The quality of the whole depends upon difference, timing, responsiveness and coordination. The conductor matters, but the conductor does not make the music alone.
Similarly, effective leadership may involve creating the conditions in which diverse capabilities can be brought forward, combined and recombined as circumstances change. The question for the positional leader becomes less:
"How do I lead these people?" and more "How do I help us bring our collective capability to bear on what we are trying to achieve?"
Author
Andrew Simon is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Yellow Edge, a Canberra-headquartered B Corp dedicated to helping individual, teams and organisations realise their potential.
Published September 2026
Yellow Edge is a local, privately owned Canberra based consulting company focused on helping individuals, teams and organisations to achieve high performance. Yellow Edge is a certified BCorp. BCorp companies make decisions that make a positive impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. https://www.bcorporation.com.au/