Public sector work often involves competing priorities, tight timeframes and real pressure. In these moments, the challenge is not just making a decision, but making the right decision while balancing risk, accountability and public trust.
This practical one-hour Skills for Success session gives you clear, immediately usable tools to help you navigate ethical pressure with confidence in your day-to-day role.

You will learn how to recognise early warning signs, ask better questions, and apply simple frameworks that help you make sound decisions, even when the path forward is not clear.

This session will help you:
• Spot ethical risks early before they escalate
• Ask the right questions to challenge assumptions and improve outcomes
• Apply practical decision-making frameworks in real workplace situations
• Balance competing pressures without compromising your integrity
• Translate public purpose into clear, everyday decisions

You will work through real examples, including lessons from Robodebt, but the focus is on helping you handle the kinds of pressure you face every day, not just major failures.

Designed for public servants at all levels, this session provides practical, repeatable strategies you can apply straight away.
If you want to feel more confident making decisions under pressure, clearer about what “good” looks like, and better equipped to act with integrity, this session will give you a strong, practical foundation.

Speaker:

Dr Vafa Ghazavi FRSA GAICD
Senior Lecturer in Political Science and Public Policy
The University of Sydney  

Vafa is a political theorist and public policy scholar, with interests in the ethical dimensions of social, political and economic life. He was the inaugural Executive Director for Research and Policy at the Australian Public Policy Institute (APPI) and before that taught political philosophy at the University of Oxford. He previously worked in Canberra at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including in its policy planning branch, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and served as an Australian diplomat in Afghanistan, the Balkans and to the United Nations in Vienna. Vafa has been a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind and a Carr Centre Fellow at Harvard University. He currently serves on the board of the Centre for Relational Care and on the Research Committee of Amplify.

This online program includes live chat functionality and optional automated captioning, which attendees can enable during the session. If you have any accessibility requirements or require additional assistance to participate, please contact [email protected] prior to the event and we will do our best to support your participation.

Event Details

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