I’ve spent much of my career leading in and around technology, but I still don’t consider myself a “techie.”
I’m not a software engineer, and I’m not trying to be. I’m a public-sector leader who has learned—sometimes the hard way—how much value government can create when we use digital ways of working to deliver better outcomes for the people we serve.
Many governments across Canada have struggled to adopt internet-era practices—human-centred design, multidisciplinary delivery teams, rapid feedback loops, product thinking, and data as a foundation.
AI raises the stakes. It can reduce administrative burden and help teams work faster, but it can also scale confusion and error if we automate broken processes or rely on messy data.
Leaders don’t need to become engineers to meet this moment. They need enough digital literacy to ask the right questions, create the right conditions, and make the right trade-offs.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the most important digital leadership move is to centre people—those who use services and those who deliver them. Skip that step and you can spend a lot of money building the wrong thing beautifully. Get it right and you create services people actually choose to use—and you make policy real at the point of delivery.
What I’ve Learned from Failure
Early in my time as a leader in government, I was involved in a major transformation intended to improve services to businesses.
The team cared deeply about making things better, but we missed a critical step: we designed for the needs of people inside government, not the people using the service. We didn’t meaningfully engage the businesses who would use it—or the front-line staff who supported them—to understand their needs. We treated “the new online system” as the result, instead of treating the service experience as the thing we needed to get right.
When the platform launched, the user experience was terrible. Businesses found workarounds or avoided the digital service altogether—an outcome in complete opposition to what we were trying to achieve.
That experience changed how I lead. Digital isn’t “a system.” It’s a way of working. Start with real user needs, test your riskiest assumptions early, ship in small increments, and empower multidisciplinary teams that can learn and adjust.
Digital Literacy for Leaders is not Coding. It’s Judgement.
For public-sector leaders, digital literacy isn’t the ability to write software. It’s making good decisions when technology shapes outcomes.
And in the context of AI that judgement matters even more—automate a confusing process and you scale confusion; apply AI to messy data and you scale errors.
Digital literacy helps leaders:
- ask better questions about value, usability, privacy, and security.
- create the conditions for empowered, multidisciplinary teams to deliver measurable outcomes.
- make responsible choices about AI—transparency, human oversight, and accountability.
Questions Public Sector Leaders Should be Asking
Digital literacy isn’t about having the answers—it’s about knowing what to ask.
Here are questions leaders can start using tomorrow to separate meaningful progress from expensive disappointment:
- Outcomes and Users. Whose problem are we solving—and when did we last watch people and staff try to do this in real time?
- Delivery. Do we have a resourced multidisciplinary team, clear decision rights, and empowered product and service owners? What will we ship in the next 6-8 weeks?
- Data and AI Readiness. What data will this rely on? What do we know about its quality, gaps, and biases? And where will a human remain accountable?
- Public Trust. Can we explain this to the public in plain language, including limitations and risks? What guardrails reduce the risks? How does someone get a human review or appeal when it matters?
How leaders can learn (without pretending to be engineers)
- Spend time where the work happens. Sit with front-line staff and service users; watch the friction.
- Ask for demos, not decks. Make “show me” the default and ask what changed since last time.
- Practice red-team questions. What could go wrong, who could be harmed, and how would we know?
Center the Goal of Better Outcomes, not the Tech.
The goal is not to “do AI”—it’s to deliver better outcomes
So if you’re feeling the pressure of AI and digital change, don’t fear what you don’t yet know. Get curious. Choose one service journey. Meet real users and front-line staff. Empower a team. Start small, learn fast, and measure what matters. You don’t need to be a techie to do that—but you do need to lead.
If you’re looking for a practical next step to build your confidence and network, consider AICON Canada as a way to learn what’s emerging and how peers are navigating it.
Natasha Clarke is an Executive Advisor at Kainos and works closely with Davis Pier. She boasts 25+ years of experience leading large-scale digital transformation across Canadian government, most recently as Nova Scotia’s first Deputy Minister of Cyber Security and Digital Solutions.
