About the authors

Catherine Althaus Catherine Althaus discovered her calling through an unusual combination: working as a policy practitioner in Queensland Treasury while nurturing a deep curiosity about how policy works from rigorous academic thinking as well as other global practices. This dual perspective became her professional hallmark—the ability to bridge the worlds of scholarship and practice. Her foundational epiphany was realising that the best policy insights come from moving between these worlds, not choosing between them. This “practitioner-academic” approach led to co-authoring The Australian Policy Handbook, Australia’s most trusted policy guide, and pioneering research on Indigenous public service leadership and more recently adaptive leadership and trauma-informed public administration. Catherine is currently a Professor in the School of Business, UNSW Canberra and Founding Director of the Academy of Adaptive Leadership at UNSW. Suhit Anantula Suhit Anantula is a strategy designer and systems thinker working at the intersection of policy, design, and innovation. Over two decades, he has helped governments, mission-driven organisations, and enterprises navigate complexity—translating public purpose into actionable systems and strategies. Suhit has led policy and design initiatives across Australia, from developing the nation’s first mission- driven economic strategy in South Australia to embedding design-led policymaking and innovation practices in state and federal government programs. His work often bridges economic strategy, public sector reform, and future-focused institutional design. As founder of The Helix Lab, Suhit focuses on helping organisations become adaptive and AI-ready through strategic design and human-centred transformation. He is also the author of The Helix Moment: How to Think, Lead, and Design in the Co- Intelligence Age—a book that explores how leaders can reimagine strategy and policy as living, learning systems in the age of AI. Through all his work, Suhit remains grounded in a simple conviction: policy is one of the most powerful design tools we have for shaping a fairer, more intelligent society.

Pia Andrews Pia Andrews has had two professional epiphanies that shaped her into becoming a passionate and relentless serial public sector reformer, in Australia and around the world. Her first early career epiphany was to realise the critical need to have a values-driven approach to technology, to ensure the tools we make actually align to human development, supporting our values and quality of life. As part of this work Pia engaged in tech community advocacy and inevitably came to interact with the government, something she’d never previously had an interest in. This led to working in a political office as an apolitical senior advisor, which led to the second professional epiphany: the realisation of the critical role the public sector plays in supporting and maintaining a fair, equitable and stable society. This second epiphany led to a career change and now ongoing commitment to humane, adaptive and impactful public service digital transformation, with 10 years in the technology sector and 16 years working in (and with) public sectors around the world, bringing together international perspectives, best practices and important lessons on the need for digital transformation to extend from service delivery, to policy, institutional uplift and participatory governance. Pia currently works as a Senior Policy Advisor on Digital Transformation (including AI) for the United Nations Development Programme with the Regional Innovation and Digital team across South East Asia and the Pacific.