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Leadership & Culture
Design Leadership for Public and Social Impact
Are you a leader in the public or social sector seeking a new kind of leadership, one grounded in purpose, empathy, and the courage to challenge the status quo? Discover how to lead and inspire others through change and innovation.
Leadership today requires more than expertise and authority. It demands the ability to navigate uncertainty, inspire others through complexity, and create the conditions for meaningful change.
Drawing on Dr. Debbie Ng's Public Sector Design Leadership™ framework—developed through integrating design leadership practices within challenging public sector contexts—this programme helps leaders cultivate the mindsets, behaviours, and capabilities needed to lead with purpose in an increasingly complex world.
Delivered through an immersive and reflective two-day course, participants will experience the four dimensions of design leadership: Networked, Empathetic, Creative, and Adaptive Leadership. Through practical application, real-world scenarios, and peer learning, leaders will strengthen their ability to navigate complexity and guide their organisations towards a more resilient and human-centred future.
Upcoming sessions
16 - 17 September, 2026
9:30am – 5:30pm SGT
SGD 1,280 per participant (excluding 9% GST)
Venue: In-person, Singapore, location TBA
Note: This programme is not about learning design thinking tools. Rather, it focuses on the leadership behaviours and practices drawn from design leadership that help leaders navigate complexity, inspire people, influence systems, and drive meaningful change. Leaders from all backgrounds will develop the mindsets and capabilities needed to lead with creativity, empathy, and courage.
Who is this programme for and what will you learn
Designed for leaders in the public sector, NGOs, social impact organisations, and mission-driven institutions who are navigating increasing complexity, uncertainty, and systems-level challenges. This programme is ideal for those seeking to strengthen their leadership capabilities, lead organisational change and innovation, build more human-centred and empathetic organisations, and inspire others through complexity with greater clarity, courage, adaptability, and purpose.
Learning Outcomes
Reframe challenges across policies, services, and ground realities, and bring different teams and partners towards a shared understanding and direction.
Understand what matters to your teams, citizens, and partners, and use these insights to lead more effectively and make decisions that create real impact.
Identify what is blocking new ideas in your team, and introduce practical ways to encourage participation, trust, and problem-solving.
Shift your leadership mindset, navigate uncertainty, and move work forward by testing small, practical improvements in your services, processes, or team practices
Day 1
Segment 1: Leadership in a Changing Public Sector Landscape
Why is there a need for a new leadership approach in the permacrises world?
What are the emerging challenges that leaders in the public and social sectors will need to face?
What new leadership skills are required to navigate the future, inspire teams, innovate and collaborate with stakeholders?
Segment 2: Introducing Public Sector Design Leadership (PSDL)
Exploring the Public Sector Design Leadership™ (PSDL) framework, its four dimensions and 12 attributes.
Self-guided assessment across the four PSDL dimensions—Networked, Empathetic, Creative, and Adaptive Leadership.
Segment 3: Networked Leadership — Working Across Systems
Exploring Networked Leadership in reframing and framing perspectives
Leveraging ThinkPlace's Four Voices of Co-Design to design for collective impact
Reframing problems through a system, experience and touchpoint view
Reflection: What can i learn from design leadership (networked leadership)?
Segment 4: Empathetic Leadership — Connecting and Understanding
Understand empathetic leadership in the VUCA world - what it means for public leaders?
Exploring the concept of vulnerability as a leader.
Connecting with employees, teams and stakeholders using three listening positions, 6 channels and the 7-needs model.
Day 2
Segment 1: Creative Leadership — Recognising Creative Blockers in the Public Sector
Examining the four major blockers to creativity in bureaucratic organisations: culture, leadership, organisational design, and structure.
Reflection: Identify the key barriers that are holding back creativity in my organisation.
Segment 2: Creative Leadership — Building Conditions for Creativity and Participation
Understanding psychological safety and the conditions that enable teams to enter creative flow.
Developing the Creative Culture Canvas: purpose, leadership, norms, cadence, meetings, and commitments.
Segment 3: Adaptive Leadership — Navigating Ambiguity and Resistance
Reflecting on the common defaults and mindsets that shape responses to change and innovation.
Exploring my comfort level with ambiguity: enduring, engaging with, and embracing uncertainty.
Exploring practical ways to embrace ambiguity through action, experimentation, and adaptation.
Segment 4: Summing it all up
Positioning Design Leadership as a core mindset and deliberate practice for everyone.
Translating key insights into actions for my leadership, my team, and my organisation.
Programme outline
Meet your trainer
Regional Director, ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia
Dr. Debbie Ng
Dr. Debbie Ng, PhD, is a distinguished design leader with over 18 years of experience driving transformative change across complex public and social challenges through human-centred design. As Regional Director of ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia, she collaborates with organisations across sectors to shape innovative, sustainable futures, leveraging design as a powerful force for social good. Debbie is a pioneer of the design thinking initiative in Singapore in 2007, and continued to serve under various capacities in the Public Service Division of the Prime Minister's Office, SPRING Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic.
Debbie excels in navigating intricate, multi-dimensional problems where solutions are ambiguous, applying her expertise in design leadership, complex systems thinking, ethnography, co-design, and service design.
Fueled by a deep commitment to empowering others, Debbie dedicates herself to building internal change and transformation teams and coaching leaders to be empathetic, creative and adaptive leaders.