I Travelled the World to Find the Future of Government. Here’s What I Found.

We’re in a moment of reckoning for government.
Across countries, systems, and political cultures, the message is the same: government isn’t working the way it needs to. And the pressure to change is only accelerating.
In Canada, you can feel it.
We know things need to shift. But we’re not moving fast enough—or far enough. Not because we lack ideas, but because we lack a clear, shared vision of what better actually looks like.
So I went looking for it.
Over the past six months, I’ve been travelling across Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, meeting the people at the front edge of this transformation—the ones inside and around government who are trying to rebuild it for the world we’re actually living in.
I call them Civic Punks.
They’re not anti-government. They’re pro-better-government. Builders, translators, and system challengers who refuse to accept that this is as good as it gets.
This talk is a field report from that journey.
Through stories and case studies from places like Singapore, Melbourne, Kyiv and beyond, I’ll share six lessons about where government is actually heading—what’s working, what’s breaking, and what’s emerging beneath the surface.
Because this isn’t just about interesting experiments happening somewhere else. It’s about signals. Signals of the kind of government we’re going to need in the years ahead.
Because if government is the most powerful lever we have to shape our future, then getting this right matters more than almost anything else.
This is about bringing those lessons home—and using them to rediscover the ambition, energy, and sense of possibility that this moment demands.