Sarah Quah, Manager, Learning & Organisational Development, Centre for Healthcare Innovation, NHG Health, Singapore

1) What does public service mean to you? Can you share more about your role in the public sector?

My role in the Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), NHG Health, focuses on building organisation health to enable organisation excellence – developing leadership and people capabilities so teams can respond with agility, lead change, and drive transformation in a complex healthcare environment.  

Public service, to me, is a space for learning, growth and meaning. 

From internships to my current role, the public sector has shaped my professional journey. 

While my work may not always be visible, and not fully understood at times, I believe it contributes to a larger, collective mission: enabling the system to better deliver value to patients, support our staff, and serve the wider population.  

2) Tell us about a project you championed. What impact did it have on the community?

As part of an annual work plan exercise, I developed an Organisation Health (OH) component requiring divisions to plan and report their OH efforts alongside workplans. 

This required shifting mindsets – recognising that ownership of OH belongs to all divisions, not a single function.  

The OH component aligns workplans with both strategic priorities and people investments, while creating visibility to compare planned organisational efforts with employee experience data.

This surfaces important insights on implementation gaps (low investment areas) and perception gaps (efforts not meaningfully experienced by staff). 

More importantly, it has shifted how the organisation thinks about performance – reinforcing that outcomes cannot be separated from how we support and sustain our people. 

What we plan for shapes what we prioritise, and now organisation health is intentionally planned for.  

3) As a young professional, how has your unique background or perspective allowed you to identify a solution that others in your organisation might have overlooked?

In our system, constraints can often appear fixed. While natural to work within them, I find it important to make time to understand the context behind them. 

This means asking questions to uncover intent and surface assumptions.

What might initially seem like a hard boundary often reflects underlying intentions that can be better understood and therefore worked with. 

This allows me to reframe problems, identify alternatives within constraints, and focus on what I can influence, thus expanding possibilities. 

4) What is your personal strategy for maintaining your creative energy when faced with bureaucracy?

I separate creativity from constraints rather than letting one limit the other too early. 

A question I often use to deliberately brainstorm without restrictions is: “If I could wave a magic wand and solve this, what would be different?”

This helps surface possibilities that might otherwise be dismissed. From there, I prioritise what is feasible and assess how ideas can be adapted to fit within existing constraints.  

I also remind myself that not every idea needs to be implemented in its ideal form.

Sometimes, a small step forward is still meaningful progress, and that helps sustain both momentum and motivation over time.  

5) If you had just one area to invest in to accelerate transformation in the public sector (regulation, technology, talent, etc.), which one would you choose and why?

Building futures thinking capabilities. As change accelerates, complexity and uncertainty increase, and we risk becoming reactive. 

Futures thinking creates space for curiosity – to question assumptions, anticipate emerging shifts, and look beyond immediate demands.  

From an OD perspective, this is about building systems that can adapt and sustain performance over time – equipping leaders and teams to navigate uncertainty more intentionally.  

6) What is your greatest ambition as you grow in your public service career?

To enable more people to see the value of organisation development, and to equip them with the mindsets and capabilities to apply it in their own contexts.  

OD is often seen as the responsibility of a specific function or a “good-to-have”, rather than embedded in the way we work.

I hope to shift this, so more leaders and teams think deliberately about how they develop people, lead change, and build environments that enable both performance and growth.

For me, this is about extending the impact of OD and embedding it more deeply across the system, to enable more sustainable and grounded change.  

7) What is a “universal value” that connects everyone in your department – from interns to directors – and how do you use that to drive collaboration?

Collective leadership, which is a collaborative model where leadership is not tied to hierarchy but exercised through how we engage and take ownership at all levels.  

In practice, this means building strong relationships, empowering individuals to lead where the work sits, and encouraging decisions to be made closer to the problem.

This builds ownership and agility in responding to complexity.

Over time, this creates a shared language – shaping how we engage and collaborate with one another, improving the quality of our conversations and work.   

8) What is the best piece of advice you’ve got for the next generation of public servants?

Learn to see and work with polarities – these are tensions that need to be navigated and managed, rather than solved.  

We work in increasingly complex systems where many challenges we face are not problems with a single right answer, but interdependent factors that must be balanced. 

For example, the prior question about maintaining creative energy while working with bureaucracy reflects a common polarity for public servants.  

Treating these as either-or choices can lead to unintended consequences.

Instead, learning to recognise these as polarities allows us to work towards the “best of both worlds” – understanding when to lean more into one side and when to shift and rebalance, which enables more thoughtful decision-making.  

9) What is a myth you wish to debunk about young public servants?

A common myth is that young public servants are merely the “hands and legs” of the organisation. 

In reality, much of the groundwork like research, analysis, and early drafts is often driven by younger officers. 

While these contributions may not always be visible in their final form, they play a meaningful role in shaping the direction and quality of decisions. 

With growing opportunities to lead, young public servants are not just executing decisions but helping to shape and strengthen them. 

10) Write a letter to your future self in 2035. Please keep it within 200 words.

In 2022, when you first started this role, your focus was on learning – understanding a new system and finding your footing to contribute meaningfully.  

By 2026, your focus has shifted towards enabling others, recognising that the most meaningful interventions are those that are co-created and owned by the people closest to the work.  

By 2035, I hope this has grown into the ability to shape systems and sustain impact over time. 

At the same time, I hope you have learned to be more at ease with change.

You have always been someone who finds comfort in what is familiar, even while working in a space that constantly calls for transformation. 

Accept that the work will evolve while holding on to what you care about – not in the form of tasks, but in the essence of why you chose this work in the first place.  

The story was made possible due a partnership with the CHI FLYING (Future Leaders and Young INnovators Guild) Network, hosted by NHG Health's Centre for Healthcare Innovation, with over 300 members connecting young health and social care leaders across Singapore and beyond.