Picture the last time you tried to access a government service online.
Maybe you were renewing a licence, applying for a permit or searching for information buried somewhere across a dozen different websites that all seemed as though they were designed by different people who’d never spoken to each other. Maybe you called phone numbers that transferred you in circles until you gave up and decided it would be easier to just go in person, which of course defeated the entire purpose of having digital services in the first place.
For most of us, this experience feels inevitable, like government services are simply meant to be frustrating, slow and disconnected because that’s just the nature of bureaucracy and nothing will ever change it.
My latest guest on The Wisdom of…Show, The Hon. Victor Dominello disagreed, and what he built next became a case study studied by governments worldwide when they’re serious about transformation rather than just talking about it at conferences.
When Simple Principles Meet Complex Systems
In 2019, Victor created something that had never existed anywhere on earth: a Ministry for Customer Service and Digital in NSW, Australia.
Not a technology ministry focused on implementing the latest software platforms or a digital services department concerned primarily with websites and apps, but rather a ministry built on one foundational principle that most organisations claim to believe but violate every single day through their actual practices and priorities.
“Governments exist to serve people. In the digital age, that service must be trusted, seamless, and measurable.”
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, almost too simple and self-evident to the point where you wonder why anyone would need to state it at all. Saying the principle is easy, perhaps even fashionable in the right circles where everyone nods along in agreement. Building the systems that actually deliver on it consistently and at scale is where everyone breaks, where the gap between aspiration and reality becomes a chasm nobody knows how to cross.
Want to learn how I help leaders capture transformational insights like this and turn them into systematic frameworks that can be deployed across entire organisations? Discover the Masterclass that shows you how to build visual models for extreme leverage
The Problem State Nobody Wanted to Admit
When Victor looked at what citizens were actually experiencing rather than what government reports claimed they were experiencing, he saw fragmentation everywhere that had become so normalised nobody even questioned it anymore.
Dozens of disconnected agencies operating independently with no incentive to coordinate or integrate their services. Hundreds of websites, each with their own logic and design and user experience, as if each one had been built in isolation by people who’d never considered that citizens might need to interact with more than one government service in their lifetime. Multiple phone numbers for services that should have been integrated from the beginning, forcing citizens to explain their situation repeatedly to different people who couldn’t access each other’s systems or information.
Citizens were being forced to understand government bureaucracy just to complete transactions that should have been straightforward, as if the burden of navigating organisational complexity should fall on the people the organisation exists to serve rather than on the organisation itself.
Beneath all that visible complexity sat a deeper problem that most transformation initiatives never address because they’re too focused on surface-level improvements that make things look modern without fundamentally changing how they work. Trust was broken, systematically eroded over decades of experiences that taught citizens to expect disappointment.
Privacy concerns about digital services that seemed designed more for government surveillance than citizen empowerment. Fraud in credential verification undermined confidence in the entire system. Zero transparency about whether anything actually worked or delivered value, or justified the investment of time and money that citizens were being asked to make. Citizens were frustrated by systems that seemed designed for bureaucratic convenience rather than human needs. Government struggling to deliver services efficiently while spending enormous sums on technology that never quite lived up to its promises.
No clear pathway forward because every attempted solution seemed to make things marginally better in one area while making them worse in three others, creating a sense of futility that paralysed meaningful change.
This is where most transformation initiatives die, not with a dramatic failure that teaches clear lessons but with a slow fade into irrelevance as everyone loses faith that real change is possible. The problem seems too big to tackle comprehensively. Too many stakeholders with competing interests and conflicting priorities. Too much legacy infrastructure nobody wants to touch because changing it might break something else. Too politically sensitive to push hard enough to make real change happen because someone will always complain about disruption to their comfortable patterns.
Victor saw a system problem that needed a system solution rather than dozens of disconnected improvement initiatives that would never align into a coherent transformation.
The Trust Trinity Framework
During my conversation with Victor on The Wisdom Of… Show (LINK), he walked me through the framework that changed everything about how NSW delivers services to citizens. The Trust Trinity, which sounds deceptively simple until you understand how the three pillars integrate to create something far more powerful than their individual components.
Not three separate initiatives running in parallel and hoping they eventually align through some miracle of organisational serendipity, but rather three interconnected pillars that were designed from the beginning to reinforce each other and create a foundation strong enough to support genuine transformation rather than cosmetic change that looks impressive in presentations but fails in practice.
PILLAR 1: DIGITAL IDENTITY
Here’s the paradox Victor had to solve, and it’s the same paradox every leader faces when trying to build trust in a digital age where scepticism is the default position.
Everyone’s worried about privacy and surveillance and Big Brother government tracking their every move and building profiles that will be used against them somehow. And Victor’s standing there championing digital identity as the solution, which on the surface seems like exactly what people are afraid of. The breakthrough insight that most people miss is that citizen-controlled identity actually enhances privacy rather than compromising it, but you have to understand the mechanism to see why.
When citizens control their own digital identity rather than having fragments of their identity scattered across dozens of disconnected government databases they can’t access or correct, when they decide what information gets shared with which services and for how long and with the power to revoke access at any time, they gain control rather than losing it.
This shifts the entire mental model from “government collecting my data and doing who knows what with it” to “I control what government can see, and I can verify they’re only accessing what I’ve explicitly authorised.” That shift changes everything about how citizens perceive and interact with digital government services, transforming them from something to be avoided into something that actually makes life easier.
PILLAR 2: DIGITAL CREDENTIALS
The second pillar addresses a different dimension of the trust problem, one that’s equally important but often overlooked in discussions about digital transformation that focus too heavily on identity without considering what you do with identity once you’ve established it.
When credentials are verified digitally rather than through paper documents that can be forged, lost, or damaged, when professional licences and personal identification and qualifications exist in a form that can be instantly verified by any authorised party, two things happen simultaneously that create a reinforcing cycle.
Fraud drops dramatically because the system makes it exponentially harder to fake credentials in a way that will pass verification, which means the few attempts that do occur get caught quickly before they can cause real harm. And confidence in the system rises among both citizens and the organisations using it because they experience the reliability directly, they see it working consistently, they learn to trust it with progressively more important transactions as their confidence grows through repeated positive experiences.
Victor’s insight here goes deeper than most people catch on first hearing, because it’s not just about the practical benefits of fraud reduction. Verified credentials don’t just solve problems, they build trust through demonstrated reliability over time in a way that creates momentum nobody can reverse. Cross-service interoperability means credentials work everywhere across government rather than needing to be re-established for each interaction, which eliminates the absurd situation where you prove the same thing seventeen different ways to seventeen different agencies because nobody’s systems talk to each other.
PILLAR 3: PERFORMANCE
The third pillar is where most transformation initiatives completely miss the point because they’re so focused on building and launching that they forget to create the feedback mechanisms that make continuous improvement possible.
They focus on building systems and launching services and cutting ribbons for photo opportunities and declaring victory before anything actually works consistently enough to deserve celebration. Victor focused instead on measurable outcomes that actually matter to citizens rather than metrics that make bureaucrats feel good about their work, and the difference between those two approaches explains why most transformations fail while his succeeded.
85% adoption on digital driver’s licence, which is extraordinary when you consider that most government digital initiatives struggle to break 20% adoption even after years of effort. 93% satisfaction rate among users, which suggests they’re not just adopting it because they have to, but because it actually makes their lives better in tangible ways. 92% overall customer satisfaction across all services, which indicates the success isn’t limited to one flashy initiative but represents systematic improvement across the board.
How the Trinity Actually Works
The genius isn’t in the three individual pillars, impressive as each one is when you examine it closely and understand the thinking behind it.
The genius is in how they integrate to create a system that becomes stronger and more valuable over time.
Digital Identity enables credentials because you can’t have verified credentials without a reliable identity foundation to build on, which means getting the first pillar right is essential to making the second pillar possible. Credentials build trust for identity adoption because when the system demonstrably reduces fraud and makes life easier in ways people can feel immediately, citizens trust it with their identity information in ways they never would have at the beginning. Performance measurement reinforces both. The feedback loops show the system works consistently, which brings the remaining holdouts on board. Their adoption generates more performance data, enabling better decisions about where to invest next for the greatest impact.
This is system-level thinking in practice, showing a deliberate design where integration is built in from the start, and each element naturally reinforces the others.
From Fragmentation to Seamless Service
The results speak clearly enough that no amount of scepticism can dismiss them as lucky timing or favourable circumstances.
One website instead of hundreds. One phone number instead of dozens. One customer account instead of forcing citizens to create separate logins for each service. Citizens no longer needed to understand government bureaucracy to access government services because the complexity got absorbed by the system instead of being pushed onto citizens who had neither the time nor the inclination to become experts in organisational structure.
During COVID-19, this infrastructure became critical in ways nobody predicted when it was being built years earlier, which is often how the best systems work because they create capabilities you didn’t know you’d need until circumstances change. QR check-ins that allowed contact tracing at scale. Digital vaccine certificates that gave people freedom of movement while maintaining public health protections. The Dine & Discover programme that injected over $1.4 billion into local economies when businesses were struggling to survive lockdowns and restrictions.
None of it would have been possible without the trust foundation Victor built years earlier, when it would have been easy to dismiss the investment as unnecessary or excessive or focused on problems that didn’t feel urgent at the time.
But here’s what makes this a case study rather than just an interesting project that worked well in one specific context. The framework travels to completely different environments with completely different constraints.
Victor now advises the World Bank on digital identity initiatives in Mongolia, which couldn’t be more different from NSW if you tried. Different cultures with different expectations about privacy and government. Different infrastructure at a completely different level of technological maturity. Different political systems with different accountability mechanisms. Same fundamental principles about building trust through systematic approaches that put citizens in control.
He chairs the Services Australia Independent Advisory Board, providing strategic oversight for Australia’s primary government services delivery agency. Senior Advisor to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, helping shape thinking about government transformation globally. Director of the Tech Council of Australia, bridging between technology capabilities and policy needs.
The Trust Trinity framework isn’t specific to NSW or Australia or government, it’s a systematic approach to building trust in any complex transformation anywhere that organisations are serious about creating change rather than just talking about it.
The Moonshot Mindset
During our conversation, Victor revealed something crucial about how transformation actually happens.
“You need to take a moonshot approach rather than incremental improvement.”
Most organisations try to make existing systems slightly better, investing in faster processing times and nicer interfaces and incremental improvements that never fundamentally change anything about how the system works or what becomes possible within it. Victor asked a different question that opened up possibilities incremental thinking never reaches.
What would government service delivery look like if we designed it from scratch around what citizens actually need instead of what bureaucracy finds convenient or what legacy systems make easy?
That question permits you to rethink everything instead of just optimising the current mess, to imagine solutions that would be impossible if you accepted current constraints as permanent rather than as choices that can be revisited.
But here’s the practical wisdom behind the moonshot that most people miss when they hear leaders talk about ambitious vision and transformational thinking: you still need disciplined, systematic execution. Detail, integration, and feedback loops are what make vision real. Without them, vision is just aspiration.
The Trust Trinity is the mechanism that turns vision into reality, converting ambitious goals into measurable outcomes that compound over time.
The Future of Trust
Victor now leads the Future Government Institute [LINK] focused on shaping the next era of governance globally rather than just helping individual organisations improve their current operations.
His mission isn’t just helping governments digitise their services or implement the latest technology platforms, but rather helping them rebuild trust through systematic service delivery that actually serves people instead of serving bureaucracy or technology vendors or any other constituency except the citizens who are supposed to benefit.
In an age of increasing scepticism about everything we’re told by institutions we used to trust automatically, the organisations that master trust-building through systematic approaches will define the future, while everyone else struggles with the consequences of broken trust they can’t repair.
The Trust Trinity framework isn’t just about digital transformation or government services or any specific domain where it happens to have been applied successfully.
It’s about building organisations worthy of trust in an age where trust is the scarcest resource and the most valuable currency, where earning it requires systematic approaches rather than hoping your good intentions will eventually be recognised and rewarded.
Ready to see how this fits together in practice?
