Opening Speech by Minister Chan Chun Sing at the Annual Public Service Leadership Ceremony on 18 September 2026

Chairman of the Public Service Commission, Mr Lee Tzu Yang, and Members of the PSC
Head Civil Service, Mr Chan Heng Kee
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues

A very good afternoon to all of you

Every year, I look forward to this ceremony that brings us together to recognise the dedication, resilience, and leadership of our public service officers.

Before I begin, please join me in thanking our four retired Permanent Secretaries Leo, Kin Keong, Chee Khern, and Chorh Chuan, and 21 other senior leaders who have relinquished their appointments the past year. Thank you very much for your dedicated service. Think all of you will agree with me that their extensive contributions to the Public Service cannot be simply summarised but I am sure many who are here today, including myself, have benefitted from their counsel and leadership. And they have all laid the foundation for the next generation, and I am confident that we will continue to benefit from your expertise as you support the public service in other capacities.

I would also like to extend a warm welcome to the 33 newly appointed Public Service Leaders and 79 PSLP officers. As with every generation of leaders, you join and build upon the work of a strong community that is actively charting the way forward for Singapore. We look forward to your fresh perspective and energy.

Navigating a More Complex and Contested World

While we have built strong institutions and a resilient economy, Singapore remains a small, resource-constrained nation-state that is deeply exposed to the forces beyond our control. Recent events have reinforced this lesson of how vulnerable we can be in this volatile, complex and contested world.

The rules and norms that have governed the international system are increasingly under strain, as we are all familiar by now. Great powers are weaponising their leverage. And this competition is no longer confined to the military or diplomatic domains, but they have spilled over into trade, technology, supply chains and even the information sphere. For small states like Singapore, the room to manoeuvre will become tighter and we will face pressure to take sides.

At the same time, the challenges we face at home are also becoming more complex. For example, workforce transformation – we must navigate the disruption brought about by technologies like AI, but we must also leverage the opportunities it presents, all against the backdrop of an ageing population, and find new ways to sustain our economic growth. These issues before us are increasingly interconnected and cut across conventional organisational boundaries.

In this more complex and contested world, the demands on our leadership will change. The Public Service, especially our leaders, must become entrepreneurs in three ways.

Chart our own course

First, we must continue to chart our own course. We must become "entrepreneurs of the strategic space" who not only keenly understand the world and our partners, but also actively shape new bilateral and multilateral relationships. Where we can find common ground, we must grow opportunities and forge new partnerships. Where we find differences, we must contain them and redirect our energies towards areas where we can still work constructively together with our partners. And where existing frameworks no longer work, we must reimagine what is possible, reinvent new ones and bring them about, rather than just waiting passively for the chips to fall in place.

The economic sector has various good examples of this. For example, many years ago, we were pioneers of the Free Trade Agreements to keep pace with a changing global economy. We have also pioneered new frameworks, like the digital economy partnerships agreement, or DEPA. All these are just some examples of how we must reimagine the geopolitical space we are having to confront. But all these reflects our willingness to imagine new possibilities, prepare for the future growth of the digital economy, and build the frameworks necessary for it. This is what it means to have agency to shape our environment and not just wait for the environment to shape us.

To do this, we must start off with the need to have a deep understanding of others around us, not just what they do but by why they do what they do.

This is why we must deliberately deepen external and international exposure across the Public Service. I encourage all of you to do so: stay alert to what is happening regionally and internationally, and help our teams and officers to do the same; actively pursue developmental opportunities such as our Civil Service Exchange Programmes or Overseas Developmental Programmes; explore overseas attachment to International Organisations, and participate in reciprocal attachment programmes with foreign public agencies to learn and seed new collaborative opportunities. These experiences give our officers a deeper understanding of our international partners and norms, and help us to build critical networks and relationships.

While navigating this messier geopolitical landscape might seem like a big challenge, it is also an opportunity for us to create new possibilities and build new partnerships with like-minded partners. The recent upgrades of our bilateral relationships with Australia and New Zealand to Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships showcase what is possible. With New Zealand, we have recently signed the world's first legally binding Supply Chain Resilience Pact, demonstrating how Singapore can work with trusted partners to strengthen resilience even in challenging times when countries are tempted to look inwards.

Our ASEAN Chairmanship in 2027 will present another opportunity for us to do the same. We should use it to bring partners together, strengthen ASEAN's relevance, and shape practical cooperation on issues that matters to the region and beyond.

These are not partnerships of convenience. They are deliberate efforts to create space for cooperation and advance our shared interests.

And this is what I mean by being "entrepreneurs of strategic space". We must continue to reimagine new partnerships, networks and plurilateral arrangements. If we do these well, we will not only stay alert, stay alive, but also thrive.

Creating Distinctive Value for Others

Second, we need to continue to create distinctive value for ourselves and others. The Public Service will need to be what I call "entrepreneurs of governance excellence". We will not be a partner of choice simply because we say so. Others will only work with us if we continue to bring value to the relationship and are able expand our portfolio of new capabilities to bring distinctive value to the table. There is no eternal competitive advantage. Every capability we build and every niche we carve out only buys us time to develop the next better one, before they are obsolete. And this is the nature of the world we are in.

As we address our own national challenges, we do so in ways that develop solutions and capabilities that are valuable for ourselves and valuable to others – so that other partners, be it countries or companies will want to work with us, and to learn with us.

Singapore's semiconductor ecosystem is one such example. We have deliberately built capabilities across the semiconductor value chain – from chip design to wafer fabrication, advanced packaging and equipment manufacturing. Today, we account for one in ten chips and one-fifth of global semiconductor equipment produced annually. For a country of our size, this is an outsized contribution.

More importantly, it has made Singapore a trusted and indispensable node in the global supply chain, valued for our unparalleled market connectivity, skilled talent, deep innovation capabilities, and world-class infrastructure. These are capabilities that will set us apart.

The same principle applies beyond our economy. We must also build governance capabilities that others value. Take public service delivery for example. Many services worldwide continue to wrestle with fragmented systems and siloed processes that can make navigating government services difficult for their own citizens.

We have made it clear that we will put citizens at the centre of all that we do. So we can reimagine how we can deliver seamless or frictionless citizen-centric services. For instance, we set up ServiceSG to bring together close to 600 services from more than 25 agencies through an integrated operating model. With AI-enabled services, such as chat.gov.sg ↗ (opens in new tab), we can further strengthen and redesign the Government and public services around citizens' rather than agency's boundaries. We are creating new approaches to governance that benefit our citizens and open the door for others to want to work with us and to learn from us.

But the point is not a single successful initiative. The point is whether we continually challenge ourselves to experiment, innovate, and reimagine what is possible. Whether it supporting education and supporting youths to thrive in an AI-driven world, strengthening social cohesion, or tackling the next challenge we cannot yet foresee – we must be proactively scan the horizon and reimagine solutions with courage and creativity.

When we do this well, good governance is not just good public administration. It becomes a form of strategic relevance.

And this is what we mean to be "entrepreneurs of governance excellence". We must never assume that today's solutions will be sufficient for tomorrow but continually challenge ourselves and ask ourselves how we can create distinctive value to remain relevant not just to Singaporeans, but also to our partners.

Partner Others to Mobilise Collective Action

Finally, we must partner with others to mobilise collective action. We should become "entrepreneurs of collective action", finding new ways to shift from doing things for our people to doing things with our people.

But what does it mean to do things with our people? It means not only looking at brokering agreements on individual issues, but engaging and building common ground, and painting a shared picture of what success looks like; very much earlier, very much upstream. Bringing people together seems straightforward, but to ensure that everyone walks out of the room with the same shared understanding of the bigger picture is a different challenge.

We can do better to bridge understanding. This will require us to convene different stakeholders, listen genuinely to their different interests, and articulate trade-offs honestly to create a shared understanding. Take the recent debates on Maju Forest and Gilman Barracks. Everyone has their preferred outcomes, everyone has their strongly held personal convictions. But there is a need to align on the bigger picture, the trade-offs and the range of considerations – housing needs, land use, energy, transport, and even sewage planning.

And we must be clear-eyed about what the Public Service can do. We do not need to possess every answer or capability ourselves. We need to know what we must be good at, and have a responsibility to decide what others are better placed to do and how to bring citizens, communities, businesses and Government towards a common outcome.

And this is what I mean by being "entrepreneurs of collective action". Even in this, we must reimagine how we organise ourselves and how we partner others so that we can unite fellow Singaporeans towards our common shared purpose. What we have done well, we must continue to build on it. Where we have not done as well, we can be bold enough to reimagine the kind of organisations and partnerships that we need. The starting point must be the humility to know that we do not need nor do we always possess all the capabilities within ourselves. Then the question is, how do we build those partnerships and work with people who can contribute to the solutions, for Singapore.

Conclusion

Taken together, these are the three asks I leave with you today: first, create geopolitical space, as "entrepreneurs of strategic space", so that Singapore and the Public Service retains the agency to chart our own course; second, create distinctive value proposition as "entrepreneurs of governance excellence", by continually building new capabilities that make us a valued and trusted partner; and finally, mobilise collective action as "entrepreneurs of collective action", by bringing different people and capabilities together to tackle challenges that none of us can solve alone.

If we can do all these three things well, Singapore will continue to be a partner of choice, both at home and abroad. Trusted for who we are, valued for what we bring to the table, and sought after for what we can achieve together.

Our Public Service leadership must continue to evolve as the world around us changes. We start from strong foundations, built by generations of officers and leaders before us. But we are never complacent and we must never assume that what brought us here will be sufficient to take us forward. Each generation must earn our relevance anew, and to build what Singapore will need next.

To all our Public Service leaders — those who have served, those who are serving and those stepping forward — thank you for your leadership, stewardship and sense of mission. Much of your work happens quietly, away from the public eye. It may not always be seen or celebrated, but it is this quiet confidence and quiet dedication that defines our Public Service. And this is why I'm most proud to be the Minister working with you – because I have every confidence that you will continue to dedicate yourselves to this cause, to help Singapore defy the course of history no matter what challenges we may face. Thank you very much for your dedication and service.