Podcast 🎧 & blog: Purposeful leadership drives real digital transformation
By Federico Plantera
What does it mean to lead digital transformation when the stakes are high, and the playbook is being written in real time? Statesmanship shines in this Digital Government Podcast episode with Taimar Peterkop, Estonia’s former State Secretary now with e-Governance Academy, and one of the architects behind the country’s acclaimed digital governance model.
From navigating the 2017 ID-card crisis, to coordinating national responses during the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Peterkop brings front-row insight into the real-world meaning of purposeful leadership.
With his keynote for the e-Governance Conference 2025 on the horizon, we explore how governments can lead with clarity, openness and courage for digital prosperity. Reflections that serve as a blueprint for all public decision makers trying to build resilience from within, lead with intent, and align digital ambition with public value.
Crisis as a Stress Test of Digital Foundations
Peterkop’s tenure intersected with some of the most defining moments in Estonia’s digital governance history: the 2017 ID-card crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s full-scale war to Ukraine.
“Crises show you exactly where the bottlenecks are. They reveal your real dependencies – not the ones you planned for, but the ones you forgot existed,” he begins with. During the ID-card crisis, Estonia had to reckon with the fact that over half of its citizens relied on a single digital identity system. That implied that not only did service continuity hang in the balance, but so did public trust in a key pillar of e-governance.
The pandemic, then, introduced another dimension: rapid, system-wide stress across health, education, and emergency services. “We learned quickly that while we had great systems, we didn’t always have the decision-making agility to match. That had to be built on the fly,” he says. But Estonia’s ability to rapidly reorient digital services – to support public health and emergency coordination – showed how earlier investments in digital infrastructure could be repurposed under pressure.
Lastly, the war in Ukraine raised the stakes on resilience and continuity, sharpening the focus on national preparedness. As Peterkop puts it, “If a society has built digital trust, it needs to defend that trust in moments of crisis. That’s when digital legitimacy is really tested.”
Yet, the former State Secretary acknowledges that crisis came to signify much more than just moments to do damage control. They were a stress test for digital maturity. And the solution, as we know, just couldn’t be purely technological.
“You don’t solve digital problems with more software. You solve them by reorganising decision-making and enabling collaboration across institutions.” Resilience, turns out, is built before the crisis. “Not during it.”
Open Governance Under Pressure
Speaking of trust, one of the most consistent themes in Peterkop’s leadership approach is openness. Especially during crises, when institutional reflexes might trend toward control and opacity, Estonia chose a different path.
“We always tried to be as transparent as possible. The Prime Minister gave daily press briefings. Scientists spoke directly to the public. There was no secret war room during the pandemic.” A posture that made such openness as ethical, as it was strategic. Trust, as Peterkop points out, is hard to earn and easy to lose. And it’s earned in the details – public-facing data, frequent updates, cross-sector coordination.
In his view, that this culture of openness was not accidental. “We had made investments over years to build a society that values open information. And that foundation helped us when it really mattered.” The same openness applied to internal communications. “You can’t be transparent to the public if your own team doesn’t know what’s really going on,” he adds, highlighting the importance of information flows inside government.
Openness also provided Estonia with agility. During the early days of the pandemic, government agencies shared real-time feedback channels with developers, municipalities, and hospitals. This allowed policy to adjust as it was being implemented, in a kind of living governance approach that should be the norm, not the exception.
Digital Prosperity Requires Purposeful Leadership
However, as much as a country could be pioneering in digital development, Peterkop cautions against assuming that good infrastructure automatically delivers public value.
“Good as we could be at building tools, they won’t matter unless you use them well. And that requires leadership,” he notes. AI rollout, for example, could quickly turn into a missed opportunity. “We may have the components ready. But without clear ownership and political momentum, it just won’t scale.”
In that sense, his advice to governments is clear. Digital transformation is a governance challenge, and not just a technical issue. Leaders must be willing to take risks, trust professionals, and experiment at the edge of uncertainty. Purposeful leadership, for Peterkop, means putting digital in service of people, not bureaucracy.
“If you’re building tools that make the state stronger but not the citizen freer, then you’re doing it wrong,” he warns. With concerns over digital surveillance and democratic backsliding growing globally, Peterkop’s insistence on citizen-centred design feels more timely than ever.
Furthermore, another ingredient in this recipe for purpose is the need for political stamina. “Digital transformation doesn’t deliver results in the same cycle as politics does. That’s why purpose has to come from leadership, rather than just electoral programmes.” In stressing this, we note how maintaining long-term focus – in environments built for short-term decisions – is one of the hardest challenges for public sector digitalisation.
The link between political vision and operational execution is vital. “Leadership means protecting space for experimentation, but also setting the tone. If the people at the top are afraid to fail, the system below will never take initiative.”
When to Stop, and What to Start
So what should governments stop doing, if they want to lead with purpose? “Thinking that digital development is the job of the IT department. It’s not. It’s leadership work,” Peterkop says.
He also stresses that many governments are overengineering solutions, when what’s needed is more flexibility, iterative delivery, and institutional courage. “Sometimes we might be wasting time trying to make things perfect on paper, instead of more fruitfully testing and adapting in practice.”
“Start small. Don’t wait for the grand strategy. Build something useful. And above all, build trust,” is his equally pragmatic advice for countries in their digital journey.
All of this must be enabled by internal motivation within institutions, a task that leaders should consciously take on. “You need people inside who want to build something, not just maintain something. That’s where transformation starts.” In fact, some of Estonia’s most impactful projects came from “intrapreneurs” inside ministries – people who saw problems and proactively built small-scale solutions without waiting for mandates.
Finally, expanding on mandates, Peterkop emphasises the importance of leadership continuity. “We (Estonian public sector) had the luxury of being able to work across election cycles. And that gave us a chance to build beyond pilots, putting up actual systems.” In contexts where political turnover can stall or reverse reforms, embedding digital governance into long-term public administration structures may be the surest way to protect progress.
Something that serves as a reminder that digital transformation is about endurance, next to agility and innovation. Building with purpose means thinking beyond cycles, and creating systems that can weather change while staying aligned with the public good.
Join Taimar Peterkop on May 27 at the e-Governance Conference for the keynote “Governing for digital prosperity: leading with purpose”.
Check the programme and get the tickets >>> egovconference.ee
Listen to all Digital Government Podcast episodes >>> ega.ee/digital-government-podcast