The Leadership Habit(ats) We Need Now

Opening

Thank you, Huia, and thank you to FACCI and GHD for hosting us. And thank you to every woman here, because I know you didn't come to a lunch like this for platitudes. You came because you're doing the work. [Run Sheet...25-03-2026 | PDF]

I want to use these fifteen minutes in a very particular way.

Not to give you a speech about leadership.

But to offer you a reframe: a different way to understand what leadership actually is in the decade we're now in.

Because the dominant story of leadership is still basically this: Be strong. Be decisive. Have the answers. Drive change.

And I think that story is no longer just incomplete: I think it is actively getting in our way.

So here's the reframe.

It's the ability to shape the conditions, in our organisations, our communities, and yes, in our democracy, where the best of us can emerge more often than the worst of us.

And when you start seeing leadership that way, you stop asking: "Where is the strong leader who will fix this?"

And you start asking: "What are the conditions that are making this behaviour inevitable, and what would it take to redesign them?"

That shift changes everything.

Career highlights

I've spent most of my career working in systems that don't move easily: infrastructure, climate transition, governance reform: places with long time horizons and high consequence. [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF], [nicole_loc...tegy_final | HTML]

And along the way, I've had the privilege of helping build some "firsts." Not as trophies · as structures.

For example:

• Developing Western Australia's first 20-year State Infrastructure Strategy: essentially building a long-range container so decisions weren't only made in short political cycles. [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF]
• Establishing whole-of-system scenario planning and analytics platforms: so multiple agencies could make decisions using shared evidence, not competing narratives. [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF]
• Launching cross-sector Net Zero collaboration work for infrastructure: because a transition doesn't happen through one institution alone; it happens when the ecosystem can coordinate. [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF]
• Co-leading a federally mandated review of Infrastructure Australia, and seeing reforms adopted, which reminded me that systems can change when the conditions are right. [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF]

Here's what that taught me.

In every case, the breakthrough was not a brilliant idea. It was not someone speaking louder. And it was not "more effort."

The breakthrough was always a designed habitat:

• the right people in the room,
• the right information on the table,
• the right incentives,
• the right permission to tell the truth,
• and the right structure for disagreement to become progress.

That is what I mean by leadership now.

Democracy + systems change

Now, let's talk about democracy, because you mentioned it explicitly in the brief, and we can't dance around it. [Run Sheet...25-03-2026 | PDF]

Most people speak about democracy like it's a set of rules.

I think democracy is closer to an ecosystem. It depends on conditions.

And when those conditions degrade, trust, shared reality, social cohesion, a sense that effort matters, the system doesn't collapse in one dramatic moment.

It erodes.

People withdraw. Cynicism becomes protective. We stop believing we can move anything, so we stop trying.

And here is the part I want to say carefully, because it matters:

Agency is what happens when you can see a pathway, however imperfect, where your choices still matter.

So the question becomes: How do we restore agency, at scale?

And this is where the "habitat" idea becomes practical.

If we want better outcomes, we have to stop demanding better behaviour from people inside a habitat that reliably produces the opposite.

We have to design:

• workplaces where truth is rewarded, not punished, [nicole_loc...tegy_final | HTML]
• institutions that can learn, not just defend themselves,
• and cultures where collaboration isn't a slogan: it's structurally enabled. [nicole_loc...tegy_final | HTML]

Because systems change doesn't come from a "call to action."

It comes from creating conditions where action becomes the sensible thing to do.

Leadership revolution

So if leadership is habitat design, what are the core conditions leaders must learn to build?

I'll give you three, and you can apply them anywhere: boardrooms, teams, communities, families.

1) Coherence

Coherence is when what you believe, what you say, and what you do are aligned.

Not perfectly, but honestly.

Coherence is why some leaders walk into a room and the room settles. No performance. No theatre. Just presence.

And coherence is contagious.

This is why Nicole's brand strategy anchors so strongly in "truth over performance." That isn't a vibe. It's an operating condition. [nicole_loc...tegy_final | HTML]

2) Coalition

Coalition is not networking. It's not panels. It's not "stakeholder engagement."

Coalition is when people with different incentives decide to hold the problem together long enough for something new to emerge.

That's why "side-by-side leadership" matters, not because it sounds nice, but because complex problems literally require multi-actor ownership. [nicole_loc...tegy_final | HTML], [Nicole Loc...rd CV 2025 | PDF]

Coalition is habitat design at the social level.

3) Capacity

Capacity is the most overlooked word in leadership.

Because when a system is under stress, everyone's capacity drops.

And then we moralise it: "People are resistant." "People are disengaged." "People don't care."

Often, the truth is simpler: people are saturated.

So modern leadership has to build capacity:

• by removing friction,
• by telling the truth about trade-offs,
• by not asking people to carry what the system should be carrying.

This is what I mean when I say leadership is no longer about being the hero.

It's about building the conditions where many people can do their best work.

Women in leadership

Now: women in leadership.

I want to say something that may sound obvious, but it's not how most systems behave:

Because the three conditions I just named, coherence, coalition, capacity, are conditions women have often been forced to become fluent in.

Not because it was fair. Because it was necessary.

Women have had to read systems. Navigate power without titles. Build alliances. Hold complexity in relationships. Do the emotional labour that kept teams functioning.

The opportunity now, and I mean this as a genuine turning of the tide, is to stop treating that as invisible labour and start recognising it as future-fit leadership capability.

But here's the deeper point:

If women rise inside a habitat that stays broken, the system will simply extract their strength until they burn out, and then call it a pipeline problem.

So the real work is not "more women in leadership." The real work is better leadership habitats: so women can lead without being consumed by the cost of compensating for dysfunction.

And that is a systems-change agenda.

Close

So I'll finish with this.

If leadership is habitat design, then every one of us, whether we hold a formal title or not, is building conditions all the time.

Through what we tolerate. Through what we reward. Through what we ignore. Through what we name.

And the most powerful shift you can make, starting this week, is not a grand resolution.

It's to choose one place you have influence, your team, your board, your business, your community, and ask a different question:

And then:

That is how you create agency without denial. That is how you move a system without burning people out. That is how you replace doom with a strategy.

Thank you.