Leadership WA Acceptance Speech

I want to thank you for the honour of receiving this award. After 9 and a half years on the board and a long and close association with Leadership WA before and after, I am so grateful to be named with the esteemed group of WA Leaders who have come before me.

Timing is everything. And I believe this is a perfect moment to have an honest conversation about what leadership actually means, right now, in a world that is moving faster and more unpredictably than any framework we were handed was designed for.

Leadership WA's CEO Dom MeCoy was famous for reminding each cohort that;

I've carried that with me. And I think it has never mattered more than it does today.

We are at a turning point: for our systems, for our planet, for each other. This moment is profound, precious and fragile all at once and our children are depending on the hundreds of small, intentional choices we make every single day.

We talk a lot about authentic leadership. We've been circling that phrase for years and I think it's because we sense there's something in it we haven't quite landed yet.

Here's what I've come to believe: authentic leadership isn't a style. It's a commitment. It's the often uncomfortable choice to accept the full truth of who you are, and then refuse to compromise that in anything you do.

From that place, your leadership stops being about hierarchy and starts being about impact. It becomes both your mission and your responsibility. Not a title you hold: a presence you bring.

Our institutions were built for complicated problems. Problems with clear inputs and predictable outputs. Analyse, plan, control, repeat.

But the challenges we face now are not complicated. They are complex. They are living. They evolve as we intervene. They span generations. And they will never have a single right answer: only paths we must have the courage and creativity to imagine together.

Under pressure though, something happens to leadership. It becomes performance. Confidence replaces curiosity. Control replaces learning. Decisiveness replaces judgment. And titles, the very things designed to create trust, can quietly mask a deeper fear. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of being wrong in public. Fear of losing the carefully constructed identity that serves the image rather than the outcome.

Then we ask those same leaders to collaborate across silos, hold uncertainty, and guide transformation without clean answers.

The contradiction is obvious. We tighten control. The system resists. Outcomes disappoint. We double down. And nothing changes, except the clothes we dress it in.

Social media has added a layer to this that we haven't fully reckoned with. It has created an environment where everyone believes they have the answer, and now has the platform to broadcast it.

Navigating what is true, what is useful, and what is simply noise has become a full-time job none of us have time for. And at a moment of complex, interconnected, planetary-scale challenges: that is a recipe for paralysis.

No single part of the hierarchy can solve this alone. We need a more sophisticated system. One where competing needs and perspectives are aired and debated, together. Where issues are no longer simply black and white, right or wrong. Where we can work in the grey, and keep moving, and keep adapting.

A collaborative approach where government, industry and community determine a path forward side by side. Where the politician still legislates, industry still delivers, and community still creates social licence, but no one part sits above the other.

I understand the radicalism in that. And I also know, if nothing changes, quickly, we are robbing ourselves of the extraordinary capacity we have to create something better.

This is not softer leadership. It's wiser leadership. Practical wisdom. Emotional maturity. Genuine comfort with uncertainty. And a shift, from me to we.

The global context makes this urgent.

At Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney described the world we are now living in as "the end of a rules-based order", a "brutal reality where geopolitics is not subject to any constraints."

He drew on Václav Havel's image of the greengrocer who posts a slogan he doesn't believe, keeping a system alive through ritual performance.

His point: systems persist, or crack, through our daily choices to perform, or to act with honesty.

His call to action was direct:

Here in WA, taking the sign down means refusing the performance of certainty. It means saying: we don't have the answer yet, so let's learn together. It means measuring success not by polished plans, but by adaptive capacity and the trust we build across boundaries.

Rutger Bregman's Reith Lectures put it simply: our age doesn't need more tech headlines. It needs a moral revolution.

He reminds us: when the centre loses confidence and cynicism becomes fashionable, history can turn dark. But it has always been small, determined groups who sparked transformation. Abolitionists. Suffragettes. Reformers who kept moving when everyone else shrugged.

Now it's our turn.

So what role will each of us play?

Who are we, really, at our core? What is our truth? Are we at peace with that? And from that place of honesty, what are we here to bring?

When we pursue our purpose with that kind of clarity, when we choose roles that draw on what genuinely energises us and bring our full worth to every situation we have influence over, something remarkable happens. We take care of ourselves. We honour our values. And what flows from that are healthier teams, stronger communities, and the kind of micro-changes that, collectively, become something enormous.

I'll close with a quote I return to often, from Theodore Roosevelt. I believe it belongs to every one of us right now, especially at a time when keyboard warriors are louder than ever, and yet the planet has never needed us more fully in the arena.

Thank you.