What I offer

I provide confidential advisory support to senior leaders and executive teams navigating structural disruption.

This work focuses on strengthening:

• strategic clarity under uncertainty

• governance and decision architecture

• institutional design and risk integration

• cross-functional alignment in complex environments

• long-term adaptation in the face of climate and systemic risk

Engagements range from targeted strategic conversations to ongoing advisory relationships.

The aim is not reactive crisis management, but deliberate capability building at leadership and systems level.

I design and deliver executive-level programs that strengthen judgement, coordination and organisational readiness.

These engagements integrate:

• leadership under pressure

• disciplined prioritisation and executive alignment

• relational coordination and shared situational awareness

• systems thinking and cascading risk

• strategic foresight and scenario exploration

• climate adaptation and structural risk integration

Programs range from executive intensives to multi-session capability development over 6–12 weeks.

The focus is practical: strengthening how leadership, relationships and systems function together under strain.

Signature talks

The three domains of resilience most organisations get wrong

Resilience is usually treated as a systems problem — better plans, better infrastructure, better continuity protocols. The work I have done across disaster, conflict, and fire-ground settings suggests this is roughly a third of the picture. The other two-thirds — leadership under existential pressure, and the relational fabric that holds teams and communities together when systems fail — are where most organisations are underprepared. This talk lays out a working framework drawn from field experience and asks the audience to locate their own organisation within it.

What I’ve learned running toward things other people run from

A first-person account of twenty-five years working in places where the usual rules of professional life don’t apply — from aid work in Afghanistan, Iraq and Congo to the fire ground in northern New South Wales — and what that experience has taught me about decision-making, fear, and the kinds of leadership that hold up when conditions don’t. Suited to leadership offsites, executive education, and audiences interested in the psychological dimension of crisis.

Australia’s unspeakable decade

Drawn from my forthcoming book Unspeakable: Facing up to climate catastrophes and its consequences in Australia. A clear-eyed look at the climate, social, and institutional disruptions Australia is already living through, and the harder ones still to come — followed by a concrete agenda for what to do about it, at the level of leadership, organisations, and communities. Less a forecast than an invitation: if the next decade is going to ask more of us than the last, what does it mean to prepare honestly, and where does meaningful action begin? Suited to C-suites, philanthropic, government, university, and civic audiences.

Other topics I am invited to speak on

• Crisis-ready leadership.

• Resilience as organisational capability.

• Disruption, complexity, and systems thinking.

• Coordination, communication, and trust in high-pressure environments.

• Learning and adaptation through disruption.

• Foresight and readiness for compounding risk.

• Human-centred approach.

• Sense-making.

Where I am invited to speak

• Conferences and keynotes.

• Board and executive sessions.

• Leadership offsites.

• Executive education and university programmes.

• Philanthropic convenings.

• Government and emergency sector events.

My speaking integrates lived field experience, strategic analysis and practical insight.