As I write this, the scene around me is tranquil. It is comfortably warm as the ubiquitous gum trees gently sway in the light south easterly breeze. I can hear the hum of unseen insects chiming in chorus. A kookaburra sits keenly still, only its eyes reveal the strategy at play, before it swoops to the ground and retreats with lunch in its beak. From my deck, with views of the Coral Sea beyond the enticing beaches of the Gold Coast, you would think I had found heaven on earth. Yet less than two weeks ago, there was no comfort in my surroundings. Little sense in my world. I live on Tamborine Mountain and on Christmas Day 2023, we weathered a tornado and then a week later, on New Year’s Day, a severe tropical rain event (André, 2024). The result of this saw our community without power, running water and functioning sewerage for 13 days. None of this may seem at all relevant to my personal leadership philosophy yet this event, my subsequent actions and our community response have profoundly shaped my thoughts on leadership and my future so I must start here.

Throughout my life, I have always valued justice and equality. I truly believe in resisting injustice, often to my detriment as I held too tightly to what I felt was right without consideration of the context (C. Wray, personal communication, November 7, 2021). I also have prided myself on proactivity, believing that action speaks louder than words. Those two attributes, in retrospective, have propelled me to act for those who I have felted needed it and succeed based on self-derived solutions. The Digital MBA at QUT provided the catalyst for defining my leadership and moulding these values (Appendix One), leading me to a profound realisation during the recent crisis. Rather than merely reacting to my values, I consciously employed them and leadership techniques to navigate the chaos. What came next surprised me and ultimately fundamentally changed my leadership philosophy from finding the balance between strong convictions, an even stronger personality and a recently discovered pathological desire to win (Appendix Two) to honestly embracing discomfort for change.

In days after the tornado destroyed our community’s electricity infrastructure, I went from home to home assisting people by supplying, sourcing and managing petrol generators, which are incidentally very loud. There were so many in dire situations not just because of the weather event but because of financial, familial or personal issues; issues which had boiled over in the chaos. These people’s lives had, for the most part, been manageable whilst their immediate environment was in order yet, as the structured system which gave them support dissolved, so did they. My fellow residents were uncomfortable and that was uncomfortable for me to see. With the abovementioned sense of justice and a significant amount of empathy, I wanted to act and solve everyone’s problems, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough resources of time, hands, money or generators. I had to sit in the discomfort along with those I was trying to help and discomfort, I realised, was an incredible catalyst for change (Gurdjian et al., 2014; Smith, 2021). It makes logical sense that if you are uncomfortable then the natural inclination is to make a change to improve your situation yet it was the revelation that I could leverage this discomfort to inspire or lead others to change (Reynolds, 2014).

It was a lesson played out in my own home. With a loud petrol generator pervading the peaceful tranquillity I described at the start, my children very quickly related the irritating noise to their actions. If they wanted some of the electronic bells and whistles modern life offered, then they had to accept the noise. It took a day and a half before they were asking for me to turn it off and in so doing forgoing the television in favour of noiseless books. Their discomfort changed their behaviour more than my nagging ever could. And so, not just for those inside my house, but for those in my community, rather than allowing my natural inclination to solve the problem and remove the discomfort, my role became to help people understand their situation better, explain the recovery system around them so they could select a their solution to see them through the present and into the future. It was fluid, changing every day as more and more support arrived.

And I was not working in isolation. I had joined forces with five others who also were sourcing and providing guidance around generators. We very quickly carved out roles; triage, financing, logistics, service and troubleshooting. We also determined mission criteria; support the most vulnerable, such as the elderly or ill, and encourage others who could self-manage to do so, and, above all, be transparent and honest by keeping receipts and document why we selected some for donated generators over others. It was these roles and guiding principles that allowed us to mobilise quickly and make individual decisions we knew would be supported by the group. It was adaptive leadership in action in a microcosm and was enacted in days not months or years by people who had never before met (Ramalingam et al., 2020). It is extraordinary what humans can do in the face of tragedy, discomfort and the immediacy of disaster (Wheatley, 2006) and how well decentralised, interconnected leadership can work with modern complex systems (DeRue, 2011).

It was also adaptive leadership within a chaotic system as defined by the Cynefin framework (Snowden & Boone, 2007). We were acting on requests from individuals in need, sensing their needs, within the parameters of our predefined criteria, and responding accordingly. The chaotic system was not only due to the unforeseen nature of the weather event but it was also chaotic as there were recovery systems within systems. The formal hierarchical system of local council to state and federal government response operated with little transparency. Below it, sat Energex’s power restoration process that was only evident by what you could see on the roadside. Energex was supported by the State Emergency Services (SES) and again, their activities were only obvious to residents by what we could see. As residents, we were not told the schedule of events or daily priorities. This is not a criticism but an observation. The community, with little control over the official response, was left to determine and respond to what was left. No one, official or otherwise, was operating with a full picture of the recovery system or influence over it.

To succeed in this environment, I had to think about and understand the system of recovery, official and unofficial. Now I was in the realm of Systems Thinking (Arnold & Wade, 2015, p. 670). How is the system working on the ground? Which activities and developments affected others? How could I leverage the system to help those who needed it? Only once did I consider I could somehow influence the official system. At a community consultation held by the local mayor, I asked if the council could mass purchase generators through their procurement team. The mayor’s answer was vague and non-committal and, aside from the questions about his leadership that his response posed, it was clear that the official system was set. Whatever I wanted to achieve in an unofficial capacity would need to be within the constraints of this official systemic structure. It was this revelation that added one more piece to my leadership philosophy. Not only could discomfort work for change but that discomfort could come from the system. 

When the power returned to our home at 2:19 pm on Sunday 7th January 2024 and my household returned to ‘normal’, it was time to synthesise everything that had happened in the previous 13 days along with the previous two and half years of post-graduate study. I consciously consider my personal leadership philosophy realising that the last 13 days was perhaps the only true test of my leadership I had ever had. I changed from wanting a balance of conviction and personality, to something else. I knew I wanted action in my leadership as I always had. Now I knew that discomfort could lead to change. Adaptive leadership could be incredibly effective in fluid situations and great leadership was not hierarchical at all (DeRue, 2011). Finally, I discovered that influence came from understanding and working within the system not by changing it.

Now, my leadership philosophy is to harness, not banish discomfort, and use it as a catalyst for actionable change within a system, particularly a natural system, which I respect. My actions will adapt to evolving situations yet will be based on values of justice and equity. I will be a brave enabler and in doing so, will lead people to sit with their discomfort to allow them to find action and transformation within themselves. In doing so, those I lead become self-reliant and my influence can scale beyond the leadership interaction.

Image One: A Personal Leadership Philosophy

Repeatedly through this acute experience, I thought of a boat on an ocean. I have spent a lifetime on boats and even made a career of boating (Wray, 2016). A small boat on an ocean is both a haven and discomfort. Depending on the sea state, you either need minor adaptions to your movement or major bracing for catastrophe. Regardless, you are never motionless and always at the whim of the ocean, arguably the world’s largest complex system.  Success on a boat is not a hubristic attempt to control the ocean, yet about understanding the interaction of wind, waves, currents and weather to manoeuvre the vessel to its intended destination. You rarely take your eyes off the horizon. The similarities to my most recent Christmas are not insignificant. A small boat on a big ocean is a brave enabler, it carries you safely, without dissolving discomfort, to your destination using the system to your advantage.

Image Two: A visual representation of The Brave Enabler

This new leadership philosophy, arguably more than any other as it showcases discomfort, requires high degrees of trust or else those I lead will not feel safe enough in my lead (Frei & Morriss, 2021; Reynolds, 2014). The distinction here is that I am not creating the discomfort for the sake of reactive change or proactive transformation yet harnessing it when it arises. With a foundation of trust, I can then coach through the discomfort to self-identify the change and to act accordingly knowing the systemic constraints. Each such interaction could, and should, leave those involved more resilient and self-reliant for the future creating a scaling or rippling effect in my personal and work life.

I will never forget the sound as 160-kilometre winds ripped over and past my home to destroy the natural and manmade habitats around me, some of which are less than 100 metres from the deck where I now sit. I also acknowledge that much of the discomfort it caused exceeds the lesson to be learnt that I have described here. Yet, it also seems an enormous coincidence that this event, which so dramatically altered my thoughts on leadership, happened immediately before the process of scribing a personal leadership philosophy. What I do know is that without the discipline of reflection and deep consideration that has come from my MBA journey, my actions and the conclusions I would have drawn for this episode of my life would be entirely different and incredibly self-centred. I am grateful for my new perspective borne by post-graduate study and an extraordinary personal experience. It is with this leadership mindset that I go forth as a brave enabler and will dedicate my final subject to researching, recommending and leading my community to be more resilient in the face of future severe weather events.

References

André, J. (2024). Power restoration hampered by more south-east Queensland storms after unprecedented Christmas night tornado. Australian Broadcast Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-01/thousands-of-residents-without-power-south-east-qld-storms/103275914

Arnold, R. D., & Wade, J. P. (2015). A Definition of Systems Thinking: A Systems Approach. 2015 CONFERENCE ON SYSTEMS ENGINEERING RESEARCH, 44(C), 669–678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.03.050

DeRue, D. S. (2011). Adaptive leadership theory: Leading and following as a complex adaptive process. Research in Organizational Behavior, 31, 125–150. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2011.09.007

Frei, F., & Morriss, A. (2021). TRUST: THE FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP. Leader to Leader, 2021(99), 20–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20544

Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T., & Lane, K. (2014). Why leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly.

Ramalingam, B., Nabarro, D., Oqubay, A., Carnall, D. R., & Wild, L. (2020). 5 Principles to Guide Adaptive Leadership. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/09/5-principles-to-guide-adaptive-leadership

Reynolds, M. (2014). The discomfort zone : how leaders turn difficult conversations into breakthroughs . In How leaders turn difficult conversations into breakthroughs (First edit). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Smith, S. (2021). Why You Need To Get Uncomfortable To Improve Your Leadership And Workplace Culture. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/03/29/why-you-need-to-get-uncomfortable-to-improve-your-leadership-and-workplace-culture/?sh=4ed4c0f16b98

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–149.

Wheatley, M. (2006). The Real World: Leadership Lessons from Disaster Relief and Terrorist Networks. https://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/therealworld.html

Wray, C. (2016). The Darwinism of Boat Shows. The Reverie Blog. https://thereverie.blog/2016/11/25/boat-show-darwinism/