10 years in Aus, 10 reflections
A few weeks ago i passed my decade in Australia. I wrote a series of linkedin posts of “10 moments/reflections/lessons”; here they all are in one place.
1. Bunjil’s wings exhibit: tear off the band aid.
Arriving as Head of Exhibitions at Museums Victoria, the First People’s exhibition had just opened. It won a slew of awards, including ‘best in world’ from the AAM just seven months later. Its centrepiece, Bunjil’s Wings in the Creation Cinema, won design awards in its own right.
I got to be the one to close it.
Like all boundary-pushing designs, it was technically complex and finely engineered. And after months of use it was clunking as it moved, and would fail irreparably before too long.
A quick fix didn’t work. Then, I took the hard call; we had to close it and re-engineer with a new technical consultant. After a few months, and spending the remedial works budget, it was not only fixed, but it was set to be stable for the life of the exhibition. It runs smoothly to this day.
Lessons?
✅ Back the vision
There were options to make the exhibit static — to remove all movement. We wrote this off quickly
✅ History schmistory
Who was to blame: an unrealisable idea? the wrong engineer? poor fabrication? I still don’t know. I didn’t delve; recriminations wouldn’t get it working.
✅ Courage
Many people were understandably unhappy it would close for some months. I needed to hold that frustration, so it didn’t bleed onto anyone else.
✅ Decisiveness
The first fix-it engineer had notebooks full of equations but their fix wasn’t working. I agreed with my team that they weren’t the right person and we let them go.
✅ Steadfastness
The new engineer said it needed closing, would take a while, and couldn’t be 100% guaranteed. OK.
✅ Innovation requires comfort with risk
Build and maintain a system (of process and culture) that can take risks and deal with failure. That exhibition, and all the long-term shows at MV, took creative and technical risks. The ecosystem was designed and maintained to flex and fix the occasional misstep.
✅ Trust your bosses have your back
There’s not a moment in this process where I didn’t believe my boss backed what I was doing. And not a moment where I wouldn’t have worn the failure if the fix hadn’t worked.
✅ Long-term thinking
This exhibit has enchanted and informed hundreds of thousands of people in the 8–9 years since we fixed it. That makes the weeks of closure worthwhile.
How does this influence me today?
I’m quicker to trust my own unease about a consultant: if the expert can’t explain it to me like I’m in high school, I won’t trust them further.
I’m relentless about focusing on the ecosystem — ritzy ideas don’t happen without method, and process alone delivers nothing worth having. Culture creates brilliance within the safety of good creative management.
I’ll always work to create the environment in which front-line staff can speak up. The technical teams are the first to understand.
2. Culture shapes negotiation
When contracting the inbound Jurassic World exhibition at Museums Victoria, the negotiating team contained 2xAus, 1xUK and 1xUSA leaders. All great professionals.
The US promoter came in with an *assertive* first draft contract, which I’d summarise as ‘we get every upside, you wear every risk’. What happened next is interesting.
My US colleague and I saw this as a normal negotiation, it fitted our ‘home culture’. Our first instinct was to send back ‘no, we reject your contract utterly. Here’s ours: we get most of the upside and you wear most of the risks’. We were ready for their bare knuckle fight, trusting that it was gameplay and we’d get to the win-win for both sides.
But for the Australians, this assertion of dominance, this ‘fight it out’ mentality, was unsettling and confusing. It raised questions about even doing business with them. For them, the start point can only be to offer the win-win as a base assumptions. Essentially, ‘we’ll all get something out of it, let’s work out what’. What I saw was that offering 50:50 would lead to us emerging with barely 25:75.
We sorted it out, of course. The four of us, and a calm external lawyer, just hammered away to get to the deal and it worked out well for us — a fun exhibition that many enjoyed, the largest touring exhibition profit in five years, and a visitor demographic that the museum hadn’t previously seen.
But the reflection here is the convo I had with my boss. He said (I summarise from 7-year old memory), ‘we are a small country, this is how we work. You’re always going to do business with someone a second, third, fourth time. So always leave something on the table for the other guy.’ He pointed out that any Australian boss would be displeased with a deal in which you ‘screwed over the other guy’ — which would likely get you promoted in the US business world.
Lessons?
✅ It was a real eye-opener for me that Australian professional culture had such a generous and kind set of underlying assumptions in professional life. It is very collegiate, in contrast to how American (McKinsey are referenced *so* often in Australia) it can seem on the surface.
✅ A strategically deployed lawyer is worth a hundred internal conversations!
How does this influence me today?
✅ I now pay more attention to understanding the underlying professional assumptions in an Australian organisation or team.
✅ It’s one reason I chose to stay, and become a permanent resident then citizen. This professional culture is better; for all its flaws, it’s fundamentally nicer.
3. Recruiting an unexpected star
I won’t say who, or where. I had a management role to fill; complex and required multiple dimensions of expertise. Who did I choose? The internal candidate who’d pretty much never done any it before.
Why did I do this?
✅ They were an acknowledged leader in an adjacent specialty. So they knew what expertise was
✅ Everybody — and I mean everybody — liked them. So they could do relationships
✅ They’d taken every development opportunity they could get their hands on. They could learn
✅ They wanted the job, because of what it was, and the challenge. They were committed.
✅ They had mastered all the management skills. They could manage money, projects and people
✅ They were self-aware, with a healthy dose of humour and scepticism. They could grow
What happened?
They were amazing. They still are. And they’re amazing for exactly three reasons: two I saw and one I didn’t. They built relationships and they learnt. Their skill acquisition rate was astounding.
But thing I didn’t really predict was the full value of their management skills. They could write an annual plan and do performance reviews. They could develop and run a budget. They could chair a meeting. They could write a proposal. And it was stunning to see them influence those around them — within the team I was building, they acted as a mentor across the department.
Lessons?
✅ Beware hiring for glamour or immediate plug-n-play ability. Hire people with solid foundations, and a proven ability to grow. They’ll grow into glamour, and develop those around them.
✅ Basic management skills are tremendously underrated. If you’re in the first ten years of your career, learn them. Go on all those 1 day ‘line management basics’ and ‘budget 101’ courses.
✅ When you see someone is great, think about why. And apply that to yourself. This leader taught me to really notice gaps in my knowledge or skills, and then go away and do the reading. This helped me when I was a CEO: I didn’t fully understand cashflow and insolvency risk and I educated myself quickly!
(Why the picture? My dad once told me of an interview with the 60s football great George Best. He was asked, why did you practice shots all morning with just your right foot? He answered, because I’m left-footed.)
4. Royal Commissions
At first, I assumed these were just like Britain’s ‘judicial inquiry’ process. A way for politicians to kick an issue down the road, and for the next set of politicians to merrily ignore it because the thing happened years ago.
But here in Aus, they are taken seriously. Recommendations are approached as a task list.
The Black Saturday Bushfires in Victoria in 2009 resulted in an 18-month Royal Commission that made 67 recommendations. Among these was a shakeup and integration of the emergency services and a change to the official advice to the public in future danger situations. And these are now in place.
The process isn’t perfect and can no doubt be improved. But I don’t think Australians realise what a strength they have embedded into the governance system. Rationally, publicy and incrementally, the system is able to improve itself.
There isn’t an equivalent in the UK. Major change there, if it happens, is a result of advocacy by policy workers / academics / think tanks / media, and the process and results are more highly politicised. This happens in Aus, but the Royal Commission processes add an extra dimension with more impact.
Lessons?
✅ Trust in the long-term value of building a method by which a system can bootstrap itself.
There’s some things I’ve been involved with in Australia — advocacy for improving the building code, repositioning the national museum association — that will only have impact over decades. That’s very different from my early career building temporary exhibitions, whose impact might last a year.
✅ Outsider views are essential
You can’t perceive a culture from within a culture. I see the UK very differently from outside, and view Australia differently to most Australians because I’m an outsider. I apply that in consultancy or working as an interim exec. I will see things as an outsider that are invisible to insiders through sheer familiarity. Recognising that as a contextual superpower is useful.
5. $2M additional funding by asking an obvious question
First task at Museums Victoria: write the bid to State Gov for exhibition renewal funding. It’s classed as a state asset, and there was an existing funding program in place for the maintenance of that asset. Just follow the government process, I was told.
In 2014, I prepared the full bid in the backdrop of a state election. Colleagues put in their sections, etc. But one day, looking at the benchmarking work from 2009 that formed the cost basis, I had a thought. The number from the formulae popped out at $16M over four years. But there was no inflation included. I dismissed the thought — surely wiser people than I, over the past five years, had thought about this. Maybe it was costed elsewhere? Maybe the gov had a formula to apply later?
Feeling sheepish about it, I asked the Director of Corporate Services. He just said ‘good point, put it in’.
What happened?
We put it in, we got $18M over four years.
Lessons
Always ask the question! Being prepared to have the CS director tell me this was already considered or that I didn’t understand Aus gov funding — in short, being open to feeling like an idiot — is the moment that yielded $2M. (For those following the series, some of this cash enabled us to fix Bunjil’s wings properly.)
Don’t assume everyone else has had the thought you just had. Voice it, make it real. It might raise $2M.
PS I did the pre-submission review at 2am on the 21 December in a jetlag haze from my parents’ study in the UK. The state gov deadline of 23 December for budget papers was not helpful! But getting the money a few months later was a great late christmas present!
6. On not having a network
Around the time I left the UK, I read an HBR article the said that successful leaders put their focus on their teams, not themselves, peers or bosses. I took this idea too far.
At Museum Victoria, I was responsible for the largest exhibition program in Australia, over three sites. I could certainly focus my energy inwards; there was plenty to do. Any energy I had left went to the young children. So I didn’t do what all my peers were doing — go to every launch, every event.
What I didn’t know is that Australian professional culture is far more networky than the UK. People’s networks are cemented early in their careers, based largely off high school, university and first jobs. And in my sector, they were maintained through the event culture of launches and lunches — the ones I wasn’t going to.
Then I followed my curiosity into other sectors — beginning right as COVID tore through. As a CEO in a new sector, I needed to build peer networks. But I was unable to: operational crises pulled me inwards and zoom doesn’t cut it for meeting people.
What happened?
The legacy of all this is that I didn’t build the depth and breadth of network that people of similar history and seniority in Australia take for granted.
Lessons?
✅ New arrivals! Whatever effort you think you should put into networking, in Australia it isn’t enough. Do more.
✅ Networking is a skill just like any other — you can learn it
✅ It is never too late to begin. I’ve found when I meet people and tell them this background story, they’re happy to help, and I am very grateful
7. Sometimes, you’re the bull
Moving to ACMI in 2017 was quite the culture change. I’d left an organisation in love with process, ingrained with a consensus model of decision-making. ACMI was the opposite — strong individualistic creatives making solo calls, woven into coherence by a visionary CEO. But the departmental silos were resistant and the individualism was a barrier to the strategy.
To prepare for the upcoming Big Refurbishment, a space was being closed. This was happening at a slow pace, resisted because the small number of people who loved the space REALLY loved it. And then a corporate partner and a great idea led to a sudden, urgent need to move much faster. But the silos ground to a halt: lots of noise and energy, but no movement.
I’d been doing big projects for 15 years with bespoke but formalised creative project management. For the past 5, it had been as chair of project steering groups. None of this existed at ACMI, so I needed to get this moving through direct action.
I really only did two things. Set up weekly meetings with everyone — independent of hierarchy — and built one googlesheet. This had the activities, schedule, actions and their owners, and most importantly, the email from the CEO saying we were doing it. Useful for re-reading aloud. Each meeting we just went through the sheet and took decisions. Quibblers quibbled, doers did.
What happened?
It got done. I was unpopular with the resistant people: I’d ridden into their china shop on a bull.
But the people who wanted change — the talented (mostly) newbies butting their heads against silos and stasis — saw that it was possible to do things differently. Three people mentioned how this catalysed change when I left two years later.
Lessons?
✅ Best practice isn’t always the right way to the objective. A ‘proper’ project manager would’ve despaired at that scrappy googlesheet. But a chef can work wonders with just one paring knife.
✅ You’re never too big that you shouldn’t get your hands dirty. This was a tiny project, ordinarily not to be handled by an Exec. But the organisation had a problem to solve and I was the one asked.
✅ Don’t be swayed by obstructive people, but don’t try to fight them 1:1. Passive aggressive resistance isn’t overcome with strength. Instead, bring issues out into the light. The cohort of good people will render them irrelevant.
8. Passion-based cultures repeat mistakes
Passiflora: a beautiful flower, vine and fruit. But it’s a voracious garden pest too; it’ll crowd out most other plants. Passion can smother your organisation too.
I wasn’t as aware of culture in organisations before coming to Australia. Part of that was the immigrant experience — you notice unfamiliar waters when you’re no longer swimming in familiar seas. The other was seniority; shaping culture was now more than ever my job.
Over 9 years…
*Museum Victoria: cross-department working as the norm, a focus on consultation, highly approachable CEO chatting in the coffee queue.
*ACMI: the opposite; a culture driven by a small number of creative visionaries, with judgement coming from a small community of like-minded art and film practitioners.
*Renew: back to collegiate consensus — this time with vocal long-term members.
What they all had in common was that staff were highly motivated by the sector and the organisation. Sometimes this was amazing; talented people, cohesive cultures can deliver great work. We are all growing our awareness that this passion-based culture has downsides: it’s change-averse and creates pockets of poor practice and favouritism.
But I want to highlight another trap I notice: making the same damned mistakes, over and over, because of this pathway:
1. We are good people, doing good work.
2. If [thing] goes wrong then it can’t be down to us (our people, our processes…) because…
3. See 1.
4. So we can only conclude that [thing] is intrinsically hard and unfixable
5. Rinse, repeat
This is nonsense, of course. One simple example is that everyone but everyone in museums will say ‘exhibition installations are always a rush at the end’. But they really don’t have to be. If a KPI is ‘be in the pub at 5pm the night before launch’ then it happens (h/t Andy Lloyd).
The mindset leads to sub-optimal products, overspends, and burnt-out staff. Doing better requires working on culture and the strategy, processes and leadership that feed it. I achieved some improvement at MV through process focus, at ACMI through reflective practice (I’ve documented these before, on my blog) though at Renew, COVID, technical debt and financial precarity stopped me ever getting out of organisational survival mode. Success was remaining solvent, through 2020 and 2021.
This optimisation of “how good stuff gets done” is what I love doing — building the foundation for all purposeful delivery.
Lessons?
✅ Be sceptical of passion-based workplaces — look closely for signs of a toxic shadow-culture
✅ There’s a competitive advantage for jobseekers in demonstrating how you can work within, while subtly developing, these cultures
✅ There’s a huge need to improve workplaces (cultures, delivery, leadership…) in the passion sectors — hence setting up my consultancy 😀
9. On choosing what matters
This penultimate one’s more personal, perhaps more anodyne than insightful. I consciously chose not to follow the career moves common in my peers, but to find my challenges and sate my curiosity in other ways.
I was told, and I watched it come true for many colleagues, that career growth in Australia depends on relocation. Particularly in smaller sectors, the next gig is likely to be in another city. In museums, a step up within the same state is rare.
My family relocated to Melbourne when our children were six and nine. It was exciting and difficult, stressful and rewarding. As the kids made their communities, and I planted trees in the garden, we worked to make it a home.
I was tapped for very cool culture sector roles in other states. They would’ve been amazing positions. I said no, because I wouldn’t pressure my family to uproot and start again. Instead, I jumped sector to be a CEO and now I continue to find new ways to work as an interim and a consultant.
I know people who’ve moved their kids around the country, and people who’ve chosen to stay settled. I’m not here to say anyone’s wrong; just to acknowledge the choice I made.
I’ve lived in my leafy corner of north east Melbourne for ten years now; with nine years in this house it’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my life. It’s good.
Lessons
Reflect on what’s valuable to you, that’s all. Climbing the career ladder in your sector may be a large part of your aspiration or a small part, but it’s never more than a fraction of the whole.
I’m glad I didn’t follow the culture CEO path to another city. I’d miss out on the limes just starting to fruit from the tree I planted in 2014.
10. Celebrating failure, or “The best conference session ever”
I have to thank Padraic Fisher for reminding me about this conference session that Ellie Downing and I proposed and ran for the museum sector’s national conference in 2017.
We had about 80 people there, from Boards to post-graduates. Chatham House rules — no gossip, no posting. Facilitation was gentle, uplifting and emphasised safety.
The session worked like this:
-In groups of 8–10, share your biggest failure.
-Vote in your groups on the worst.
-Each group winner goes in front of the room.
-The whole crowd votes on the biggest fail.
-They get a little prize and a big cheer.
All I will say is that the winner on this day — the biggest failure — was a CEO who had, much earlier in their career, been responsible for an exhibition that burst into smoke, then flames, and then required the museum be shut down.
We talk about learning from mistakes but our entire professional culture is based on never having made one. This session turns that upside down. The worst becomes the winner.
Sharing failure in a safe space is JOYFUL. 79 people learnt their failure wasn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever done. (That CEO can wear it fine. They know who they are.)
Lessons?
✅ I bloody love running conferences sessions
✅ The museum sector has some truly *beautiful* people in it — clever, creative, purposeful, humble, hilarious
✅ It is fun watching people compete for the crown of biggest doofus, in front of a crowd cheering them on
✅ If you share vulnerability, it is a lot safer than you believe.
Manifesting: I would love love love to do this again. The professional world of management, leadership and governance is needlessly and performatively sensible.
Laughing at failure is tremendously energising and empowering: no-one left that room more likely to fail; everyone left with a little more confidence that failure wouldn’t be career-ending.
An epilogue — the stories I DIDN’T write.
⏺ Asking the Defence Minister’s office whether the Australian Air Force might be able to escort some objects into a war zone.
⏺ What it was like when a young team member died.
⏺ When a board member told me I was too senior to expect to be able to take leave and de-stress and I should just ‘pull my socks up’.
⏺ The times I coached people through applications and interviews to get better jobs.
⏺ How I once I turned a blind eye to a team member forcing a better decision by getting an external partner to write sternly to the CEO, because it was right
⏺ When I refused say ‘mistakes on both sides, let’s move on’ when my team called out a workplace bully.
⏺ When I hired someone because of the last 45 seconds of their interview. (And I was very right to do so, you know who you are.)
⏺ When I was a recently arrived white guy failing to understand Indigenous perspectives and blundered, causing pain.
⏺ I had to help a QUITE FAMOUS museum director get back to their hotel safely after too much conference partying.
⏺ When I was the wrong hire, in a culture that didn’t enable me to thrive, and it took me too long to realise.
⏺ When Nick Serota showed a leadership training cohort his 1988 application letter for the job at Tate
⏺ When I had to say ‘not acceptable’ to the two male colleagues discussing the ‘nice new haircut’ of an employee over twenty years and three layers of management behind them
⏺ When I badly misjudged the assignment on a light-hearted professional debate event (and everyone was really really nice about it)
⏺ When a Board member said they didn’t know what a financial statement was
It’s this rollercoaster of highs and lows, publicly lived and privately held, that’s been enriching. I think it’s what enables me to be kind and helpful to leaders navigating complexity.
