Transcript of Question & Answer Session Leadership in an Age of Digital Disruption

Thanks Sarv I'm just interested to know how you applied some of those concepts and changes within the RBA, its leadership team and particularly even your charter in whether that is difficult to do given some of the constraints that you have as an organisation?

The aspects are that I've talked about are very much relevant to most organisations is the degree to which they are applied. Culture is one where we do have a strong focus in understanding the needs and learning behaviours of the different demographics across the organisation, and that's where we do for example have more of a highly interactive approach in getting viewpoints and ideas from the younger cohort who join the organisation and also getting views from them on how to go about in developing solutions. So there's a lot of interaction and an example is that we have regular lunch and learn sessions which are oversubscribed when we have them and we often have to rehold them, and those are ideas generation and conversation sharing ideas. And we've also run internally you know internal competitions for coding amongst – to generate a level of excellence around our technical work, but I think culture is the key one around excellence, reputation and being able to do your best where we can actually bring the traditional side of management and also new and more interactive approach to bear within the organisation and that's actually having a lot of positive effect.

Hi Leanne Roth from Kincare. Just you talk about collaboration, how do you manage the balance between allowing people to collaborate, because that's where ideas are generated, and the need for them to pull away for quiet time and actually to do some of that deeper thinking, because it's a hard balance to manage to support people to collaborate but also to allow them that capacity to actually go for a deep dive in what they're doing.

Part of that is the physical environment in – in offering I guess people environments which are highly interactive and they can share a space, you know common area, just to have deep discussions across with other people in the team and then offering them a quieter environment to actually contemplate and think and plan and that's sort of more within the organisation, but the approach I guess across industry if you're collaborating across industry is actually having the time to reflect and come back and say what did we learn out of that interaction? What was the other organisation doing well? What was it not doing well? How can we help the other organisation? How can it help us? So it's actually having that moment of reflection when you're engaging with other organisations. But then more importantly having an appreciation of who they are engaging with I think is key in the collaboration as well because it is a chain. But I think the question was more around how do you actually pause and contemplate and create action, and I guess that really comes from a physical separation for a period and thinking about it, but also reflecting and saying so what did that do it was a nice chat with this other organisation but what did we actually learn.

Thanks Sarv. Part of the digital opportunity is about being more user and customer centric how have you driven that within the culture of your organisation?

Our environment I guess is quite unique, in terms of internally we do a lot of I guess prototyping and getting input from the internal users on what a solution should look like and demonstrating an earlier version getting input on that. And that's helped us iterate internally in some of the systems that we develop. More broadly though across the industry it's actually seeking feedback, so whilst that may seem as business as usual it is in a way iterating getting viewpoints then bringing those together, synthesising those and saying that this is where we want to head now as an economy. So it's sort of different levels of interaction and feedback, but it's really largely around an iterative, test and learn type approach whether it's the scale across the country or whether its internal to the organisation. But most importantly accepting that the feedback some of it actually would need to be addressed as part of the next iteration, it's no good taking the feedback from the users – internal users or other stakeholders and not do anything about it. It doesn't mean you have to address everything but certainly being able to address the ones – the bits that improve your solution is vital and that's the whole test and learn approach.

Hi Sarv thank you and thank you Shelley. Chelsea Ford from Diabetes NSW, I actually have two questions if I'm allowed. First of all you spoke about having a coding competition, just wondering are you seeing new recruits have the skill set in the first place to keep up with the level of innovation and disruption they spoke about?

We're finding certainly the new recruits do have the appetite and the skill set to innovate and also both in technical terms but also the soft skills, because innovation requires technical and soft skills and they do have that. The trick is giving them a challenge because they all like challenges, the younger generation coming through and so finding business problems that are worth solving for them is really the challenge for leadership. And our approach to the Codathon was really around getting the business to come up with some internal improvement opportunities and as part of a working group with the business we then picked the top 10 ideas that could do with a bit of prototyping and a bit of coding and you know I think around 70 to 80 staff got into groups and decided to give it a go over 12 hours and with lots of pizzas and cans of coke, and so – so they have the appetite but it's creating the environment for them to come up with the solutions and that was a well received exercise in terms of building the culture, solving a few problems for the business, but more importantly giving the staff the opportunity to grow themselves. In an internal but competitive environment where they're actually looking at what the other group was doing across the floor in prototyping their solution.

Thank you.

You've got the mike you may as well carry on.

The other question I had you spoke about courage particularly leader's courage and the Apple example of going bigger with the phone when the direction was going the other way. I'm kind of curious around how you see we could support leaders to have that courage.

I think the courage it comes from probably mentoring but I would not – I wouldn't just say the traditional form of mentoring where you have someone who is more experienced, but the concept of reverse mentoring and some certainly I've seen you usually find the younger entrants want a more senior mentor but the ones that are successful the younger person actually ends up mentoring the older person on technology matters and so whether it's on social media, on what's happening out there and so and so, that actually helps give confidence to leaders that this actually it sort of demystifies all of this change in the digital world and so reverse mentoring I think actually does have some merits but it's hard to set up in the right way, that sort of helps the courage factor of some very senior leaders, I have known leaders in the past, in the recent past who have actually had that in place. It's easier for them to ask a person at work what four squares is than asking their children who might not give them the answer you know.

I think it's more around recognition and opportunity that are the drivers in that sense that certainly in my travels and it's not necessarily the financial reward or the – it's actually giving someone an opportunity and it could be a rotation into another part of the organisation for a period, it could be a secondment to one of your suppliers for a short period. But it' s setting it up so that they feel that they've earnt it in a competitive way and then there's something for them at the end in terms of a new experience. So that sort of assumes yes your remuneration and other you know benefits are reasonable, but giving people the opportunity is actually I think far more reward in setting them up for the future and also having them being more appreciative. I know in sort of in our experiences many of our graduates aspire to at some early stage in their career to do further education whether it's an MBA, an MSC and then getting those kinds of things in place as a consequence because of them excelling or achieving something is actually highly regarded.

So in a collaborative environment do you reward the team or the individual that leads the team, how do you kind of assess the contributions?

I think the – it has to be at both levels its – I mean the outcome is for the team so the team has to celebrate there's no doubt about that. But I think at some point individuals in that team also need a level of recognition. So the way we for example do it we have quarterly recognition awards within the technology department, some of those are team based but there are equally individual based and you've got to recognise that, because once the project or the collaboration objective is over the people are individuals until the next team is formed. So motivating them for the next team event is actually critical and that's where it's getting the balance right between that.

We've heard a lot about culture and collaboration and it's all great, but aren't we in a bit of a paradox here where we're expecting the results of the start up world which is dominated by a small number of very passionate driven founders to be then working the same model. Aren't we at risk at adopting a model that doesn't work in the culture of collaboration?

I think and you know I know PWC might have a view as well, but I think the – within larger organisations it's not – being able to do this in a small manner is probably the way to go about it and not try and change the whole culture and some call it you know innovation at the edge or building an environment as a part of the organisation where you can apply more innovation and idea generation collaboration, but there would be certainly a part of the organisation which actually needs to do things in a traditional way, in a more structured way with specifications, with structure, with quality built in you know at every stage, and so it's working out which part of your organisation needs to move in a start-up fashion and which part of your organisation needs to be stable, reliable, fully secure and so on. And that for us is obviously a key consideration is which parts of the environment can we innovate in and give our users some new tools to experiment with and which platforms like the payments, banking, markets, which platforms where do we actually want full reliability, stability and security. So it's working out those two spectrums in your organisation but you're absolutely right you can't suddenly turn you know 100 year old organisation into a culture of a start-up, I mean that's doomed to failure.

Yeah, I would echo Sarv's points there, I mean the approach that we're very much taking is where can you get a small group of people who are interested in engaging innovation and let them work with segments of the business to make sure you incubate properly that you maintain the success of the rest of your business and how can you pull the best of start-ups, so that's working agile, it's not spending in your traditional cost structures, so you bring those best parts of a start-up but you very much want people to love your business, that are engaged with your clients and can figure out how to marry the two, but finding that passionate entrepreneur that's willing to unlock their ideas and bring the best of themselves to your business is no mean feat to get there and do it successfully, so a very valid point.

Look I think ultimately that's then a - as start-ups in the single product sense become more successful, I guess they try and diversify and so that's really a business decision in terms of should they diversify and develop other products or should they actually continue to specialise and I suspect those that continue to specialise end up getting – some of them end up getting bought out by the ones that are – that are chosen to diversify. But I think that's really a strategy decision I mean I would suggest both can be successful, it's really a strategy related question, but each of them carries you know as you expand into different product sets then the product sets and services then the courage and the culture question becomes even more important, it's how do you retain that as you grow into different products.