Well Rebecca, thank you for joining me and congratulations once again on being the 2nd ever recipient of the Joe Fisher scholarship. The award was a little while back, and you've had time to reflect on it. How's it sitting with you? Thank you. It's absolutely an honour and I'm humbled to be recognised and to be able to continue Joe's great work around development and leadership and the work I do in culture. So thank you to SMG Group. So being able to be recognised for some of the great work I've done in the last, particularly 5 years, but more broadly, the last 20 years has been a real honour and I'm really grateful. Now, one of the big ideas in your submission came in the form of a question, which was, you know, how do you maintain engagement, organisational engagement, people engagement, during times of significant transformation. How did you answer that question, briefly? Yes, absolutely. So my, my answer at the time was heavily based around the work we've done around human experience and really connecting with people and their leaders, leaders leading from the front and being that trusted advisor. We've done so much work over the last Couple of years to connect with value and purpose, and the customers we serve are serving the Victorian community on the front line of hospitals and Department of Family Fairness and Housing. So really connecting with heart and with purpose were two real focuses for us around engagement. But as we enter 2025 and we've got more opportunities for transformation, even greater push for efficiencies, for us, that challenge is even more increasing in the coming year. And I don't know how we continue to maintain that engagement in some senses because, How do you continue to push through all of that? And still keep people engaged and still deliver great outcomes. There's a UK journal and Politico called Alastair Campbell, and, and he coined a term last year that I thought was a bit naff. But this year really makes sense to me, and it's this, this logic of persivilience. It's to lead through transformation is hard, and to lead through transformation requires more than perseverance, it requires more than resilience, it requires adaptability, flexibility, pushing through, learning and bouncing back from those setbacks. It's this combination of all of that. And I think the only hope we have to maintain, I, I don't even think increase engagement, to maintain and not reduce engagement is to really give our leaders the skills of persivilience. And so on that note, so let's look ahead to 2025, do you think we're going to need more persivilience, given the changing geopolitical sort of environment that we're experiencing? Yes, absolutely. I think you've got the nature of transformation that is ongoing and just increases and increases. You've got greater pushes for efficiency and and resource outcomes, then you add the geopolitical layer, and a lot of the work we've done around connecting people and, and that human-centered approach around DEIB, for example, all of our inclusion work then also becomes considered about how did that impact in the geopolitical sphere. So there's certainly, certainly greater challenges ahead in 2025. Yes, I'm sure you'll rise to them. Congratulations once again. Thanks for making the time to have this conversation and uh wishing you, your organisation and your team um all the best for the year ahead. Thank you so much to you and the team at SMG. I'm really humbled and honoured and I really appreciate you doing the award in Joe's honour, so thank you.
