Navigating Crisis: Stephen Leane's Insights from Leading ESTA

Often the crises we've seen with CEOs, the incident or the crisis didn't destroy their career. It's how they managed the communications through the crisis. Leadership is really important. This is where CEOs, board chairs, all the C-suite personalities across an organisation come into their own. Visible leadership is really important. So for me, you have to be seen walking around, you have to be seen coming out of those meetings and talking to the staff.

If you could give your younger self some advice, what would it be?

Okay. Stephen Lean, welcome to The Mentor List.

Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here.

Great to have a former police officer, non-exec director, mentor, member at— in one of our mastermind groups as well. here to share your story and share some of your insights about probably a topic and theme which we want to dig into. It's probably around crisis management is how I'd sort of label it at the top level. And I couldn't think of anybody better to have this conversation with. So thanks for coming in and looking forward to it, Stephen. So I guess the first question is just, so knowing that you've been through many different crises, whether it's a crime scene, whether it's a riot at a correctional facility, whether it's a crisis at the non-exec or even in the chief role in business. Do you have a sort of framework or how do you sort of respond? Where does your mind go? And sort of step us through anything that could help us for our next crisis that we might say, okay, well, here's Stephen's framework. 2-step process, or— it's a hard question but easy to ask, so I'll throw it to you, Stephen.

No, it isn't, and there's lots and lots of literature on it others have done as well, so it's pretty— we make it straightforward as we can. The first part about managing a crisis is making sure that you've got some heads up what might be coming before it arrives. For business and for CEOs and boards, that's really about your audit and risk committee and making sure you understand your risks. We talk about risks and how it affects the bottom line and what will happen, but really understanding and drilling into your risks so that you understand what might be coming your way. If you're a tech firm, then it's pretty straightforward. You start to think about your cyber issues or whether your systems are going to last. But if you're doing service delivery of some sort to community, the range of issues that might affect you may very well be IT, but they may be electric. Your power goes out, as we found in metropolitan Melbourne or Victoria, Yeah. About a month ago, it might be, you know, that natural disaster, as we know now, global warming is coming, so it could be flood, could be fire, could be any of those big emergencies. It could be people. We've been through, the world lived through, you know, a pandemic several years ago that nobody ever thought would be possible. If your Audit and Risk Committee, by the way, picked up the pandemic, I'd like to know about it before it came. So would lots of others, just so we can know what else is coming down the Down the pipe. So I think that's a good starting point, is know the nature of issues and risks that will affect your people and your business and your customers and stakeholders.

Yeah.

So this is something you're doing in peacetime, for example?

Yeah, it's how you plan for that rainy day that might come and make sure that you've got ahead of it. Once you think you've got some ideas about what you might do, the next thing to do is actually make sure that you develop some sort of plan. plan on how to deal with them. A crisis response plan are often generic, that's fine. They can be altered depending on the circumstances, but the big issue is it's got to be related to your organisational company strategy. It's actually got to exist if you can do it, so actually write it down. Key components of it are fairly straightforward. Leadership is really important. This is where CEOs, board chairs, all the C-suite personalities across an organisation come into their own. So leadership is really important. And there's 3 parts of that leadership. It's the strategic piece, to make sure that the board, CEO, other key stakeholders know what's going on. There's the tactical piece, and that might be your Chief Operations Officer or your CFO, It might be a CIO if it's an IT-related issue. So the tactical piece, and then there's got to be some operations piece. You've got to understand, and the people that work in the organisation or providers that work with you know what the third party is. So if you rely on power and you lose your power for 12 hours but you've got a generator, simple issues around is it fuelled and where do we get fuel from is an operational problem. As we found, I think the telecommunication companies found out in Victoria's last emergency is that the cell towers ran until the fuel ran out on the generators that were powering the batteries.

Right.

They couldn't get fuel to the generators and we lost our phone lines. It can be as simple as that. There's a range of things that you need to think about and how you operationalise your response. And then the next part is For me, is really to make sure that everybody knows what their job is when it happens.

I recall that. It was if you didn't have more than $50 and 3 bars of battery in your phone— $50 because the payment system went down, 3 bars of battery so you could make calls, and then a certain amount of petrol— then you were exposed in those— You were exposed.

Yeah, wow. And that's sort of simple advice. community, we get as community if we go on holidays in a bushfire-prone area during summer or you live there, is that are you prepared? And the same with our homeowners, you know, or, you know, when we're on holidays, we have to be prepared as organisations and business.

Yeah.

So to keep it as simple as I can.

Well, that's a 3-step process. So we can probably dig into that.

That looks good.

Yeah.

So do Just, Stephen, how do you help people understand their sort of roles in these things? Is it a question of just drilling the plan, or—

Practice makes perfect. And I love the word practice. Lawyers use the word practice. You can become a lawyer, and then you practice law, which means congratulations, you know enough to be admitted to practice. But as you practice, you get good at the law. Accountants use the word practice. Medical profession use the word practice. In crisis management responses to issues, practice is what you do. So there's a number of ways you can practise. You actually run exercises where you actually try something. Lots of buildings you're in, you'll notice the lights flicker when the building manager is turning on the alternative power to make sure that it actually switches over. That's just practise. So we practise that in lots of ways, but I think as leaders of organisations, it's important to demonstrate that you're on top of it and you're scheduling how you practise, how you do it. So practise is really one way to make sure that you're on top of it. The other way is to learn from other people's mistakes.

Yeah, because you've been in industries where, you know, make a mistake and someone literally can die. For example, whether it's, you know, the 000 hotline service or whether it's actually out there in the field as a police officer. So moving maybe into industries that weren't so emergency service prone or that wasn't their main line of business, did you see a vast difference in the amount of practice that you'd have in, for example, the police force or— a correctional facility, or— yeah, what did you see any contrast there? And then the ability to respond in a crisis?

I think it's still steps away from lots of different businesses and people I talk to across business around those sort of issues. Yeah, there's some that do it really well. I think the cyber threat has really honed lots of businesses' response, so they were getting better and better at understanding the cyber threat, better and better at understanding our contingencies So I think that's an example of where we can, where we can do it, learn how we can do it and apply it to other facets of the business. I think the application to other facets of the business may not be as diverse as it is. I think the lessons we'll see, we might dig into during the conversation, is around, you know, what happens. It's the little things that will hurt you along the way.

Yeah.

The little things that you get wrong, particularly as the CEO. And I'm sure there's lots of Harvard Business School articles to be written about, you know, the life cycle of a CEO might be 3 years even though they're, you know, they're tenured to 5.

Yep.

Is, you know, what's happening, and there's a number of case studies that will be looked at around CEOs that have, you know, either haven't made decisions at the right time, or have made decisions but haven't communicated those decisions, or haven't engaged with their community or haven't engaged with their workforce, it's just worked against them.

Yeah, and you've been sort of thrusted into that sort of limelight or key sort of roles, um, in various— whether it's big policy changes or whether that's another crisis, we'll get Stephen in to deal with this. Was it you putting your hand up, or how did you get sort of a bit of a reputation for someone that was, um, that responds well in those type of scenarios?

I suppose there's a couple of facets to that. Part of it is longevity. As those who listen might pick, my voice is reasonably older than others, but you'll see my grey hair on, on video, is that you've been through the school of hard knocks for a long time. So I've been in the workforce for probably 45 years doing lots and lots of different things. Where I got to, I think, before I finished my police career, and it's sort of coming up over 4 years, nearly 5 years ago, sort of grew with momentum over probably 20 years of just being around. Some of it was bad luck, that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of it was good luck, was diversification of career. I went— I was a mature age student, managed to get through law school at Monash Uni, and senior officer in Victoria Police spotted it, put me in a job for a while doing law reform, and September 11 happened in 2001. All of a sudden I found myself in a room, in a conference room in Canberra with 27, 30 bureaucrats and senior lawyers and all sorts of people trying to understand how do we make sense of terrorism response across the Commonwealth and states of Australia. So I've probably been lucky enough to see lots of different views of emergencies and how to respond to them. So like I suggested, the strategic side— I've been involved in the strategic side and the policy positions and how you do things. And then the operations side, some of the stuff that came out of September 11th that we worked on was around the arrangements, just what actually happens if the City of Melbourne is subject to a terrorist attack. Like, what is the role of the Commonwealth? What does the AFP do? What does the military do? What does health do? What does Victoria Police do? Fire, ambulance? So actually sat in rooms and asked really big hard questions around what we should do.

And just, I mean, you mentioned sort of, you mentioned a Melbourne example there, but there was actually a, uh, the tragic sort of where we had the car running through the streets and, and you were sort of called in to help support with, with, with that. Do you think having all the time where you're not in crisis developing policy And then with that grounding, right, Stephen, front and centre of the media, here you go, here's the issue, not fix it, but—

I think in policing and military, we call it taking charge. It's probably not a word that's used a lot, but somebody actually has to stand up and be accountable. And that's the issue with crisis, is that you do need leaders who stand up.

Yeah.

I've been around, done lots, practiced lots of them. I mean, in policing, we used to practice. I was in charge of a lot of Melbourne and particularly the city for a long time with operational policing on the other side of my brain when I stepped out of the strategic and the policy and over to actually service delivery to community. You know, we'd practice with Grand Final day, with the Boxing Day Test, with major events. We'd practice with our, with our partners just delivering that safety overlay so that we worked together, we knew each other, we knew how things operated. When you get to something like the Bourke Street strategy, how did I get to be there? Well, I was selected as the Assistant Commissioner for the Northwest Metro region and probably got into that job because I was a safe pair of hands.

Yeah.

And I'd been around and done lots of things. And it was the place, it's most of, all of the CBD of Melbourne and all of the north and western suburbs. including the Tullamarine Airport, places like that, the docks. So it's the place where if something's going to happen in the state of Victoria, it's, you know, 2 times out of 3 or 3 times out of 4 most likely to happen in that space. Even just as an anecdote, though, when the strategy group got together and redefined the boundaries of Victoria for Victoria Police, they actually coloured it red.

Wow.

Because they call it the red zone is where it's going to happen and who wants that job. So So David, how did I, how did I land there? I suppose years and years of experience and then, yeah, um, being quite prepared to stand up and do things.

And then on being prepared, because if you go— if you Google Stephen's name, you'll come up in various, uh, where various news reports where you are the, the front of whatever the crisis is that you're representing the response to. Um, and the way you conduct yourself on video would suggest that You're quite well— there must have been some training, or whether it's media training, how to speak in front of a camera, how to make people feel like you're in charge, you're standing up. Was that something that you did? And then was that something you did in response to, I need to do that, or was that a preparedness thing about, well, I know one day I'll need to do that? Just interested in—

I think it's, I think it's a bit of all of that.

Yeah.

So I think with media when you move into a role like that, then you do have to be prepared. And organisations provide you with access to media training. And when you do it, it's not just a bit of hit and giggle and have a bit of fun. And lots of organisations do media training for their CEOs. And you go through the motions and you do it and see how it goes. I think you take it fairly serious when you know that you're probably going to be pushed out to do some things. And I think in my career, I'd already done some stand-ups. simple ones, you know, at the scene of the crime and as you start, which are, you know, you look back and they're really bad and you wonder how you got away with what, you know, what did you say and what did that make sense. The other part of it is, as someone in that role of leadership, whether in a crisis, an emergency, you know, in an organisation, is that you do have to be authentic and you do have to have a sense of what you're doing and know what you're doing and be confident in what you're saying. If you, if you can't do that, yeah, then as you're probably, you know, on the other side of the camera, the people will work that out.

Yeah.

And they'll work out that you're just rambling on a whole bunch of words that, yeah, you know, they're policey sounding words or they're CEO sounding words or they're politician sounding words that, yeah, it's just gobbledygook and it doesn't mean anything. And so if your message is, it's a terrible thing has happened. So if we go back, you know, we touched on it, if we go back to the Bourke Street tragedy, like a terrible thing has happened. What community needed to know was the details of what happened. And they were learning about that through social media and talkback radio and direct media. Because it was in front of everybody.

Yeah.

And you could see it. They needed to know what exactly what went on. But who's in charge and what are they doing about it?

Right.

And when is— like, what does this look like later today and tomorrow? And then, you know, when are we going to be safe again? And what's happened with the person who did it? And so that there's a desire for knowledge and there's a desire for no-nonsense, you know, responses to— and calm responses to it. So they say, oh, if that's the guy or girl from The cops, I trust them. They look like they're going to do what they say. So it's not as simple as just— for me, it's not.

Yeah.

You know, it's just not being a media performer.

Yeah.

I was lucky enough though, I'm able to talk in public and practiced in front of all sorts of rowdy groups and stuff like that and then got some media training. But I think it just sort of intersected.

Yep.

At the right time and being prepared to do it. Yeah.

Stephen, you touched on a couple of traits already, but just in terms of leadership in a crisis, what other traits do you think are important or vital?

Well, we've touched on— I think we've touched on authentic already, which is, which is pretty important.

Coming through clear.

Yeah, people will see through you fairly quickly. We can all reflect for a second, even as we listen to this podcast, and think of the worst one of the worst managers we've ever had, or supervisors and leadership was, you know, that they just, you know, they told fibs to us or did something else.

Yeah.

And we picked them, you know, if we didn't pick them, we picked the next one because we're not gonna, we're not gonna fall for that twice. So authenticity is really important. Having a knowledge of what you're going to do, but also know what you don't know, is really important, particularly in a crisis. I think there's a, you know, we want the, we want the leader out the front or in, you know, in the organisation in charge, but we'll also pick what they don't know. So if you don't know something, be honest about it.

Yeah.

Which is part of the, you know, the integrity about the leader, and there's people that will know more than you do in a crisis. They'll be there, they'll either be your own staff or they'll be contractors or they'll be members of the community who are just there who know, or, you know, consumers. They could be anybody, but there will be people who will know more than you do and can fast-track you to your solution faster than you can. So, so being in, you know, having some integrity around what you do, what you say, what you don't. Um, the other, the other part for the leaders is to be really, um, which I focused on in my most recent gig at Triple Zero Victoria, was being visible.

Okay, so what do you mean by that?

Well, I think if, if we go back to your the premise about the conversation starts at crisis. There's often a crisis team, and if you're in a crisis team and you're the leader and you're in a room and you're watching monitors and you're doing all of that and you're trapped in there and nobody sees you, eventually people say, where are they? What are they doing?

Yeah.

So visible leadership's really important. So you have to be, for me, you have to be seen walking around. You have to be seen coming out of those meetings and talking to the staff. You have to be— you do have to talk to the media even though they're screaming at you and—

Yeah.

They're screaming for a response and you've got a media advisor who's telling you one thing and your lawyers are saying another thing and all the other advisors you've got in this crisis meeting are giving you all sorts of advice. If you sit there for hours and not come out, then that will become painfully obvious. So visible leadership's really important, right, and being seen by your own people and everybody around you, stakeholders, that is, is that you're actually there, you're not, you're not just a name on the end of an email or—

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that links as well to sort of having a clear communication strategy.

Communication will often— the crisis, as we've seen with CEOs, the, the the incident or the crisis didn't destroy their career, it's the how they manage the communications through the crisis.

Yeah.

Might be that, it might be the issue that affects them. And if we reflect for a second on, um, on the Banking Royal Commission and how different, um, executives within particular banks manage themselves in front of, in front of the, the world's cameras and, and a Senate hearing or Royal Commission, I forgot which one it was, but you know, how you manage your communication will often be the end of you. There, I think the issue for communication, it's both immediate, as we've talked before, there's an immediate need for people to know what's going on, which is part of your strategy. The other part of communication strategy which is really important in a big organisation, and coming out, Victoria Police is up to 20,000 people now, and 000 Victoria was sort of, we got to 2,000. is that your staff will listen to what you say through your media conversations as much as you will through your emails and notes and, you know, FOIA video clips. And so that's a really critical audience.

Yeah.

The other part about your communication strategy, it's got to deliver confidence for a range of other stakeholders as well. So your regulators are watching. They're watching to see what you do. If you're an industry that's regulated, then there's lots of regulated industries, or you're supplying to a regulated industry.

Yeah.

You know, if it's hospitality, it's still health regulators. People are looking. Politicians are always looking. Media are always looking. Other media, social media. There's lots of different people that are looking for confidence from your communication strategy. So There's some wonderful— I've seen some wonderful communication strategies of different places, but then having the strategy probably is the next thing about execution.

It's an interesting thread though. You mentioned Triple Zero Victoria, so you've got 2,000 operatives taking and working through, I guess, I mean, it must be complex. It must be so random, the types of calls that come in, and it could be a blue one or a green one or a yellow one, and then the ability to then craft that into a workflow. But sort of as part of the pre-briefing call, we were talking about how it's not just about the phone call. When you're a police officer, you'd have the 000 respondent on the call with you in the car going to the scene. Maybe you could talk through that flow.

So I think the issue was when— so I took over, which is now Triple Zero Victoria, in October of '22. I was on the board. I joined the board as part of my portfolio career for a little while before, which is another conversation about doing your due diligence about your board before you end up the CEO of the organisation you've just joined its board.

Hot tip.

Yeah, but walked in, uh, with, with little or no notice. into an organisation that was much smaller than the 2,000 at that stage. It was probably under-resourced.

Hmm.

It had been under-resourced for some time. There were some leadership issues. There was a lot of the visible leadership issue. You know, the executives, because of COVID weren't going to the workplace in spite of the fact that all their operatives had to go in and weren't being seen. you know, the unions were calling for the heads of the executives, but they just weren't getting to— weren't able to get through the volume of calls to the point, you know, they have— they've KPIs that they were miles away, people were waiting horrible sort of time frames, and there's people, you know, people have passed away as a result of not being able to get an ambulance to them.

Wow.

And as we speak, There's a coronial inquest running in Victoria now, which starts up again live with hearings, I think, in the next couple of weeks. So I'll be careful around those issues. But it became— when we jump into that space, it was a real issue. So for me, walking in as the CEO, it's— so you've got an organisation in crisis, you've got a workforce that's in crisis, they've been working you know, they've been battered from pillar to post. They've been reading the media about how they're not getting the calls when they're saying, well, we're getting the calls, there's just not enough of us. So, you know, we're doing our job brilliantly. And so I reflected my first day, I spent some time with the executive in the morning and there was a call, an operations room in one of the facilities where I worked from. Walked into the operations floor and the first call I heard was a young ambulance call taker who was working through with the caller around the birth of a baby right there and then.

Wow.

Right there and then, so asking where the head was in relation and how much of the head they could see as the baby's head was actually starting to be delivered. So, and they do that, people in Melbourne might know we had some demonstrators on the West Gate Bridge that closed our West Gate Bridge and the 000 Victoria operator helped deliver a baby to a woman who was trapped on the West Gate Bridge who couldn't get past the demonstrators.

Wow.

So they range from that to, from my policing background, you know, they do call taking and then operational communications. So for the last 20 years that it had been operating is that, and for all of my police career, when you turn on a— get into a police car, you turn on the, you turn on, you know, FM radio and listen to whatever you want to listen to, but you most importantly turn on the police radio and there's a triple zero Victoria operator who's actually, you know, working with frontline police. So when I walked into that organisation, it was like some of it was, was coming home.

It's full circle. The voices you've heard all these years are now—

Come back to where it was, you know, left policing, went out to diversify, joined boards, did a whole range of different things, and then found myself, you know, would you like to go back and see if you can do something Yeah. Which is with Triple Zero Victoria. So for me, yeah, that sort of walking into work, it was an organisation in crisis in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of its own crisis about not being able to actually deliver its service. So they all compounded on top of each other. So, you know, if I can go back to the visible leadership piece, I spent so much time and still probably critical of many, many of the staff are critical, is just stopping and walking around and being and listening to them. And they knew the answer to a lot of the issues.

Yeah.

You know, the first 15 things I could have done, they were telling me off the top of their head, do this, do this, do this, do this. I sort of walk away, come back, remember, now I've done that. What else did you want me to do?

There was many of other things that we had to do, but I think you've partly answered my next question, but it's going to be about how did you identify the issues and prioritise them?

Yeah, well, when you walk into something like that, well, I'd had a heads up because I'd been on the board and I saw it coming. I wasn't aware of the depth and the breadth of the issues. It's not to you, like I say, when you do get some confidence of your staff and they actually tell you exactly, I mean, many people will tell you what they think, but It's the other ones, the, the ones that, you know, the thoughtful ones who actually tell you the depth of what's going on. Um, so it was, it was sort of a coming together for me, reflecting, it was more of a coming together of sort of 40 or more years of work, whether it was, you know, being lucky enough to get to business schools, to doing the strategy piece, to doing the investment with government, to doing the media, to keeping government confident, you know, the— What do we do now? What is the plan? Within 3 days of being there, government was asking, what's your plan?

Yeah. Come on, Stephen, you've had 3 days.

What is your plan?

You fixed it yet? What is your plan?

Rethink portfolio career was probably one of them.

Hey everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. If you're loving this podcast, please give us a 5-star review.

So probably heading back to where you do develop a plan. And what I did was actually I I did a deal going in with the board chair who asked me to go, is that I'd go if I can take one person with me. So I had a colleague who's now the CEO of 000 Victoria, she came in as deputy.

Oh, great.

She'd worked with me in Victoria Police. So it wasn't actually, to be fair to her, it wasn't actually my plan. When I rang her and said, would you mind? She said, I'll only come if I can bring one person with me. So I hadn't rung the board chair yet. back to say I'd take the job. So I rang her back, said, I'll come as long as I can. I used her words. So she— and that's the thing, is that in a crisis, you know, when we get to it, is what's your crisis team look like?

Yeah.

So we, so we pulled in a few people early, um, and essentially became the, the person I came became the Chief Operating Officer, which allowed me to do the strategy piece. But between us, and I relied heavily on her, We essentially had the, what's your 100-day plan? But what's your 10-day plan?

That's it.

Where do you go from here? So within a week, we had a, on the whiteboard, we had a plan about the things we had to do, and they were big issues. And the issues that we were facing, unfortunately, wasn't something we had the capacity to solve overnight. We didn't have the capability to solve overnight. We couldn't just buy it in. There wasn't a firm that could just come in and do it. So there was no providers who could do it. We reached out to other agencies to try and help. We even flew down ambulance call takers from New South Wales at one stage until their pandemic took off a bit more and they had to hightail it back to New South Wales.

Yeah.

So there was a bit of an opportunity for us, but it was Multi— yeah, you develop a plan.

Yeah, sounds like a prolonged effort.

Um, it was a, it was a campaign.

So on maybe, um, talking about— you mentioned sort of, you know, if we didn't fix it that day, we'd be back the next day. But maybe a scenario that you were thrusted in again, which should be very different, was the prison riots, uh, where I don't think you could just go, all right guys, we'll fix this one tomorrow, I'll be back in tomorrow. Is there sort of things that you think, okay, prison riot versus what happened at Triple Zero, different time horizons, but are there similarities in terms of the response, in terms of the stages?

There certainly are. And that's why I say it's— for me, it was a coming together of a whole range of things that I'd learned. I think Triple Zero Victoria, before I finished up, it was supposed to be 3 months. It turned out nearly 2 years when I got out. I probably used every trick that I'd ever learnt and everything I'd ever learnt from anywhere in the Triple Zero Victoria. But coming back to your question, the issue is, you know, do you have a plan and a strategy? So you talk about something like a prison riot. Yes, there was a plan. It was a standing plan. It existed. The next thing is, who's in charge? For us, for police, was— so we had a really good quality, fabulous person, superintendent at that stage, now Assistant Commissioner of Victoria Police, got the hard job of being forward at the actual prison. If I'm strategic, who's tactical then? So I had one of my commanders step in as tactical. So what's your team? Do you— and by that stage, I knew who the people were. So know your team in the short term, put them in. What is your plan? What's your resourcing? Think about how long this is going to go. So from a strategic point of view, often you get going, it's the first 10 to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, you get going and you start responding. Post that for, you know, from a strategic position, and this is probably a lesson for CEOs and boards, is how long can my people work for?

Yeah.

What happens at 10 o'clock tonight when they're all exhausted if we start at 8 o'clock in the morning? What happens tomorrow? What happens the next day? What does that look like? So you start straight away, you start thinking about planning of what's just not now, but what's next. And what else could happen as a result of this if we lose— we lost control of a prison in the western suburbs of Melbourne for about, I think it was about 10 or 12 hours in the end. And at one stage there, it was calm and And, you know, we're still doing headcounts at 5 o'clock in the morning when I was— I headed in back into the office to stand up with the Minister for Corrections the next morning to say it was all wonderful. But I was on the phone just before I walked into the media to make sure that the numbers counted up. We had lost one. And it was like counting sheep, you know, they come back with a different number. You go, what's that? What's the number? They count up, you know.

Well, imagine this Considerable scenarios in a prison that can and, you know, probably do happen from time to time. Riot would be one, and imagine a person escaping. So then there is a workbook, I guess, that you could rely on, which sounds like later on in these more, um, you know, not more complex, but more less defined, less able to sort of to guess that that was going to happen. I mean, the pandemic with running Triple Zero, I mean, it's like a cocktail of, if they're already under-resourced and then you throw, overlay that on top, who would have thought that that could have happened? So I don't know if that's a question, it's probably more an observation.

No, no, it was a good chat.

Yeah, I'll throw to you, you can ask the questions, Alex.

Oh, it's funny, when you stepped into the role at Triple Zero, obviously you formed your plan after a week and, you know, you were a very visible leader in terms of meeting everyone and walking the floor. What was the sort of cadence of communication with the internal stakeholders, with your staff?

Cadence is a wonderful word, and sound. We used to say at Triple Zero, so you, you know, what's the lifebeat of an organisation, and, you know, is visible, you talk about visible, as a visible change. But for Triple Zero Victoria, because they work on headsets, it was the sound of the organisation. We picked up, you could feel the tension in the voices even when they were talking to community, and as soon as they put the headset off, you could see it. So dealing with, it was, you know, it's a very unionised workforce. They're still sitting with an EBA that hasn't resolved. I think it was close, but it's queued up with all the emergency services in Victoria and that. You know, holding pat at the moment, trying to be resolved, I think. It was pretty tough conversations, but I think you just got to get it, you know. For me, it was about getting out and being visible, not just to the floor, but, you know, the union leaders I'd ring up and say, you know, I don't know if you've heard of me, my name's Stephen, I've just stepped into this job, you know, I understand that you're, you know, the secretary of this union, or the— you're the union official responsible for this workforce. Just let you know I'm here and have a chat. Work with stakeholders as far as that as well. The emergency services weren't happy with 000 Victoria either. They were pretty cranky.

Right.

Had a lot of long conversations with senior ambulance officials around their disappointment in relation to the service that they were getting, and rightly so. It was reflecting poorly on them and And how the good work that they were doing. Yeah, um, so you had a lot of trust to build up again. There was, yeah. I probably used up a lot of favour— like I said, I used up a lot of favours. Uh, had probably my being able to deal with a crisis called in, uh, had to be strong a couple of times in relation to not, not taking a step back. I think there was a desire to beat the organisation up and Blame everything in the world at its feet. Things weren't going right for a lot of people, and I think no matter what went wrong, it was, you know, Esther Triple Zero Victoria's fault. So I had to call out, you know, I had to get a bit brave and call out a few of those and back off. And then the media scrutiny was just— Yeah, just enormous. Just relentless and enormous. And dealing with it.

Did it ever get personal or was it more of just—

It didn't get to me. I think personal is an interesting issue with the media. I've done lots of media and I thought, which is an issue for CEOs and others, is the media really— they'll listen to this, I'm sure they will because there's lots of them who'll follow or spot my name and have a listen. In its simplest form, the media's got to sell its product. As we know. And so if there's something bad happens in the community, community want to know what's happened and who was at fault, who's the— and who can we blame.

Yeah.

And so I did a lot of media interviews and I sat down, I sat down with— in this sort of format, but it was a 60 Minutes interview, which was a— no offence to you, but—

Big role and more gruelling than this, I would hope.

I think, I think, uh, I think we didn't get interviewed for about My media officer said I had about 43 minutes with 60 Minutes. So they only go for 60 minutes long and they have TV breaks and other stories.

Oh, yeah.

I was going to say. So I think the issue for that is that reflecting is that they were looking for a villain. And so while I was happy to be the face of the organisation, I was the face of I'm going to fix it. And I'm not a villain. I'm here to fix it. And I had a lot of conversations with families too, which was really tough. Families that had tried to get through on the, on the line, hadn't, and lost a family member. Now, you know, they're looking for someone to blame, which is just normal. But have a conversation with families, and all I could say was, look, this is me, this is where I've come from. You can, you can Google me and see that I've stood up, been accountable before. But I'm here and I'll fix it. And the unions were the same, is that, what do we do and how do we get the workforce back? I think with a lot of support from government that I got, which is probably another story about how you get that, we did an MOU on top of the EBA with the unions within several months of me being there, which gave them better allowances. better conditions, and 6-month MOU, let's get— let's work together to get through this. What can we do right now? And so, so I had to build that trust through negotiations to an MOU. It took several, you know, took a lot of meetings. The first, the first meeting I had with union delegates and officials, I'm sure there were still flaming torches and pitchforks.

Yeah.

They were, they were, I think, I think the I described it to someone. It was, there was a 60-minute meeting and we did it on Teams of all things. If you remember back.

Yeah.

You couldn't have a meeting in those days. In the first 30 minutes, they threatened to use a big stick that they all, you know, felt like they carried into the meeting with them. For the next 20 minutes, they continued to show me the big stick, remind me that they could use it on me if they felt like it. And for the last 20 minutes of the 60-minute meeting, it felt like they'd listen to me, but every now and then they just remind me they've still got this big stick that they're gonna hit me with. As the CEO, because they'd seen the last CEO off and we'll see you off too, sunshine. It's pretty hostile. You can't do it. Yeah, it was tough, but we got through it and kept fronting up. That's the other thing about being a leader is we talk about what are the qualities is you've got to continue to front up. That resilience piece we talk about. Are you resilient? How do you build resilience? It's almost the old language of my parents' generation of stoicism, you know, the old, you know, Second World War British community, the stoicism stuff. There's sometimes as a leader in these sort of circumstances, you know, the word stoicism is probably the best, is that you've just got to keep fronting up.

Yeah.

And keep going.

Yeah, it's like that old adage, you know, keep calm and carry on.

Keep calm and carry on. Exactly. Yeah. And I had to read, I mean, all these lessons follow through though. We've been lucky enough to grow up since my generation, baby boomers onwards, we've lived in a fairly calm world. There's been some big things, but the Western world, Australia, New Zealand, the UK predominantly, Western Europe, we've lived pretty well.

Yeah.

But all those old lessons still apply, Winston Churchill sayings, and they all still apply, and the lessons still apply as to how you, how you manage through things.

Yeah.

I think lastly I might just ask, obviously things have changed a lot, the Western world has, but also really it's about the speed of sort of information sharing, things like that. So how has that impacted a crisis on the face of it from high level, and therefore your response to crises?

I think what it does do, it gives you a lot more information than you had before. Yeah, so we talk about major incidents that happen in policing, is that we'd run a major police centre and there'd be 60 or 70 different police and others working in there to try and solve the crisis. If you can imagine it like NASA with all these screens everywhere, and for me I always made sure that I had a couple of media officers and the TV running, and they were listening to talkback radio. Because by the time our police were able to find out what was going on, get on their radio, give it back to you, somebody from 3AW or one of the talkback radio stations had grabbed somebody, put a microphone in their hand, and asked them what they saw.

Wow.

And they were saying it. So that's the description of how quickly information can move. And in organisations, that's exactly the same. Your staff, no matter where they are, will be on social media. They may post things, they may get a response, and it'll gather momentum. So the idea that you can have a crisis management plan, and a crisis management team, and a crisis operations room, and that you can be in that room, and you can methodically work your way through it without any inference of what's going on outside that, is gone. Those days have gone, which is how quickly you can respond, how quickly you can convert chaos into some sort of control, and then what is your plan to get there, and then how quickly you can get out and start sharing information with your customers or your community.

Yes.

From where I came from previously. And we've seen that, you know, we've got no, as a As a human race in the Western world, we've got no patience to not know. We go to the airport, there's a delay, we want to know why. What do you mean the computer systems are down? Like, I'm taking a particular airline and it's delayed. What, you know, what's, what's going on? And if, and if organisations in their media plan spend 3 hours devising a beautifully crafted response, by the time it comes out, everybody's decided what the problem was.

Yeah.

And there's no time for you. So So those things, so it's both a, you know, it can be really negative in that, is that your time for making decisions, you know, talking to your organisation, getting things mobile, starting to respond, is really contracted.

Yep.

On the other hand is that you've got, you know, a lot more information than you ever had before, and it might even be, you know, one of the TV broadcasters or Sky News Actually, if you're running a production plant, it'll be a helicopter from a news camera showing your production plant right there, whether it's caught fire or something's happened. You can see it right in front of your eyes.

That's cool.

There's no need to wait for 7 phone calls and a briefing note from your operations manager. So it's got things either way, but I think the speed of the world has picked up. It sort of comes back to, are you prepared? Right.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, Steven. I think we'll probably move on now to the second part of the show, which is sort of a considered answer to some preset questions. So please do expand on why you've selected what you have.

Sure.

We'd love to know, obviously you've spent a lot of time, different experiences, training, international and domestic. Do you have a favourite quote that comes to you?

I use lots of them. I do try and spend a lot of time with other people in developing them, so I use lots of them. In the conversation we've just had with crisis, I reflect there was one that— and I think it's power is where power goes, and I'm trying to remember, it was LBJ, Lyndon Johnson. So it's a wonderful— I saw a wonderful film about him and the quote popped up in it some years ago.

That's a good one.

And it's something that I used at Triple Zero Victoria because we were awash. There was no power, there was no influence, there was no control. But if you stand up straight, be responsible, have a plan and get going in a vacuum, the power will come to you. of some sort, enough to, enough to do what you have to do. So power is where power goes. And so I think from that perspective on our conversation, that's a great, great quote in terms of what we've been talking about. Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you're prepared to do it, yeah, in the, in the, if the world's gone mad and they've all lost their head, but if somebody's prepared to stand up and take responsibility, people will follow. And that's that. It's that essence, a little bit of the essence of leadership.

Yes.

You know, people, people want to follow somebody, but they're looking for that, for the right one. It can be misused, of course, you know, as we see in the world political environment at the moment, in different— whether it's not just the Western world, how people can, can use power and centralize power and threaten, but in a positive sense.

So Stephen, do you have a favorite book that you can recommend us?

Um, I was going to say, I've had— I like lots and lots of books, and I read different Different books. I've just picked up one in a secondhand bookshop the other day, To Kill a Mockingbird, which I hadn't— which I've just started to read again. So hopefully people have read it. It's a classic. You may have done it in school or you might not, but I remember when my kids were at high school, one of them had it as a book and I reread it.

Yeah.

And reread it. I like it for a whole range of reasons. I think from my perspective, There's obviously legal issues that I'm really interested in, but it's also about fairness, about how you can make a community better in a time of crisis, which for some of the families in that, it was. So yeah, I think, and it's beautifully crafted. Anything well written, I really like.

That's really interesting. I think you're the 4th guest who's on our podcast. Is that right? Recommended that book. That's fantastic.

Give it a read.

You haven't said you have to have it. Oh, you have to have it. When I'm finished with it, David, I'll bring it in.

Okay, sounds good.

Is it your great holiday book or a plain book?

Is it a novel or is it a—

It's a novel.

So, got it.

So you'll get lost in it pretty quick.

Good.

Yeah, fantastic.

I always struggle to read novels, but I can read anything personal development. So this will be a growth area for me, but I'll give it a read since it's 4th time coming on.

So I should always have a mix. I've got a book, probably like many people, I've got this big stack of books on the bedside table ranging from, you know, from— I'm still trying to read Obama's biography. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. It's, you know, got as many words as the New and Old Testament. I think it's huge. But huge. So lots of biographies and lots of just cheap lose-yourself detective spy novels.

Yeah.

And then some really, some real classics.

Well, we know you've got a passion for reading detective books, but do you have any other sort of interests or passions you've either— we wouldn't guess, or you've recently discovered?

Probably. I'm probably a lot like lots of other people, but I have a real interest in music. So I got caught by one of the Channel 9 journalists down at the Port Fairy Folk Festival on the last weekend when it was 40 degrees. My wife and I and another friend, we were camped in a tent in the, you know, out on a folk festival. So that's a bit— people probably wouldn't pick that for Stephen. Lots of people who didn't know me probably for different things. But I really enjoyed all sorts of different music. And particularly when I travel, you know, we travelled through the south of the US and found Cajun music and really liked the band and bought their CD after the show. And we bought a Scottish folk band's— CD at the— so interesting music. Um, still got a car with a CD player in it.

Um, yeah, I was picking that up on a road trip.

You put a CD in, away you go. So, um, and still, you know, CDs are coming back, which is great. So I'm cool again. So that's, um, a lot of interest in eclectic sort of music. Um, and then still, still love sport. Um, for, for business, you know, people, a lot of people know, played a lot of different blank different games, but I'm a rugby union tragic. So I managed to continue to play until I was about 58, so I was still running around.

Bravo.

A freak of nature, I mean, not getting injured too much before then, but it's finally got the better of me at that age. So still love it, still do a bit of work with the rugby club doing some lunches and things for them and MC and help out wherever I can. So real interest in all sorts of But in Melbourne, for Victorians, rugby union is— is that the Storm? No, it's not. That's the other one. Yes.

Are you looking forward to the Lions tour next year?

I've managed to get some tickets yesterday.

Oh, amazing.

So I'm looking forward to that. So we had to organise— won't be overseas next year in July when it's on. Had to have a long conversation with my wife about, yeah, the winter holiday might be at a different time.

Yes.

So those sort of different interests, I think, which keeps you alive and active, I think.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Stephen, if you could give your younger self some advice, what would it be?

I've seen this, people ask this, what would you tell your 12-year-old self? And what would you tell your— probably strap in and it's going to be a wild ride. enjoy it, you know.

Yeah.

I couldn't imagine, I can't imagine, couldn't have imagined as a 10 or 12-year-old that I'd be sitting in this room and talking to you or have done the things that I've done. And even as I think about what I've done, you know, we talk about, you know, as an aside, you know, I did a lot, we talked about, I did a lot of law reform stuff with the Commonwealth on terrorism. As a reward for that, which is, you know, it's a quirky world, The Chief Commissioner of the day in Victoria sent me to a law reform conference in Scotland, so I went there and then arranged to visit the Metropolitan Police for a study tour, which happened to be in 2005.

Right.

So I was at a train station in the Underground on the morning of the bombings in London in 2005, catching a train 3 stops to a Chief Superintendent's Conference of the Met Police. How does— you know, you've asked a few questions about how did you get here. You know, God knows why I was there, God knows how it happened, but then, you know, it was another experience of being in London when it happened, being around senior police trying to deal with crisis. And not just London Police, you know, there was— I managed to have a lunch several days later with, I think it was the liaison officer from the Spanish Police, there was the New Zealand Police, there was the Australian Police, myself, City of London, I think Chief Superintendent from City of London about 3 days later.

Wow.

Went out for a lunch and just, wow, you know, like, what was all that about and what's happening?

Yeah.

So what would you tell my younger self is don't beat yourself up when things don't go well and strap in and enjoy the ride and you never know what you're going to see.

Brilliant, thank you. And Stephen, is there anything else you'd like to cover that we possibly haven't touched on today or Any, uh, final words you want to leave our listeners with?

Yeah, I probably— I hope I haven't frightened people with this thing about practice and, and get out there and do it. But, um, from a crisis management point of view, it's, it, it is, uh, it's probably one of the biggest leadership challenges CEOs and others will have. Yeah. And, and it's really critical that, that you understand it, you take part of it, you prepare And as I've said, be visible, stand up. You're not the only one that's ever suffered through this. There's lots of others. So make sure that if you're in a position where you've got that sort of responsibility, that you've thought about it, you reach out, you have many conversations with people who have experienced it, and have some critical friends that you know that you can call on if something happens. In case of emergency, break glass.

Yes.

Did you have a few of them?

Who do I go to?

Tough times. Did you have a few people you could call on? that may have had a few, um, a few more experiences down the line. You had a—

Yeah, all the time. I've for 20 years been working with executive coaches myself.

Yeah.

And one of them early on talked about the concept of the, you know, the kitchen cabinet, which is, you know, the, like the government cabinet. Is it— who's your— who are your top 5 or 6 advisors? You don't always get, you know, you don't get them together and buy them lunch as a group, but who are your go-to people? Whether your go-to person for industrial relations, your go-to person Alright, so, and they're the people you have an honest conversation with the door closed.

Yeah.

That as a senior person, as a CEO, you can't have those conversations with your board chair or your board members, you can't have them with your executive suite, you can, but you need to go and have a talk to somebody. So, and the subject we're talking about today, crisis management, how do you deal when things go worst? Well, in your group of people that you call on, Have some people who'll be honest with you and tell it, tell it as it is, but also support you.

Yeah.

Support you through it, because it'll be a wild ride, as we've seen from the experience from hopefully today's chat, but also as we've read in the financial papers and the mainstream media about the challenges other CEOs have had to work through in Australia in the last, even the last 6 months, isn't it? Just keeps coming up.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Are you happy to move on to the next part of the—

Yeah, yeah, I thought that was it. I thought that was the end.

Yeah, no, this is it. It's sort of naturally drawn to a close. Do you want to start firing off some rapid fire, Alex?

I can do that.

I thought we did that. I thought that was what's your favourite book. You've got even more now.

These get more rapid now.

These are either/or questions.

Okay.

That was moderate. That was just a little bit of Overhead bullets. This is rapid fire.

All right.

I'll get my timer going. All right, 3, 2, go.

Right. Triple zero or 911?

Triple zero.

Risk taker or risk averse?

Risk taker.

Data-driven decisions or intuition-led choices?

Intuition based on years of experience.

Long-term planning or agile adaptation?

Long—

I'm a long— I'm a long plane flyer. Yeah.

Books or movies?

Books.

Summer or winter?

Winter because of my skin color.

Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

Netflix or YouTube?

YouTube now.

Electric or petrol?

Hybrid.

PC or Mac?

PC.

TV or book?

Book.

Pay the ransom, yes or no?

Pay the ransom and get it back.

There we go. Excellent.

That's a minute.

Thank you.

Well, thank you, Stephen. Yeah, thanks for your time today. I know it's hard to condense— I think you said, was it 45 years in the workforce into sort of, you know, 45 minutes? But really appreciate, um, you know, doing that for the benefit of the listeners. I couldn't think of anyone better to talk about, you know, crisis management because unfortunately or fortunately you've been entrusted in these positions which couldn't get more high profile or, um, you know, more, more, more more at stake. So it was the strategical, the tactical, the operational, looking at those 3 lenses. And I think, you know, your experiences in talking through those lenses of the model has been really, really insightful. So thank you, Stephen, appreciate your time today.

Thank you. Hope it's been of some use to you and people that may listen.

Thanks, Stephen. Yeah, I think a lot stood out for me in that, so appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah.

Hey, this is Alex. If you enjoyed the content so far and you want us to do more, if If you want to hear more, click the subscribe button. It allows us to bring on more guests in the future. Thanks.

Thanks.