Associate ProfessorBradley Hastings

When I ask a room of executives how their last transformation project went, the answers are mixed. Why some projects deliver and others don't is the question I've spent 30 years on: from running them, to researching them, and now teaching the people who lead them.

I started with delivery. As Business Development Director at Capita Plc, I led the shaping and winning of transformation partnerships with government. The largest was a £1.7 billion education support partnership across 400 schools in Staffordshire, which created 500 jobs and produced the fastest improvement in educational outcomes in England at the time. As a Partner at Stroud International, I led organisational improvement projects for blue-chip manufacturers. One German car component business went from 2% to 25% profit on €300 million of revenue, in an environment where everyone said improvement was impossible because they were already world class. Another lifted productivity by 20%, which removed the need for a €35 million investment. Earlier, at Hagen & Co, I led consulting teams into problems that had been written off as unsolvable: 25% more productivity at Ford's engine plant, 20% lower labour unit cost at the Email refrigerator factory, and 30% more output across Uncle Tobys' Australian manufacturing sites.

After 20 years of more international flights than I'd like, I took a career break to go around the world a different way – on the Clipper yacht race. I didn't know how to sail but figured that twenty crew facing mother nature was a fair place to observe how leadership emerges under pressure. It was crossing the North Pacific, after our fourth storm system, that I made the decision to take my question back to academia – and shift my focus from doing, to decoding and teaching.

My research asks what carries an organisation from intent to result – the mindsets and processes behind successful change projects – and it is published in Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Australian Journal of Management, and Journal of Change Management.

My research purpose is to change practice, rather than furnish the shelves of the library. With the Queensland Public Sector Commission, I built an evidence-based leadership framework now shaping how 320,000 public servants are selected, assessed and developed. With NSW Health, my work moved state policy guidance on transformation towards dialogic practice, an approach associated with a higher probability of success. With TeamInvest Private, I put the collapse of residential home builders on the public agenda and developed a funding model that lowers the risk carried by homeowners and industry.

Nothing brings research to practice more acutely than executive education. Today, I design and deliver transformative programs at the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership, including the Executive Leadership in Major Projects program and the Catalyst Program. My participants lead major projects across the Australian public, private and not-for-profit sectors and internationally, and we help them shift the dial on their leadership, as well as the project ecosystems they work within.

I still sail. On weekends, I'm usually found on a boat somewhere on Sydney Harbour.