Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Audette Exel

Intro: Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how influential and authentic people lead through change – the good, the bad and everything in between, because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: Hi I’m Jenelle McMaster and welcome to Season 2 of ‘The Change Happens’ podcast where we continue to have conversations with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. 

Now if you haven’t listened to the podcast before, I do encourage you to go back and have a listen to Season 1. We’ve had some cracker guests and certainly today’s guest will be another case in point. Today, I’ve asked the Pioneer of the Business For Purpose Model or Debt Excel to join me to explain how this concept works and her incredible journey to getting there. A few minutes into a conversation with Audette and you can’t help but be hit by two things. She truly is a citizen of the globe and she’s a formidable person of many talents, not afraid to experience and drive change.

Audette grew up in New Zealand. Studied and worked in Law before moving to Hong Kong. Running a Bermuda Bank and sharing the Island’s stock exchange. She even signed the Bermudian $5 note while working on the Board of the Financial Regulator. 

In 1998 she shifted gears, founding her own philanthropic business the Adara Group. It’s a fascinating model which consists of an investment banking advisory business as well as a not-for-profit international development business. Now what’s fascinating about this is that all of the profits generated from the investment banking side are used to fund the philanthropic development work that Adara does in Uganda and Nepal. The aim is to bridge the gap between for profit and for purpose modelled organisations. Bearing all that in mind, it makes absolute sense that Audette calls herself a ‘leftie’ who loves a deal. 

Now Audette has had an unbelievably long and impressive list of awards and accolades and if I was to try and run through them, I’d guarantee you, you’ll be here all day and I’m actually keen to speak to her. So I’m going to say amongst the many, many titles she has, Audette was awarded an Order of Australia in 2013 for her service to humanity and leading philanthropist by Philanthropy Australia in 2016. 

The former ‘pink haired’/’sky diving’ self-described wild child feminist/activist who fights for human rights every single day is an absolute force and I’m totally delighted to have her join me for this discussion today. 

Audette, welcome. 

Audette: Thank you Jenelle. I’m really delighted to be here with you. Crikey that’s quite an introduction!

Jenelle: It is indeed! I loved writing it because there is just so much to try to summarise in there.

Audette: I’m delighted to be here with you. I love the fact that you’re opening this space and discussions about change and how we lead into this new world. I’m really delighted to be a part of it. Thanks for having me on.

Jenelle: Oh so much to get into but I’m going to start the conversation with an understanding of the impact of COVID on your world. It’s hard to ignore the circumstances that we find ourselves in, and have found ourselves in over the last year - across your companies, your teams and the populations you serve.

Jenelle: Now I know you were on a plane coming home from New York. You were planning Adara’s emergency response in March last year in 2020 and in one week you decided to arrange for your workforce, across multiple countries to go to work from home.

Take me through that time. What was going through your head? I can only imagine the stream of thoughts that were happening and how did you go about getting people safe? Accessing technology? And working productively for their respective communities? Some of which would have been incredibly challenging to work through.

Audette: Yeah I mean what a time in our world that was and, still is of course and I think millions of people our mind was going at a thousand million miles an hour trying to figure all that out. I’d been in New York late February/early March, New York and Boston and it was very apparent over there that the world was going to need to close down and that COVID was going to become incredibly serious. So that long flight back from New York to Sydney I had a lot of time, whatever it takes 28 hours. For that entire flight I was really thinking the things you’re talking about. How can I keep everyone safe? How can we do the work and serve? What tools are we going to have in our toolkit to provide service cause as you know we’re health and education service deliverers in remote communities. How are we going to manage?

I had sort of mapped a plan so by the time I landed and went into the office, our poor head of IT, this wonderful, very senior guy David. I said to him “David, we’re going to go to work from home all over the world within one week”. I think he’ll forever remember that conversation. Once I’d climbed the mountain of figuring out what we needed to do, the rest was just implementation and isn’t that the case so often in life. Once you make the decision it’s all about effective implementation. That was about occupational health and safety. About getting people set up from home and in the countries we work in that’s not necessarily so easy. It was also about the global leadership team coming to grips with the fact we had to throw out the plan that we’d written for the year and start all over again – with this key question “What tools do we have in our toolkit now?”

It was a very, very intense time. I think the whole global team is very proud of how we managed it, but weirdly having 28 hours to sit on a plane on my own quietly and map my way through as the Leader of the Organisation was actually a bit of a gift looking back.

Jenelle: Yeah I can imagine it. Look I think your point is a good one the mental shift around “What is it that we’re going to do?” as opposed to the execution side of things. Both are really critical in that equation but this one in particular would have been so challenging. It’s one thing to make such a big call. As you said the world is going to close which is a really interesting sentence to wrap your head around, right? I can only imagine what David’s reactions or his face would have looked like when you landed and said that, but then implementing it. When I think about Uganda and Nepal where you do so much work, the infrastructure isn’t there. The backbone of the economy is not there, incredible remote locations. The implementation side of that is no small thing. Where do you start with that?

Audette: Yeah its massive isn’t it. There was a couple of advantages we had. The first is we’re a global organisation. We’ve learnt over the years how to work virtually with each other even though we’re also frontline service deliverers. We have teams of people who know about whether it’s Zoom, or Skype and SMS and WhatsApp and who are used to dealing with their colleagues. We run like one team even though we’re all around the world. We’ve also learnt our way into - How do you work in low resource settings? How do you make sure you’ve got enough battery backup? How do you make sure that you’ve got the key equipment you need? So we had some advantage in that. 

Audette: I think to it was a testament to the quality of the Global Leadership Team in particular and the teams that flow underneath them that the seriousness of the situation was such that, it was a bit of a call to arms in a way. It wasn’t just a directive from leadership it was built from the ground up. We need to re-plan everything right now. Every single member of the organisation is involved in this process and we brought it up very fast. We have a brilliant Global Leadership Team. There were a few things that were really apparent to us – the simple and obvious stuff. We need to get PPE on the ground immediately. Luckily we do have supply chains but the speed that things were closing and the lack of access to critical lifesaving equipment. A lot of it was about prioritising. When things are really terrible sometimes our brains want to not believe. Avoidance is a great emotional coping strategy.

Jenelle: Fantastic strategy!

Audette: But not in a situation like this. Being able to work through – this really is happening. We have to analyse every single risk. What tools do we have in our toolkit? What are our assets? We’re going into lockdown all over the world. In March when Nepal locked down everywhere was locking down and here we are we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of development specialists, healthcare providers, education specialists, how can we serve people when we’re in that situation? The conversations that came out of that were riveting. For instance, we were one of the first in Nepal to get radio education on the air because our teams realised we’re in 16 schools – they’re all going to close but people are still going to be on the radio. We led the radio education work formal and informal. We were ahead of the government to get that out there and we’re very proud of that because once we sat and thought we can still do that even though we’re sitting in our own homes. We’ve got teachers, they’re in their own homes – they can get on the radio.

Health education work that we do in Uganda. We know that we can do a lot of work by SMS and messaging. It was a riveting period actually in terms of figuring out ‘Gee we can deliver service – even when we’re locked in our homes’, ‘even when the world is closing’ and for the service that has to be delivered in person we can deliver it as safely as we possibly can, if we equip our teams properly. Yeah and some of the things we’re learnt we will carry forward COVID or no COVID.

Jenelle: I was just going to say that. No doubt it’s surfaced some innovations and some learnings and some evolution of work that you’ve been doing that you would take forward. 

Audette: No question. We will be better service deliverers going forward. Our teams are blown away that the radio education – let me give you a great example of this. All of a sudden we realised, all these people were tuning into radio education. Illiterate women who never had the chance to go to school are suddenly tuning into radio education. How cool is that!

Jenelle: Very cool. I feel like it’s a rhetorical question but I need to get involved. 

Audette: So isn’t it out of adversity you learn, right, you rise. So there is a whole lot of stuff that we’ve done that we’ll take forward into the future and as I say there is a sort of sense of pride in the organisation. “Gee look at that, ok we’ve made mistakes, we always make mistakes and we always face our mistakes, but there is some cool stuff that we did that was going to take us forward”.

Jenelle: I love that and speaking of the word ‘learn’, what you’ve learned in this time. What did you learn about yourself in leading through these turbulent times. Also what did you learn about your team as leaders?
 
Audette: Yeah let me take that in reverse order. I learnt that my team around the world are even more outstanding than I ever dreamt. Oh my goodness the heroes that I get a chance to stand beside. Not only the depth of thinking and compassion, the effort, in the face of terrible fear, these extraordinary leaders throughout our work, they just stepped up. I can’t even begin to tell you how breath taking some of it was and how honoured I am to work with them. I never thought I underestimated anybody in our team but holy cow when the chips are down you know the quality of leadership. So their ability to turn on the dial. Their ability to be courageous. One thing for us sitting here in Australia (actually our US team have really been in the teeth of it too unfortunately as you know with COVID), but to be sitting here and mandating and coming up with great ideas, it’s another thing to be sitting in Uganda with people with COVID are coming into your project sites and dying. Or to be in Nepal when you’ve got kids in our most remote education sites with COVID and we don’t have any tertiary medical facilities within a day’s walk, it’s a whole other level of courage and leadership. So what did I learn? I learned that if I never understood, I thought I knew how brilliant they were now I really know. 

What did I learn about myself? I learned that it’s really hard to lead from behind the line. 

Jenelle: What do you mean by that? 

Audette: Well I’m a leader who, I’m somebody… When the Nepal earthquake happened in 2015 the first thing I thought after ‘Oh my God is everybody alive?’ ‘Is everybody safe’, was when is the first aeroplane there? I’ve always wanted to lead beside and in front. We’re going over that hell, and I’m going first type leader. That’s not necessarily the right way to lead at all times, but that’s me. So suddenly I had to learn ‘Ok you’ve got to not only lead, you have to hold everybody from behind a screen’ and your job is to keep everybody safe and listen to every voice but you can’t do it beside them physically. You’ve got to do it from behind a screen and gee that was a challenge. 

So yes I hope I’m a better leader now, but it was a big learning for me. There was plenty of times I got off my Zoom calls and I put my head on the desk and cried. Yeah I mean it was a big learning.

Jenelle: I just want to stay on that for a moment cause leading from behind it’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? What sorts competencies or traits or attributes did you have to dig deeper on, or call upon in leading from behind that you might not have had to if you were out there at the front?

Audette: Yes it’s a holding right. They really do think that’s the right way to think about it. Leading from behind is a holding. You have to listen more. I think I listened more. I was at some points very directive but I think in general you have to listen more and I had to listen more. There’s a thoughtfulness. There’s a mothering. There’s a caring and compassion when you hold a team that are facing crisis. I had to be more present. I think we’ve all become a bit more present right because we can’t be thinking next week I’m going to New York, the week after that I’m in Nepal. 

Jenelle: You have to stay in this moment, right now. 

Audette: You have to be right there. 

Jenelle: Yeah ok that’s really interesting.

Audette: And you have to be completely available. Emotionally available, available by way of time, available by way of thinking. So yes it’s a different kind of leadership. I hope it’s added another tool in my toolkit. Hope I’m a better leader. Leadership is such a privilege right.

Jenelle: Absolutely.

Audette: For the whole world it was an enormous year. 

Jenelle: I imagine in your world when I see photos of you in Uganda and Nepal as I’ve seen many of them. Touch is a big part, you’re wrapping your arms around communities.

Audette: Yes. 

Jenelle: There is a whole physicality behind taking resources and seeing it land and seeing it in practice and not being able to do that must have been an incredibly difficult time and continue to be.

Audette: Yeah it’s funny isn’t it? There is a [15.24] grief when you can’t be and everybody is experiencing this in different ways. Physically wrapping your arms around the people that you love or, you care for or, your responsible for. In fact, I was just talking last night to some of our teams and saying “Just wait for the party when we’re all together in Uganda”, “Just wait for the hugging we’re going to be doing when we get back together”. Nepal is going to be the same. It’s not just me. It’s not just Adara. Not just one country. This is something our whole world is going through and we’re all facing this in different ways. Yes it will be a good day when we are together and there is going to be a lot of celebrating, laughter and hugging when we can finally do that again. 

Jenelle: People the world over are waiting for borders to come down for that very thing. 

Audette: Yes.

Jenelle: Now COVID has clearly done a lot to bring the topic of economic and health security right to the forefront of every conversation. Whether it’s in our households, across the dinner table, or it’s at the bus stops or, where ever you are or, across organisations, communities, whole societies. I’m just wondering whether the fact that it’s at the forefront of everyone’s conversation, has that helped elevate the cause of Adara? Or has it kind of caused care fatigue? We’ve got so much stuff to have to care about – local employment, the regeneration of our economies, the bushfires, Black Lives Matter. Is this helpful or is it a hinderance that there is another thing?

Audette: It’s such a hot topic for me and something I’m feeling really a lot of anguish and passion about. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – it tell us when you feel unsafe or insecure in your own home it’s impossible for you to think about other people’s needs. I think there has been a layer of that. 

There’s not been a whole lot of information in the public domain about what’s actually happening in the developing world. I think it’s a bit of a paradox because we can see now. It couldn’t be more clearer that a stranger’s health risk is everybody’s health risk. From one person where ever this began with bats or whatever it was in Wuhan here we are with this global crisis. It shows us public health is a global issue. We know that WHO tells us that having the highest standard of health is a fundamental right, yet we also now see it. It’s completely unveiled how desperate our access to quality healthcare is. 50% of the world’s rural population, 20% lack access to institutional healthcare. We see it now. 

But is there fatigue? Are people able to look outside and care for others? Yeah there is fatigue. People aren’t looking outside as much as I wish they were and I think it’s almost so overwhelming to people that in some ways people almost can’t take it in or don’t want to know. But unfortunately we’ve got to figure out how to take it in and know. We’ve got to care for the amazing, our neighbours and faraway places. Not only because that’s what compassion and values tell us, but also because we’re all connected. If they’re not well, we’re not well. 

Audette: So from a purely pragmatic point of view we have to get our hands around the global health situation and the economic situation globally but I’m worried that this conversation is not in the public domain in the way that it should be. We see this with vaccine equity. The lack of access to vaccine in some of the places it’s needed the most and the stock piling of vaccines by wealthy countries. It’s a disgrace. Pushing up vaccine prices so that they’re not affordable because of the stock piling. These are issues that as a world. We have this moment where we can show greatness as a world through this crisis or, this moment could take us the other way – into smallness, into closure, into not caring. I think there are so many people who are going to make sure and fight to make sure that we do go to greatness. I think the battle is going to wage. I’m proud that Adara is going to stand on the side of trying to do our best for our neighbours in remote countries every single day. I think it’s critical to what our world becomes.

Jenelle: It’s very grateful for organisations like Adara and for people like you to keep this, to hold us all to account and show that we can continue to expand our compassion beyond our own views. I’m going to come back to that but I’d like to just turn perhaps the conversation to a bit about you. 

You grew up in New Zealand with your family. You started to travel at an early age and see the world from quite early on in your life. What impacts did that start have on where you are today?

Audette: Huge I think. My Dad was this wonderful journalist so for a period of our early lives we were in Singapore during the Vietnam War times. I remember very clearly being very shocked when I went back to New Zealand to find myself in a country where everybody looked like me. 

Jenelle: Oh yes cause you were the minority.

Audette: I was the little blonde haired, blue eyed kid in Asia in the 60’s. How wonderful! So my view on our world was deeply multi-cultural. Actually also in my early life I thought we were in a minority not in a bad way but I just thought that’s the way that it was. We were in Asia. I think that’s given me and set the scene for a sense of I’m part of a whole amazing global world and not everybody is like me and how wonderful that is. I’ve never understood when people talk about tolerating diversity rather than celebrating it.

Jenelle: I’m with you.

Audette: So yeah I think it’s a huge set. Growing up with different language groups around you. People who look different to you. People who think differently to you. What greater gift could you be given as a child then that?

Jenelle: Indeed. You speak about being a social activist during your time at Victoria Uni in New Zealand, having a pink streak in your hair and a placard in your hand. Yet you made the decision to step outside of your comfort zone into a top law firm and years later you described that as a pivotal moment in your career. What made you decide to make that change? And why did you see it as a pivotal time?

Audette: Yeah it was really…. I find it hilarious that people think I’m a business person who wants to give back. A business woman [22.11]. People who really know me know that’s not the truth. They know I’m an activist who decided business is going to be the way that I’m going to affect social change. I’ve had a few periods of my life. I don’t know if you’ve had these, where I’ve had these kind of blinding moments of realisation and there was a blinding moment of realisation as I was finishing my law degree when everybody I knew and me expected thought ‘Ok now I’m going to go off and do Human Rights Law and I’ll always be an activist’. 

Audette: When I realised there is a whole part of the world I don’t know about, I don’t understand power and money and I need to learn it. I just had this moment of realising ‘Oh my God I need to get out of my tribe’. ‘I need to go learn power’. ‘How can I create shift if I don’t know power?’ I felt like I was the enemy going into, the spy in the enemy camp going into the business world and it was such a great experience to step outside of my tribe. It has formed a life, where my life is about engagement and it is. The tagline of Adara as you know is ‘Bridging Worlds’. I am still, and always will be an activist at heart. I believe there are millions of different ways you can create social change, this just happens to be the place that I picked for my little search in the tapestry of change.

I’m really glad I did that because it’s made for an incredibly interesting life.

Jenelle: A couple of questions in there. First of all when you say the tagline for Adara is ‘Bridging Worlds’, tell me about the worlds that you are bridging. 

Audette: Oh so many worlds. We’re bridging the worlds of the most advantaged with the most disadvantaged. We are literally Wall Street to the poorest streets in the world. The places where there are no streets. That’s the business development world. Then on the ground of course we’re bridging all sorts of worlds. We’re bridging worlds of high quality facility based healthcare with people who are living in extreme poverty. We’re bridging cross-culture worlds – look at us we’re the United Nations. 

Jenelle: Yep.

Audette: We’re a secular organisation. We’re working with people of faith. People of all different kinds of faith. People of no faith. People of different philosophies. We’re a tiny little example of how much fun it is and how joyous it is when you truly unite across divide. We’re anthropologists working with investment bankers. We’re accountants and lawyers working with educational specialists. We are like the weirdest cross-cultural, cross-sectoral, cross-skilled, cross-ethnicity, cross everything! 

Jenelle: It’s amazing. How rich.

Audette: We really bridge worlds but I guess the most obvious and the biggest bridge is from within the business. We are advising Australia’s largest listed companies and we have got some of Australia’s most highly regarded, most senior investment bankers and corporate advisors working with us to do that. People and the work that we do at those very high levels on sometimes deals that are billions of dollars is involved in those deals, the fees that come from that are going to places where people only eat twice a day and don’t have access to the internet. So it’s a huge bridge. Oh boy it’s a beautiful bridge when you see it working.

Jenelle: Absolutely. You had the sentence with the phrase that you wanted to understand power and money and how that moves, how that works. I know after you were in law you ended up getting into capitalism, finance. You ended up running a publicly traded bank in Bermuda. I think you were not shy of 30 years of age, no less at that time. One of the youngest women to not only lead but also revive a failing bank into a profitable entity. What did you learn? First of all sort of questions about how you did that, but what did you learn about money and power through that period of time?
Audette I learnt to put aside my prejudice. I learnt to stop stereotyping. I also learnt that you can make amazing change when you move power, so a great example of that have a look at what Larry Fink has done with BlackRock.

Jenelle: Incredible.

Audette: Have a look at that amazing woman in Australia Bronwyn King with the anti-tobacco work that she does, wow.

Jenelle: Alumni of the podcast. I interviewed Bronwyn last year.

Audette: Oh is she? Oh love her. She figured it out. How do I get people to stop smoking. I move money out of investing in tobacco. I learnt that there are lots of ways to make change but a very powerful one is to move money in a different direction. In the coming up to 23 years since I started Adara, gee that’s become evident and how wonderful to watch it. It used to be people thought I was crazy. These ideas were crazy. Now it’s absolutely mainstream. ESG is no longer, environmental, social, governance overlays on investment portfolios or, what companies do, climate change as a mainstream issue, this is no longer something the crazy left are talking about. This is mainstream discussion in the biggest companies and investor groups in the world and how fantastic is that in terms of being able to make change.

Jenelle: Well it does feel like something of a tipping point and I think folks like Bronwyn, Larry Fink have been instrumental and yourself included. But when you began Adara as you say people were really, well as we know, people were really doubting this concept. People certainly doubting you from the business community. I think earlier in your career when you were travelling on a bike for a couple of years, you were approached by a senior partner in the firm you working in and said “No one is ever going to take you seriously in business again”.

Audette: Yes.

Jenelle: But you had the confidence to persist. Whilst it’s still difficult. I mean you don’t have to convince people so much of that now. You had the confidence to persist, listen to your own voice despite the naysayers. Where does that confidence come from? How did you choose to defy that and keep going and then eventually come up with a model like what you’ve come up with at Adara?

Audette: I should tell you the backstory on the guy who told me “I’d never be taken seriously again”. When I ended up running the bank and there was a little article about me in the Financial Times, so I cut it out and posted it to him!

Jenelle: I’m so glad you said that cause I always think you’d probably be above that. I would absolutely do that too!

Audette: No, not a saint. Definitely not a saint. Where did it come from? A weird mixture of things I think. First of all is total hubris. Weird mixture of arrogance and stupidity. I think every entrepreneur, especially young entrepreneurs you kind of need that. I think also I was raised by extraordinary people, both my Mum and my Dad are incredible people. We lost Dad 20 odd years ago but I’ve often thought he must have sat by my bed at night and whispered in my ear “You can do anything”. He was one of those men who just wanted to unleash his children. So the two of them together, the sort of permission to fail that they gave us. We will love you no matter what, just get out there and have a go. They threw open the doors of the cages for us and loved us as we leapt forward. Gosh that’s such a thing to give a child.

Jenelle: What a gift.

Audette: Huge gifts. I think it was a whole mixture of things. There is also sort of this slight tenacity that I’ve got as a character trait, but anyway it all came together. I’m so glad it did.

Jenelle: What about the idea of an investment business funding the philanthropic side where did that come from?

Audette: It came from a whole journey of thinking. So remember I came from an activist view point. I went into the world of big money, big power through law into banking. Thought a lot about models. I’m very interested in models of change.

Audette: When I was running the bank, all you do when you run a bank – it’s complicated but what you do is you think all day about matching assets and liabilities and how much money you make in between that. 

When I began to look at the model of not-for-profits I realised ‘Oh my God it’s the worst asset/liability mismatch I’ve ever seen in my life’. Short term donor dollars/long term responsibilities to people on the ground. So I was very interested in thinking through models and I thought ‘Gee maybe there is a better mouse trap than that’. Maybe the model should be ‘A long term commitment of a business that’s devoted to making money for a not-for-profit’, so not-for-profit leaders don’t spend every day worrying about where the next donor is coming from. They can get on with the incredible complexity of service delivery. 

So when I launched the business and the NGO at the same time and said “Hey we’re going to run a business and it’s going to make money and pay for this international development organisation.” “I’m going to hire bankers to make money and they’re going to hand it over to the development specialists”. I thought that was kind of obvious but everybody thought I was a money launderer. 

I came out of this thinking about models. Years and years of thinking about systems, models, change. How you gage. What does the not-for-profit sector need? What could I take from my business learning to bring into that environment? And how wonderful here we are 23 years later. My gosh there has been a lot of mistakes along the way and a lot of learning. A lot of refining and evolving. Like any good entrepreneur I think I’m never satisfied with what we’re doing.

Jenelle: You said “My God there has been some mistakes along the way and learnings.” What would be some of those? I mean 23 years on, unbelievable success. But what might be a couple of standout mistakes or things that have formed a different way forward for you that you will hold dear as those lessons?

Audette: Yeah. Rushing. In the business community one of our skills if you’re at the top of your game is you’ve got to be able to make the big judgement calls quickly on the basis of available data. When you are dealing with human social service delivery, you have to think and you have to think again. You have to listen to a lot of different voices, particularly when you’re dealing with complex cultural, religious, gender and other issues that come in failed states that are living in poverty.

So biggest mistakes I made in the early days – I rushed. Trying to solve things that I didn’t fully understand. I’ve talked before about terrifying mistakes that I made and that I own – rushing incubators into hospital settings without consistent power supplies and when the power went down babies suffocating in the incubators. 

Jenelle: Oh..

Audette: Really serious stuff. Mistakes that I still grieve. So rushing is a huge one. The idiotic belief that business skills translate into the not-for-profit sector, ‘Boy that’s a big one’. Having to learn there is a whole new way of thinking about this and there are people who are absolutely expert, I need to listen to. Thank God the behavioural scientists, anthropologists and development experts coming in relatively early in the piece. When you sit on the knife edge of profit and purpose as we do, you have to be really, really clear which of those trumps, profit or purpose. There are two times when you can get yourself into real trouble there. When there is too much money or, when there is not enough money.
 
Audette: You need to make sure that the people who come with you on the journey understand the purpose will always triumph over the profit.

So alignment, culture and teams and people who are with you. Oh my goodness I’ve learnt a lot about that. Now I look at our shining teams all over the world and think ‘Yeah we finally got all that right’. The right people are with us on this journey. The right people are attracted to us on this journey. 

There is an integrity at the heart of it and a culture that shines and I’m just so proud of that. 

I mean on and on I could go. Not being properly prepared. The horrible moment in the early days when the same week Ebola hits one of our projects in Uganda the same time as the Maoists take over another project in Nepal and I’ve got people from everywhere ringing saying “What do we do?” And I’m realising ‘Holy cow I don’t have a disaster recovery plan’. ‘I don’t have emergency evac’. ‘I don’t know what to do’. ‘We don’t have the right insurance’.

Jenelle: Oh wow.

Audette: Risk mitigations. Structure. Strategy. Planning. You name it. We’ve fallen down those holes. There is a whole lot of learning there and I love that one of the things that we do at Adara freely is talk about mistakes. Try to help others. Try to take years off other people’s learning times. For us that’s scale. Share your knowledge, including all the honest mistakes that you’ve made. But yeah there has been a lot of them.

Jenelle: How did you go about choosing, or why did you choose Uganda and Nepal as the two countries that you would focus on?

Audette: Our work is much wider than Uganda and Nepal now. We run across.. I mean they’re the two countries where we have Centres of Excellence and we deliver service.

Jenelle: I see.

Audette: We run service delivery and we run knowledge sharing. Our knowledge sharing, for instance, our work with pre-term/low birth weight babies which all exhibits and Centres of Excellence in Uganda but that work we’re on a global stage with that work.

But in terms of Uganda and Nepal – why did we end up there in terms of delivering service? First of all I wanted to work in places of lowest quality indicators. There is a scary amount of them. I wanted to work in places that are land locked. It was sort of a ‘go big or go home’ strategy. Find the toughest places, go there. I always had a real bug, a bee in my bonnet about ‘go remote’. No one serves remote. Governments don’t serve remote, NGOs don’t serve remote. It’s wrong. It’s a human rights affairs.

Jenelle: So you went for the toughest? The toughest conditions.

Audette: I wanted to go tough. I had two personal connections. I trekked in Nepal like all good Westerners in the 80’s. Loved the country. Met all my screens. Thought people were astonishing. Knew that there was extraordinary levels of need and I had a very weird connection to Uganda. When I was running the bank I used to go across with all those famous people to Davos. It was quite a lurk of the job being a young woman running a bank. In a coffee shop in Davos I met the First Lady of Uganda and we formed a friendship. This was years before Adara. We wrote to each other in the old fashioned way before the internet and I said “One day I’m going to come and do something for you and your country”, “I’m going to come and help”, and she said “If you ever come to Uganda I will open every door for you, I will make sure you’re safe”.

Audette: So literally years later I drove up to Government House in Kampala and buzzed the buzzer, “Remember me.” I figured if you want to work in a country it helps to know the people who are in charge.

Jenelle: It really does.

Audette: So weird personal connection as well as this screen.

Jenelle: Oh and I think I told you weirdly personal connection. The two countries that have most profoundly impacted me in my life has been Uganda and Nepal having spent time working in both of those countries. It’s just bizarre. So there is something in the stars, it’s meant…

Audette: How magical. How beautiful those people are. How wonderful that doing that great work with all those amazing communities. It’s now touching the lives of people in so many different communities. So people come into Uganda, learn about the cue from us and take it into other countries. How wonderful is that?

Jenelle: It’s wonderful.

Audette: But yeah we love both countries.

Jenelle: Audette, I know we’ve talked about the change that you have been doing but if you were to articulate in a sentence the change that you are seeking to make happen in the world, what is that?

Audette: That’s a good question. Not seeking to make it happen. I’m seeking to be a part of making it happen because I recognise we’re only one stitch in a huge tapestry of change. The change I think we need to see in the world is around equity. We need to see social justice. We need every little girl in this world to wake up and have the same opportunity as every little boy. We need every child in this world to wake up and have the same opportunity no matter where they’re born. I believe profoundly that everyone has the right to essential service delivery no matter where they live. That’s the change that I want to see in the world. It’s not too much to ask for fairness right? If you want a beautiful read. If I was on a desert island and I had to take a book, I would take the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.

Jenelle: Ok.

Audette: That’s the change that we need to see in the world. We need the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to apply to all.

Jenelle: You’ve said “We’re only one stitch in the tapestry of change”, what strikes me is that, and even your examples of ‘rushing’, you seeing that you felt that you were rushing to solve some things. It seems that you’ve taken a step back, you’ve been doing things like working with business and bridging worlds. Tell me about your views on how you drive change at the system level?

Audette: That’s a really good question and something that interests me greatly. I’ve always been really interested in activity and action, not talking and policy. But as I’m getting older and now we’re a couple of decades in I’m realising ‘Ok it’s time to start thinking about systems change’ because that’s what will really turn the dial. Systems change is not only and it was not in my view unfortunately ‘politics’ or is rarely politics and policy – it can be.

Systems change is actually changing the discourse in the way that people view their roles and responsibilities in the world. I think systems change is happening around the way that business views its responsibilities in the world for instance.

Audette: I think systems change is happening around a universal understanding across all elements of our society and economy but climate change is a next essential threat. I think we need to get systems change happening around rights and marginalised people that everybody is entitled to the same set of rights.

How do I think about that? How do you begin to play into that, or be a piece of that? One way to do is to get into the world of policy. Another way to do it is to lead by example. I believe sometimes you can inspire people to systems change. So you could show people what’s truly possible. 

I had the great honour of interviewing Muhammad Yunus a few years ago. He said to me “The way to make systems change is to do one thing brilliantly and have people copy you” and I thought “yeah that’s right”. That is sort of what Adara is trying to do in a little way. We’re trying to do that. 

It’s also about being a voice right? I’m trying to figure out what our voice should be, and what my voice should be. Being a voice, sitting on the board of big companies, having the business credentials. Being a voice for change. At the moments and with people of influence and companies of influence, and systems of influence. I think there is a whole lot of different ways to achieve that but certainly from our perspective at Adara the expertise we’ve got, for instance, in new born health, or remote education, we’re now moving to a level where we can say “Ok can we start to be involved in systems change?” Through the knowledge sharing piece. Through the influence piece. Through the voice piece? And we are kind of finding our way through, but yeah I’m thinking about that much more. And I actually think we’re living in a world now where if you never saw it before, boy do you see it now. 

Do we need systems change? Yes. We cannot continue with the way that this planet is, and the way we’ve been operating the planet. We’ve got to make systems change.

Jenelle: So Audette no doubt you’ve got countless stories and moments that you have in the back of your mind but is there any particular moment or particular story that you think about? When you think about having made a change happen and Adara making a difference in communities. What’s one or two stories that you might be able to share with us?

Audette: ooh yeah I’d love to be able to tell you some good stories and it’s funny to me that this is a life that people sometimes think has involved sacrifice but of course when you do this kind of work and you’re connected to communities like this, you know that actually it’s the opposite of that. It’s a life full of joy.

I can give you one example of that. One thing we’re pretty well known for in our work in Nepal, our remote community development work – is working with kids who have been taken out of the child trafficking trade. We do a huge amount of work in child protection now and it involves thousands of kids, but there are 136 kids who are incredibly particularly dear to my heart and they’ve sort of started us on this journey. They’re a bunch of kids that we pulled out of basements now nearly 14 years go. The littlest ones were three and have been in our lives all that time. They’re part of the Adara family. They’re health educators. They’re engineers. They’re teachers. I mean they’ve gone on to do amazing things. Connected to their own community and their own families of origin. 

But I had a wonderful moment. There is one kid in particular who went off when he graduated school, he went to Dubai which was very scary for us because a lot of Nepali people go to the Emirates and are treated very badly.
 
Audette: Anyway off he went and like nervous parents we worried about him and we followed him on Facebook and fussed. He started off working in Dubai basically peeling vegetables and I think it was at ‘Thank God it Friday’s’. Then he ended up as sous chef and then out of the blue I got this email from him saying “Aunty Audette, I have got a job in Australia. I was picked from 200 applicants and I’m coming to work at a very expensive restaurant in Sydney.” Amazing. So I sent him a note saying “Get into my office the minute you arrive, I want to see you!” Anyway he’s gone on to become a really serious chef. He ended up out at Wolgan at the Emirates Hotel out there.

Jenelle: Oh yeah.

Audette: But when he first came, the first year he was here, it was Mr Wong’s he came to. He told me in a very embarrassed fashion he said “Aunty Audette I have to tell you, you probably won’t be able to afford to eat at the restaurant I’m working at”, which is so wonderful!

I had this wonderful moment. He volunteered for us as well as working full time. He came and worked a day for us in the Adara office. I had this one moment where I was running down the stairs and his name was [44.43] and he was running up the stairs into work for Adara. That was like “Hi, hi”, how are you, how are you?” And as he ran past me, as I ran down the stairs, and I thought ‘Oh my God it’s all worth it’.

Jenelle: Oh that’s quite a symbolic almost like a sliding doors moment as you pass each other that way when you think about him being pulled out of a situation when he was a child.

Audette: It was. Right and there he was having an amazing life. At the highest levels of his profession. There he is. You know the Jewish community has this amazing, beautiful saying which is ‘If you save a life, you save the world’. I believe that to be a profound truth. So there’s one life, right, that made it all worth it for me and there is so many, many more. I mean there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, but it was just that moment where it was crystal clear to me. ‘Oh it’s all worth it’.

Jenelle: There must be times and I’m sure there have been hundreds where thousands over the years, where it just feels like maybe you aren’t getting the kind of traction and change you want to. I wonder how you keep going? There must be rage about the inequality that you drives you, which inevitably would give way to disappointment when things aren’t getting done. How do you not let frustration, fatigue, defeat, anger, injustice, all of that. How do you not let that take over you? How do you keep going?

Audette: Yeah. First of all I am enraged. I am enraged about inequity. I’m angry every day on behalf of the poor but I have learnt that speaking of anger or rage it’s not helpful. People just shut down on you. Better to turn that to channel that into action.

Do I feel defeated? Cause I do. When I’m on project sites. Last year I cried a lot last year. However, what I also feel is ‘Oh thank goodness I’m doing this’. How would I look at myself in the mirror everyday if I wasn’t getting up every day and trying?’ It’s also about taking your wins, right? Celebrating with the victory. When I’m in Uganda I always go through this ‘Oh I’m so inadequate, it’s so useless’. I always go through that. But what I do in Uganda is I get up in the morning. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. I go to the NICU, known as ICU. And it’s beautiful. The dawn is coming up and there is all these tiny little babies in there who are a huge number of them are going to grow up and have beautiful lives who wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t do this work. At the moment the census is we’re taking nearly 60 a day in there at the moment. And I walk around in there and I go there before I go to sleep and I think ‘Ok it may not be enough but it’s good work’ and thank goodness I’m doing it.

Jenelle: Thank goodness you are.

Audette: So that’s how I do it but I’m the same as every other human being in the planet. I get filled with anguish and despair. Filled with doubt and insecurity and then I get up and do it again the next day.

Jenelle: Now I know that you were awarded the Order of Australia back in 2013, sometime ago. That would have been something of a highlight amongst those moments of rage. What impact did that have?

Audette: I was totally astonished by that because I’m not Australian. I’m a Kiwi. So it was an incredible honour to be honoured by Australia get an AO. I was nominated as it turned out by a wonderful man who lives next door to my Mum and Dad in a little town called Mollymook. His name is Ron. This wonderful man in Mollymook did all this work and I got the AO and unfortunately he died before it was awarded to me. But he knew that I got it and he was very proud of that fact that he’d got it. I quietly call it ‘Ron’s medal’. It was a gift to me. Yeah it’s a huge honour. It’s a badge of credibility. It’s like being in the Masons! That little button that they give you to wear. I think sometimes when you’re a woman, this happens to me less now that I’m older but you are generally underestimated. It’s kind of nice to have a little sign to people of ‘Ok this woman has been honoured by the country’.

Jenelle: You’re doing alright.

Audette: Yep it’s a very nice thing and I’m very grateful for it. I was appalled by some of the stuff that’s happened around the awards recently but I feel very honoured to have it.

Jenelle: Well done to Ron and well done to you. 

Audette: And I wear it with real pride, and good on Ron. 

Jenelle: Good on Ron!

The last three: three fast questions on change to finish the podcast

Jenelle: The first question is. What are you reading, watching or listening to right now? I have made a note of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a recommended read.

Audette: I don’t read that to relax at night!

Jenelle: Assuming you’re not reading it right now! What are you reading, watching, or listening to?

Audette: If I did want to read another incredibly important document by the way on my desert island, I’d be reading ‘The Statement from the Heart’. If any Australian hasn’t read that, they should. It’s the most beautiful moving document.

What am I reading right now? I’m an escapist. I love novels. I read a lot of trash as well as some good novels. I always read the Booker prize. I try the lot to read the long list as well as the short list. But right at the minute I’ve just finished a brilliant
Louis de Bernières book. I don’t know if you know his books? 

Jenelle: I don’t.

Audette: It’s called the Autumn of the Ace. Oh it’s wonderful. 

Jenelle: Ok.

Audette: I also just finished another wonderful booked called ‘The Shadow King’ which was shortlisted which I absolutely loved. I’m an escapist reader. I can also be found reading – I love a good spy story.

Jenelle: Very good.

Audette: Those are the kind of things that I read.

Jenelle: Excellent. Well I’m going to compile this at the end of the year for our audience of the recommended reads or watches from our guests. So that’s really helpful.

What is your superpower? I feel ridiculous asking this. You’ve just spent 45 minutes telling me all about your superpowers! But let’s go with something that maybe is even a useless party trick. Any other superpowers up your sleeve?

Audette: Oh bloody hell I don’t think I’ve got the useless party tricks. I think if I had a more serious superpower, cause that’s a very [50.57] title, right? I think people don’t understand about me. Some people don’t understand that if you try to tell me no, you will encourage me enormously. I’ve been like that since I was two I think. My mother would tell me I’ve been like that since I was zero! So I think a really useful superpower, put downs, disrespect and being under estimated has super charged my life.

Jenelle: It’s your fuel.

Audette: It’s my fuel. It’s always been one of my fuels. I don’t know if that’s a superpower or not.

Jenelle: Yes I think it is.

Audette: Just never bloody tell me no! That’s probably the superpower!

Jenelle: I love it! And if you were going to put a quote up on a billboard. It might be something that you’ve said. It might be something that stays with you that you’ve heard someone else say. What would that quote be?

Audette: I think at the moment and there are a lot of them obviously. But at the moment I would probably put up ‘We are all connected’. That to me is the message that we need to take out of what’s going on in our world right now.

Jenelle: We’re living and breathing it aren’t we? As you say a bat in Wuhan has impacted us all. So for better or worse we are all connected. 

Audette: Exactly.

Jenelle: I’d love for it to be better.

Audette: Yeah well it’s got to be better. We’re going to make it that way, right? I’m huge Leonard Cohen fan. I don’t know if you like Leonard Cohen? I’m a worshipper and one of his great songs is the Anthem and there is a line in it or a chorus and it goes something like this “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, , there is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in”. And to me that’s the answer, right? Forget your perfect offering. We can’t be standing back waiting for the world to be perfect. We just have to figure out where’s the crack? Where’s the light? Go there and as long as we are doing that we are going to make a better world.

Jenelle: Oh I love that. I do love that. Thank you so much for your time today. I think this is a conversation that people will need to listen to a couple of times over. I feel like I need to probably play this back and I’ll continue to take things away from it.
 
Jenelle: Certainly, some of the things that stay with me right now is the courage to forget what you planned and the discipline to remember what you know and what you can do with that. I guess the learning around what it takes to lead from behind that you need to call more on listening, caring and compassion.

I think the power of bridging worlds. It’s only when we bridge worlds that we find the level of common understanding. We can park our prejudices that we might have around the other worlds. Whether it’s hubris, or arrogant, or stupidity, or an unbelievable sense of compassion or an understanding of driving systems change or debt you have been moving mountains and have made such an impact on this world.

I love clearly your humility in talking and your honesty in sharing mistakes. The power of learning from those mistakes and the only way we learn is if we exercise humility and we create psychologically safe conditions for people to share and reflect on their learnings and we’re curious. 

I want to say thank you to your parents for encouraging and unleashing their children on the world because we are so much the better for it. I love the power in not taking no for an answer and may we remember the words of Leonard Cohen and we go for the light. 

Thank you so much Audette.

Audette: An absolute delight to talk to you. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

End tape recording