Brave Leadership - Knowing when it's time to build

This is a story about a CEO under extreme financial pressure who made an unlikely decision without perfect information but based on trust, shared values, and a willingness to fail and try again.

This is the story of when an inspiring leader meets a burning platform. But it’s also a story about what long-term trust allows you to do when the stakes are high.

A working relationship built on 15 years of shared values

Jo and I first worked together during the NDIS trial rollout. She was a Regional Manager in Campbelltown, overseeing the Hunter trial region. I was responsible for transitioning packages and making sure participant data, budgets and operating processes kept pace with a completely new funding model.

It was messy work. The rules were still forming. Tensions were high as everyone was learning in real time. But, from the beginning, our working relationship had a particular quality. We could have hard conversations. No ego. No theatre. Just two people who genuinely cared about participants getting to the crux of the issue. We leant into the fact that our brains work differently. But we both operated from the same baseline question:
Would this be ok if it happened to someone without a disability?

That question wasn’t intended to be strategic, but had the power to cut through compliance BS quickly. It became a shared compass.

Over the next fifteen years we worked together in different roles, different organisations and under different reporting lines. Sometimes as peers. Sometimes one reporting to the other. Sometimes as consultant and client.

The power dynamic constantly shifted, but our values and respect for each other didn’t.

The CEO role and the burning platform

One thing you need to understand about Jo as a leader. Her biggest fault is the doubt she has in herself as a leader. Early on, she thought she wasn't hard enough to have the tough conversations. Now, it is because she doesn't have as much tenure as other CEOs around her.

But if this story does nothing else, it will prove what a great leader she really is. Leadership is both a trait and a skill. Jo has always had natural leadership traits:

 - values-driven decision making,

 - the ability to hold complexity, and

 - genuine care for the people she serves and employs.

But she has also works incredibly hard on the skill. She has been intentional about her development in a way that many leaders with decades of tenure have not. So, whilst her insecurity is misplaced, the self-awareness that it produces is actually one of her greatest assets. Leaders who think they have nothing left to learn are the ones who create the governance failures I spend most of my time cleaning up.

Jo knew she had a lot to give, and also a lot to still learn. With that, she pursued her first CEO role.

She became the CEO of a small Western Sydney SIL provider called Anowah. Some of you may even recognise Jo from the recent sector advocacy work she did with the NSW Government on workers compensation.

Whilst Jo knew being a CEO would have its challenges, she inherited a problem that even the most seasoned CEO would panic about. Anowah was and still is, paying 18% of its revenue on workers compensation premiums.

For those who understand the NDIS Price Guide, that is a guaranteed death sentence. The margins in SIL are already razor-thin and losing 18 cents of every dollar to workers comp before you pay a single support worker is not a viability challenge. It is an existential one.

Yet, this wasn’t the piece she was unsure about. She gets the financial dynamics. That’s what turned a burning platform into a pathway to possibility.

A random conversation that changed everything

Jo had engaged me on a very low-cost, low-touch quality retainer. She knew quality is often the first thing to fall over when money is tight, and she didn't want that to happen. In my experience it’s also a move that many CEOs under financial pressure don't make. The key reason, it's hard to measure and quality doesn't show up on this month's P&L.

During a routine conversation one day, I told her about something I had been thinking about: how the features already built into Microsoft 365 could replace most of the quality management systems currently on the market:

·         Forms for data capture.

·         Power Automate for workflows.

·         SharePoint for document management.

·         Teams for communication.

·         Power BI for reporting.

All of it already there, already paid for, already familiar to the workforce.

Jo had already moved her rostering and payroll systems to a more affordable, fit-for-purpose solution. But she was still using a sector-endorsed CRM that wasn't really providing the insight she needed to effectively run the business. It was essentially a data repository. Information went in. Not much useful came out.

Shortly after our conversation, the software provider gave notice that fees were increasing as the contract had run its term. After reviewing the cost increase, the value they got from the product and the organisation’s financial position, Jo made the decision to cancel the contract.

That gave us three months to build something that better. Something that matched the way SIL services actually operate.

No pressure.

What brave leadership actually looks like

I want to pause here because this is the moment in the story that matters.

The safe option would have been to find another off-the-shelf system. Shop around, compare features, negotiate a contract, migrate the data, train the staff.

That is what most leaders would do. It’s been done before. It is defensible. And, when it doesn't produce the intended results, you can point to the vendor.

Jo didn't do that. She investigated the abstract idea from her quality consultant and weighed it against the financial reality of her organisation. Jo also understood the relationship capital that had been invested in for nearly 2 decades. We both knew the stakes, but we also knew the tools were already part of the organisation’s Eco structure. Anything we did would be framed by the existing security and governance controls. But most importantly, Jo didn’t expect perfection and I didn’t promise certainty, but we both maintained there could be no negative impact on the people being supported, her team or the organisation more broadly.

Jo had faith that even if the Microsoft experiment failed, I would work tirelessly with her to adapt and supplement.  We had trust.

Faith and trust don't eliminate risks, but they do change the way it's calculated.

That's what brave leadership actually looks like. It’s:

·         imperfect information, limited resources, a workforce that needs stability, and participants who need continuity of care.

·         a decision point where there is no clear good option, and the only reliable evidence you do have is that the status quo is not serving your needs.

·         the quiet resolve to venture into the unknown and trust your instincts. What you get might not be perfect, but neither is what you have.

What we built

There was (and still is) a lot of trial and error. We started simply but focused on core governance. Microsoft Forms were developed to suit the support needs of the organisation. This gave us more refined and pattern driven Shift Notes, Incident Reports, Medical Updates etc.

Then we started building in workflows. Automating notifications. We improved our understanding what needed to be escalated urgently or what became a pattern to monitor.

Then we refined. We knew we had built a mechanism that addressed the compliance requirements and allowed us to monitor organisational risk. But what we also knew was our approach mimicked most other systems and we hadn't built for how the frontline really need to use a system.

We went back to basics. What information does our frontline need to provide good quality, continuous support and what information does the leadership team need to confirm it was happening. This was a massive shift as Improving data points meant we could actually ask questions of the information coming in.

Then we overlaid secure AI to help extract insights from the volume of daily records that no human team could manually review. We stopped counting incidents and started understanding the patterns in each participants supports.

Our goal was to build a Microsoft-native system for 75% of the year-one cost of the old software. We have done that, and then some. But what we can’t put as price on is the new intelligence that organised information brings. We strategically and systematically:

Changed how participant support needs are communicated and updated. Not buried in a document repository, but actively flowing to the people who need the information at the point of care.

Reframed early warning signs that a participant isn’t satisfied and provided staff with three options to try. Each being recorded and measured for effectiveness.

Identified key staff performance metrics and built systems for monitoring them. Not just tracking incidents after the fact, but watching for the patterns that precede them.

Actively tracked goal support and achievement. Not as a compliance exercise for audit, but as a genuine measure of whether supports are making a difference in someone's life.

Linked subtle care signals to escalation patterns. We discovered that changes in something as routine as bowel motions can be an early indicator of behavioural escalation. That kind of insight doesn't come from a system designed to store documents. It comes from a system designed to surface patterns.

Jo now has a product that gives her actual data to make informed decisions. It gives her a user-friendly tool that her team are already familiar with allowing her to communicate information in a way that is digestible by the workforce. A tool that works the way her staff already work and is responsive to the variable nature that is human services.

The lesson for other CEOs

This isn’t a story about software. Microsoft isn’t the answer for all organisations.

It is a story of trust, values and courage under constraint. Jo didn’t make her decision because of a polished demo or a persuasive sales pitch. She made it because she had 20 years of evidence about how we work together, how we handle disagreement and how we respond when things don’t go to plan.

We still have a way to go. The system evolves every month. There are features we haven't built yet and integrations we're still refining. But the direction is right, the foundation is solid, and the data is already changing how Anowah operates.

Here is what I think other CEOs should take from this:

Your software should work for you, not the other way around. If your care management system is a data repository that you pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to maintain, ask yourself what decisions did it has help you make in the last six months. If you can't answer that quickly, you have a storage problem dressed up as a technology solution.

The tools you already have are more powerful than you think. Most NDIS providers are already paying for Microsoft 365. The capability is sitting there. What's missing is the thinking about how to configure it for your operating context.

Trust is an asset that compounds over time. When a leader is forced to make a difficult decision without perfect information, they can’t rely on a sales pitch. They need to remember there is no award for isolated decision making. Relying on relationships that have already proven themselves under pressure, can be one of the best problem-solving decisions you make.

And finally… Brave leadership is not about certainty. It is about being honest about the risks, clear about the values driving the decision, and willing to course-correct when things don't work.

Jo had all three and I am grateful for the relationship we have built and what we have been able to achieve together.

The new reality for NDIS providers is that the old models, expensive software, compliance-focused systems, information locked in repositories that nobody queries, are not going to get you where you need to go. The regulatory environment is tightening. The financial environment is brutal. The expectation on outcomes is increasing.

The providers who will thrive are the ones led by people brave enough to build what doesn't exist yet.

Jo is one of them. And that choice says more about her than any title ever could.