#110 - Marnie Hughes Warrington AO, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of South Australia on How the Power of the Past Shapes Our Future

In this thought-provoking episode, we delve deep into the mind of Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, a globally renowned historian and philosopher, who has been pivotal in reshaping educational perspectives both in Australia and internationally. From her humble beginnings to being at the forefront of some of today's most pressing challenges, Professor Hughes-Warrington offers an insightful blend of history, philosophy, and modern education. Dive in with us as we explore her personal journey, her thoughts on intertwining academic disciplines, and her significant role in the university merger that's been making waves in South Australia.

🔍 Here are some cant-miss highlights of this episode:

1️⃣ The unique worldview of a historian & philosopher melded into one.
2️⃣ The monumental university merger – what it means and the genius behind it.
3️⃣ How AI is taking notes from historians. Yup, it’s as cool as it sounds!
4️⃣ Marnie's journey from being a Rhodes Scholar to a game-changer in modern education.
5️⃣ Insights from her 8 (yes, EIGHT!) trailblazing books.

A blend of wit, wisdom, and 'wow' moments, this is an episode you won't want to skip! 🌟

We hope you enjoy this insightful episode! As always, your feedback is invaluable to us. Please like, share, and subscribe to stay updated with our latest content. And do share your thoughts on the topics discussed in this episode—we'd love to engage in meaningful conversations with our listeners!

HIGHLIGHTS:

3:32 - Discussion about the prestigious Australian Prime Minister's award for teaching.

5:58 - Sharing a personal story about being a first-generation university graduate and the journey to becoming a Rhodes scholarship recipient.

7:29 - Insight into the bestselling book and sneak peek into upcoming publications.

11:33 - The purpose and vision behind Marnie's scholarship, emphasizing on education and working with the deaf community.

14:18 - A candid talk about Marnie's struggle with video games and her perspective on questioning fairness.

18:08 - An emotional reflection on impactful memories, especially her father's staunch belief in education and his love for nature.

22:13 - Highlighting the immense importance of asking questions and the ability to think differently in today's world.

29:42 - The philosophy of maintaining humility in the world of academia and the essence of continuous learning.

38:24 - A profound conversation about self-awareness, emphasizing the importance of recognizing our own strengths and weaknesses with compassion.

1:20:08 - A stimulating debate on the subjective nature of history versus majority beliefs, and how this shapes our understanding of the past.

Where to find Marnie Hughes-Warrington

• LinkedIn
• Website

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST:

•  Growing up Aboriginal in Australia By: Anita Heiss

Join the conversation on Synergy IQ on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (@synergyiq).

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Say hello to our host Daniel Franco on LinkedIn.

Transcript

00:00:04:17 - 00:00:32:07
Daniel Franco
Hey Everyone. And welcome back to another episode of the Creating Synergy Podcast. I can't even begin to tell you how thrilled and admittedly a little bit nervous I was about our guest today. We've had some pretty impressive guests on the show, but none with a unique worldview that Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington brings. Not only is she a globally renowned historian and philosopher, but she's also the cornerstone in reshaping how we think about education in Australia and beyond.

00:00:32:10 - 00:00:58:10
Daniel Franco
Currently, Marney serves as acting vice chancellor with the substantive of Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Enterprise at the University of South Australia. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Her esteemed journey has seen her as a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Washington and Associate Dean at the Macquarie University, or Vice Chancellor at Monash University and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the Australian National University.

00:00:58:24 - 00:01:24:04
Daniel Franco
So beyond her roles, the accolades a truly remarkable 2008, she was honored with the Australian Prime Minister's Award for University Teacher of the Year and Teaching Excellence Award in the Humanities and Arts. And most recently in 2022, she was appointed officer for the Order of Australia for a distinguished service to tertiary education. And not to mention that she's also the author of eight insightful books.

00:01:24:05 - 00:01:49:12
Daniel Franco
Because we dive into this conversation, we'll explore her early life, her journey to becoming a Rhodes Scholar, and how she consistently at the forefront of entwining history and philosophy with modern challenges, including your thoughts on AI and how I can learn from historians approach to logic. We also touch on what everyone is talking about here in South Australia.

00:01:49:19 - 00:02:16:08
Daniel Franco
A massive university merger. It's making headlines everywhere where she will play a pivotal role in the success of this merger. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Professor Marnie Hughes learning to Enjoy. Welcome back to the Creating Synergy Podcast. I am actually very excited about and I must I must admit I've been nervous about today's conversation.

00:02:16:27 - 00:02:17:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I say, because.

00:02:17:29 - 00:02:31:11
Daniel Franco
We've had some amazing people in this show, but I don't think I've ever spent probably an hour and a half, 2 hours with someone who can speak about the world and use the world like you do. So welcome to the show. Marnie Hughes, learning to.

00:02:31:14 - 00:02:33:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it, too.

00:02:34:12 - 00:02:40:04
Daniel Franco
So just as a bit of background, you're a globally renowned historian and philosopher by trade.

00:02:40:19 - 00:02:41:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's right.

00:02:41:11 - 00:03:10:11
Daniel Franco
And I want to share a little bit of history about you, if I can, so you're currently the standing acting Vice-Chancellor at the University of South Australia, but you substantive is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, previously a lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Washington and Associate Dean at Macquarie University, prove Austrian Chancellor at Monash University and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the Australian National University.

00:03:10:11 - 00:03:21:15
Daniel Franco
So it's an amazing, amazing career. Some awards that you've achieved Australian Prime Minister's Award for the University Teacher of the Year. What does that what does that mean?

00:03:22:07 - 00:03:26:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So you have this process. We can be nominated to be the best university teacher.

00:03:27:07 - 00:03:29:11
Daniel Franco
Across Australia, like your number one.

00:03:29:25 - 00:03:45:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I count it with somebody else. Okay, Phenomenal guy. And yeah, you are. There's like a couple of all but three or 400 nominations and you win category. So I won the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences award and then you go into the mix for whether you're the Teacher of the year.

00:03:45:15 - 00:03:46:02
Daniel Franco
Well done.

00:03:46:02 - 00:03:46:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You are pretty.

00:03:46:29 - 00:03:53:23
Daniel Franco
Fabulous amongst that. In 2008, you also won the Teaching Excellence award. Is that for the same thing?

00:03:53:23 - 00:03:54:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, that's yeah. Okay.

00:03:55:06 - 00:03:56:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Section. And then you get considered.

00:03:56:26 - 00:03:57:11
Daniel Franco
Beautiful.

00:03:57:13 - 00:03:57:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
PM's.

00:03:57:25 - 00:04:22:17
Daniel Franco
Award 2013 University of Tasmania Foundation Graduate of the Year Award. Unbelievable. And in 2022, you were appointed officer of the Order of Australia on the 2022 Queen's Birthday Honors for distinguished Service to Tertiary Education and Governance as an administrative leader and mentor. That had been the last one on the Queen's birthday, actually.

00:04:22:17 - 00:04:24:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, really poignant to be there.

00:04:24:23 - 00:04:25:22
Daniel Franco
It's amazing.

00:04:25:22 - 00:04:29:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
She she died just before the ceremony, in fact. Yeah.

00:04:29:22 - 00:04:30:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Wow.

00:04:30:05 - 00:04:44:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So it was a very moving experience and I was very fortunate. The ceremony I was at was for the armed forces and for the police as well. And so you had all these folks that had served their country in lots of different ways and serve the community. And they was made.

00:04:45:14 - 00:04:47:14
Daniel Franco
I mean, that was you. I think you've done enough to.

00:04:48:23 - 00:04:49:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To have.

00:04:49:03 - 00:04:55:19
Daniel Franco
Been there. I mean, how did it feel? When did you know that you you obviously knew weeks before.

00:04:55:19 - 00:04:57:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I give you a heads up. Yeah.

00:04:57:10 - 00:05:05:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Months before you might be interested in accepting. And I think I take it that my response was relatively similar to a lot of other people. So I thought it was a spam email.

00:05:05:23 - 00:05:17:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. So you got anything you got? I got an email. An email where I didn't couldn't possibly report. You can't tell anybody that you. Exactly. You can't tell anybody. You've got it. It's confidential. And you just thinking, well, look, it's got.

00:05:17:25 - 00:05:19:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To be wrong. It can't be me.

00:05:19:13 - 00:05:22:17
Daniel Franco
Did you do a check to dismiss Taken?

00:05:23:03 - 00:05:31:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It was genuine and went, okay. Then you go and then you thought as well why and who and who's been up to mischief nominating. Yeah.

00:05:31:05 - 00:05:36:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So I spent lots of years nominating lots of women and men for those awards.

00:05:36:10 - 00:05:37:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And that's what I thought my job was.

00:05:37:24 - 00:05:40:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To nominate other people. So when you get nominated.

00:05:40:20 - 00:05:44:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And then you know, and you think, Oh my, okay, so what.

00:05:44:21 - 00:05:48:19
Daniel Franco
What impact does that have on your life getting that award?

00:05:49:07 - 00:05:55:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think really importantly, I like to tell people I'm the first in my family to graduate from university.

00:05:55:05 - 00:05:58:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
MM So that's a it's a big thing.

00:05:58:06 - 00:06:06:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So I think if it helps people to see that you were there and you've achieved that, you know, and I've won a Rhodes Scholarship when I was 21 and.

00:06:06:13 - 00:06:08:01
Daniel Franco
I was getting to that so much, and.

00:06:09:17 - 00:06:09:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Now you can.

00:06:10:00 - 00:06:15:09
Daniel Franco
Guess why we're there. So Rhodes Scholarship in its own right, is a rarity as well, isn't it?

00:06:15:25 - 00:06:30:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, it is, but it's what you make of it that really counts. Okay. When I was 21, I just said I want to contribute to education. And I had only the sketchiest idea of how I was going to do that as a 21 year old. And I just said, That's what I'm going to do. I really, really want to do that.

00:06:30:19 - 00:06:54:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And with the I know, you know, my my feeling is, oh, great, I'm I'm getting there. So there's two things that are really important. The first is if you can signal to other people that your background, you can come from any community across Australia and you can contribute. I think if it inspires other people to nominate other people that yeah, right.

00:06:54:24 - 00:07:02:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's a really great thing. And my mum was really funny. She texted me and she said, Well, it's really generally they give it to people that are retired. Sometimes they give it as an encouragement award.

00:07:02:23 - 00:07:06:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I take it that you're the latter, you don't need much encouragement. And I said, Actually.

00:07:06:29 - 00:07:10:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's a great encouragement. It's a really great encouragement to continue.

00:07:10:16 - 00:07:11:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To contribute.

00:07:11:08 - 00:07:11:25
Daniel Franco
To do more.

00:07:11:25 - 00:07:12:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, yeah.

00:07:12:07 - 00:07:14:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To do more, to lead and to encourage other people to lead.

00:07:15:18 - 00:07:19:18
Daniel Franco
So we're getting to the roads. But you're also the author of eight books I offer.

00:07:19:19 - 00:07:20:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, no.

00:07:20:23 - 00:07:21:24
Daniel Franco
Nine, nine.

00:07:21:26 - 00:07:23:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Number ten will be out in November.

00:07:23:14 - 00:07:25:26
Daniel Franco
There you go. Yeah. So Wikipedia didn't.

00:07:26:22 - 00:07:27:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's got to keep on it.

00:07:28:24 - 00:07:33:01
Daniel Franco
So did you. Which one is your favorite? Like, which one and which one's the bestseller.

00:07:33:01 - 00:07:33:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh.

00:07:33:24 - 00:07:36:09
Daniel Franco
Because we can, we can read them all off. But which.

00:07:36:09 - 00:07:36:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
One's bestseller.

00:07:36:27 - 00:07:38:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is 50 key thinkers on history.

00:07:38:07 - 00:07:39:21
Daniel Franco
50 key thinkers in history.

00:07:39:21 - 00:07:45:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That was three editions and in seven languages. And I've just been asked to do the fourth edition of that.

00:07:45:02 - 00:07:45:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Wow.

00:07:45:25 - 00:08:00:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So that's the bestseller because it's really just a global account of lots of different historians and theoreticians. So it gives people a really introductory sense of how people think about history. So that's the bestseller? Yeah, my favorite. Oh, that's hard, because they're.

00:08:00:07 - 00:08:00:14
Daniel Franco
All your.

00:08:00:14 - 00:08:01:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Babies. My babies.

00:08:01:13 - 00:08:02:05
Daniel Franco
But people also.

00:08:02:10 - 00:08:03:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That you're working on at the moment is.

00:08:03:26 - 00:08:10:25
Daniel Franco
Is most interesting at the moment, isn't it? I get asked the same thing with the podcast and I saying the exact same thing. I cannot answer that one.

00:08:10:25 - 00:08:11:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I like that, really.

00:08:11:21 - 00:08:16:15
Daniel Franco
And, you know, want more, you know, I said, I think I reckon this conversation is going to trump a lot of them.

00:08:16:15 - 00:08:18:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So no pressure.

00:08:19:19 - 00:08:34:26
Daniel Franco
But the Rhodes Scholarship. So I think from my research it's like only 5% chance that you've got an opportunity to actually get this scholarship across the world because it's for those who don't know it's at Oxford. Is that.

00:08:34:26 - 00:08:36:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Correct? Yeah, that's right.

00:08:36:08 - 00:08:42:21
Daniel Franco
And so tell us about that situation. What happened there? How did you get nominated for this scholarship?

00:08:42:22 - 00:08:54:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think I'm no different to a lot of other people that one of my tutors said to me, you should apply. And I said, well, I can't apply because, you know, I'm not X, Y, Z. Yeah, but those are stereotypes.

00:08:54:02 - 00:08:54:25
Daniel Franco
I think I should.

00:08:55:01 - 00:09:01:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just apply, give it a go. You actually have nothing to lose. And if you write the application, it will help.

00:09:01:02 - 00:09:01:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You.

00:09:01:21 - 00:09:12:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You understand. So I just wrote the application and I thought, Wow, I've got an interview that's shortlisted for an interview. And I thought, Wow, I've got an interview. And I thought, Well, I have nothing to lose. So her advice was, You have nothing to lose.

00:09:13:03 - 00:09:14:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And you are who you are.

00:09:14:18 - 00:09:15:20
Daniel Franco
And ask, You don't get.

00:09:15:28 - 00:09:30:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You don't ask, you don't get. And I thought, Well, I am who I am and I'm just going to answer the questions as I as I am basically. And you know, wonderfully, they selected me and I spent a couple of years thinking, oh, gosh, they must have made a mistake.

00:09:30:19 - 00:09:34:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I hear that after sitting in person. It's just called imposter syndrome.

00:09:34:03 - 00:09:52:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I thought, no, no, no. It's a great thing to be when somebody, you know, gets behind you like that. It's not just the financial support that really matters. It's somebody saying you have got great potential, you can do something great with this. And your job then is to say, I can, I can do that. I can really, really do that.

00:09:52:14 - 00:10:06:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And it helps you to stretch in ways that you possibly hadn't thought about previously. So, you know, since that time, I have really worked to give back to Rhodes, you know, So I was national secretary from 2014 to 19. So the first woman in Australia to do that.

00:10:06:20 - 00:10:07:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, well.

00:10:07:06 - 00:10:25:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I'm on the governance committee for the road scholarships, which is based in Oxford, there's 102 of them across the globe and we get about 20,000 applicants per annum. So it is a huge privilege for me to contribute to the oversight of those. You know, we make adjustments to the rules every now and again. We monitor the applications.

00:10:25:11 - 00:10:27:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We say who's applying, not applying. It's a phenomenal.

00:10:28:11 - 00:10:28:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
What do you.

00:10:28:24 - 00:10:35:11
Daniel Franco
What are you looking for in a person? When what are they looking for in a person when they're accepting these awards?

00:10:35:20 - 00:10:36:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So we have.

00:10:36:03 - 00:10:45:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
The criteria that we sit down in the will as as a rights and they are the same criteria with some wording adjustment. Yeah. About manliness.

00:10:45:12 - 00:10:46:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:46:25 - 00:11:02:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That was changed in 1977. Yeah. The same criteria really. Roughly speaking, it's academic excellence, a kind of commitment to use your talents to the full leadership and a consideration of other people. So the language has changed a little bit. Yeah. The time.

00:11:02:12 - 00:11:02:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:11:03:02 - 00:11:19:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But you really looking for somebody who's not just excelled in the classroom, but somebody who's really given their heart and soul to something in their own way and people will do all kinds of things and we write scholarships. So it's not one sport or one community service. We say all kinds of things.

00:11:19:13 - 00:11:22:15
Daniel Franco
So what was it that you focused on with your scholarship?

00:11:23:12 - 00:11:47:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
What did pretty bolshy 21 year old saying? I think education is the greatest cause of it, and I still believe that. So that was really what I wanted to stand for. And I had done a lot of work with the deaf community in Tasmania because at that time the cochlear implant was being introduced and people very concerned that the technology perhaps was not really cognizant of how the community was thinking about these things.

00:11:47:04 - 00:12:08:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so I taught myself sign language and then went off and and worked with the community to teach someone I knew with language classes across Tassie to try and lift awareness and inclusion for deaf people. So, you know, which I still believe really powerfully and absolutely. And my sport, if it is a sport and I'm still doing it, is hiking, which I absolutely adore.

00:12:08:05 - 00:12:09:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So yeah.

00:12:09:26 - 00:12:31:23
Daniel Franco
Brilliant, brilliant. So given that background, given the success that you've had and the awards and let's look back before you 21 and what do we need to know about your earliest context to understand who is money and how did you end up sitting here today?

00:12:31:28 - 00:12:33:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, it's often.

00:12:33:01 - 00:12:40:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Something that we think about, so in lots of different ways. All right. I think there's probably some really interesting things about little money, as I call it. That Cheeky.

00:12:40:25 - 00:12:43:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, that I remember.

00:12:43:25 - 00:13:03:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think there's some really important things. So, you know, I'm writing a book about machine historians at the moment. One of my first memories is my dad taking me into work and showing me mine from computer, and there was a ticker tape and the ticker tape was punching out and he showed me the tape and I said, The type is really interesting, but I'm really interested in the little holes that have been punched out.

00:13:03:16 - 00:13:25:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the little pieces of paper that have been punched out. Yeah. Yeah. What are they? And dad said, that's evidence of the computer thinking. And humans can be computers, too. Yes. And I just went, Whoa, this is really interesting. So I grew up in a family. My dad really wanted me to be a computer scientist. Yeah, he was tremendously keen on, you know, getting into this new thing called computer science.

00:13:26:10 - 00:13:45:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And disappointingly, I ended up a philosopher, but he understood the relationship between logic and computer science and got that in due course. I think he discovered when I started, you know, because home computers then were introduced and they had games. Yeah. And I had real difficulty with things like Space Invaders sitting there and my family find this hilarious.

00:13:45:28 - 00:13:57:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'd be looking at the screen going, Why are the aliens looking at me? Screen? Yeah, well, when I'm shooting up at them, that doesn't seem fair. And are they, you know, are they looking at me outside of the box? And my dad would just play.

00:13:57:23 - 00:14:02:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
The guy just, you know, just not sure what's going on here. And he should have really twigged at that point. Yeah.

00:14:02:11 - 00:14:06:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That I wasn't really probably going to code. I was going to be the person going, Why the aliens?

00:14:06:06 - 00:14:08:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You look may maybe on the screen you.

00:14:08:01 - 00:14:10:24
Daniel Franco
Were questioning, why am I shooting something that's not looking at me?

00:14:11:04 - 00:14:17:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is that fair and is that fair? And why am I doing that? That's guy. That's just a guy. This is a guy. So that's the first.

00:14:17:05 - 00:14:17:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Thing you need to know.

00:14:17:29 - 00:14:19:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
About Marnie. The second thing.

00:14:19:01 - 00:14:24:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
About little money, which I think is really sweet, is that she decides she's going to read every book in the primary school library.

00:14:25:10 - 00:14:26:03
Daniel Franco
Oh, really?

00:14:26:03 - 00:14:27:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yes. What age?

00:14:28:06 - 00:14:34:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
When I started, I could read when I got to school and I was tremendously keen because there were so many books in the library.

00:14:34:02 - 00:14:35:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, I've heard.

00:14:35:05 - 00:14:36:27
Daniel Franco
Of people like you.

00:14:38:14 - 00:14:40:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In the not exactly.

00:14:41:11 - 00:14:43:15
Daniel Franco
In the in folklore somewhere, I think.

00:14:43:26 - 00:14:45:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So what would.

00:14:46:01 - 00:14:56:17
Daniel Franco
I can't even get my children sometimes to read 10 minutes at night time. What possesses someone, if that's the right word, to want to read every single book in the library.

00:14:56:21 - 00:14:58:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We didn't have a lot of books at home.

00:14:58:06 - 00:14:58:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Okay.

00:14:58:26 - 00:15:19:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And beautifully my grandad got a bunch of old encyclopedias from around 1930 that he pulled out of a skip and he gave to my family, gave to me. And so when I was about four or five, because there's a shortage of books, you know, my family, wonderful. It was a great upbringing. But we could never go to the library often enough for my liking.

00:15:20:08 - 00:15:25:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So I actually peculiarly was reading this kind of 1931 encyclopedia when I was like five.

00:15:25:24 - 00:15:28:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just, you know, trying to teach myself words.

00:15:28:02 - 00:15:36:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So you can imagine for a kid like that, yeah, getting to school and there were picture books and all kinds of books, let alone these things called Asterix.

00:15:36:01 - 00:15:36:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:15:37:00 - 00:15:38:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And all sorts of interesting things.

00:15:38:18 - 00:15:42:07
Daniel Franco
They were. My favorite sets are amazing.

00:15:42:07 - 00:15:57:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
There's books here because I love the local library. My parents took me, you know, they always took us to the local library every month. Yeah. And from I, from my earliest memories, they were really keen for us to read and to participate and to read. And but the visits were never frequent enough for my liking.

00:15:57:20 - 00:15:58:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Yeah.

00:15:59:04 - 00:16:17:22
Daniel Franco
Well, clearly not. If you're trying to read the whole library. I think you think that's difficult for children these days with the amount of distraction you think. Look, back then computer games might not have been your thing or reading was your form of entertainment. Today there's so much more distraction. Do you think that is the reason?

00:16:17:25 - 00:16:19:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I don't think universally so.

00:16:19:16 - 00:16:23:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so, you know, just to go back to your question, I think my parents made a huge difference.

00:16:23:16 - 00:16:23:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:16:24:02 - 00:16:46:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So their belief in literacy, you know, my dad was a professional staff member at a university. He saw very smart people all the way around. And for him to say that, you know, investing energy in education was a big thing, Look, I don't stereotype young people, but I come across absolutely avaricious readers all the time. That's true. Lots of young people who actually write reading paper books.

00:16:46:24 - 00:16:51:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. You say, oh, I can send you a free copy, open access of my book. And I go, No, I actually want to do paper copy.

00:16:51:19 - 00:16:52:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, okay, sure.

00:16:53:00 - 00:16:55:15
Daniel Franco
I'm one of those people. It's Hack Tony. So it.

00:16:55:15 - 00:16:57:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
All and the smell of the smell.

00:16:57:01 - 00:16:57:27
Daniel Franco
Of the paper is the.

00:16:57:27 - 00:17:13:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Size of them. Yeah. You know, for some people, I think that's really important. So. So I do certainly strike young people and older people who are really, really keen readers. So and then there's some people you just can't get them to read, but they read functionally those kinds of things. And so.

00:17:13:05 - 00:17:32:12
Daniel Franco
Well, I must admit, I think there was a my life sort of went in this sort of these phases where it was I read a lot as a child, became interested in sport, didn't read so much, then finished sport and went back into reading. So it was kind of like this wave, but more let's let's deep dive a little bit further.

00:17:32:29 - 00:17:57:17
Daniel Franco
You've your upbringing. We've talked a little bit about your upbringing. What was one of the most cherished memories that you had as a child there that really sort of went towards the formation of of mining who you are today that you think is a foundational piece. You think, right, that was it. That was something that that changed me or had an impact, profound impact on me.

00:17:58:03 - 00:17:59:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think I want to nominate too.

00:17:59:08 - 00:18:14:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So that moment with my dad and him saying humans can be computers, too, you know, and his real belief that there were opportunities in a field that didn't really exist much then know he just had huge hope in education.

00:18:14:09 - 00:18:14:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:18:14:29 - 00:18:30:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And the second is, I just have good memories of being a really hopeless bushwalker. So I just remember walking with my parents and saying, Oh, it's so far and I'm not going to make it. And dad's going, Oh, don't be ridiculous. You've walked more than half. Why now? So there's no point going back.

00:18:30:10 - 00:18:31:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, now it sounds negative.

00:18:31:20 - 00:18:37:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But actually it was what I would really educating me was just to love the places where you.

00:18:37:29 - 00:18:38:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Are.

00:18:38:28 - 00:18:52:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And my dad, who's so great, I love my mum dearly, he would say, You know what? And he always said to me, You're always in a hurry. It was in a real hurry. You read the books really fast. You do all these, you're very smart. And he goes, Look, the trees grow slowly around here so you can afford to take your time.

00:18:53:15 - 00:19:15:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yes, right. You learn so much, so good when you're out and about. And you know, what they were doing was we didn't have a lot of money. But what a great family. They said what you can gift your children is the gift of education. And you can give them a real appreciation for being outside, being out in nature and looking for the tiny details which don't doesn't cost anything but time.

00:19:15:19 - 00:19:32:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so they gave that time really generously. And in retrospect, you know, it takes a lot of patience as a parent to teach a child walk. It does a distance because, you know, you moan a lot when you're really little. You have to learn how to do it. So I have really fond memories and, you know, my dad is no longer with us.

00:19:32:20 - 00:19:52:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Sadly, he died a decade ago. But when I'm walking, sometimes I can echo hear his footsteps. So the way he walked, I've got a good aural memory of the sound of his footsteps. And it's still really moving to me that we often walked a lot. And he never talked, but he said so much in the way that he walked and just being with him.

00:19:52:27 - 00:20:04:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So, you know, just such happy memories of, of a family that understood reading is a great thing. And this beautiful country that we live in, we should take time and say it.

00:20:06:00 - 00:20:31:09
Daniel Franco
Thank you. What a remarkable story. It it feels like your father and your parents, I should say, had the ability to almost slow down time in its own right to help you notice those things, which is something that I'm probably not so crude that it's I live in the world I find myself in at times is is this fast paced world.

00:20:31:09 - 00:20:38:28
Daniel Franco
And there's not enough time. Whereas you had that benefit of of being out and being slowed down in time.

00:20:39:00 - 00:21:03:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, you do that. So to understand that sometimes when you go slow you see more and you hear more, so you're gifted more when you do that, that's an extraordinary. And so that if you can alter the pace of when you do things, if you'd go the same speed all the time, you're probably not going to notice details or different things, but it's all to you speed through life.

00:21:03:07 - 00:21:22:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Sometimes it's just frenetic. You take a moment out every day or you do take some time to go walk and things like that. You just begin to notice different things and things are still turning over in your mind, but they allow you allowing it space to happen. So it was a really generous gift to say you don't need to go at the same pace all the time.

00:21:22:21 - 00:21:27:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You don't need to be in a hurry all the time. And in fact, you'll get more done sometimes if you don't hurry.

00:21:28:06 - 00:21:49:06
Daniel Franco
It's funny. So this is a second like this morning. I quite literally what she was on LinkedIn. It was a video of John Cleese of it all and of all people who who said those who are the most creative are the ones who take the time to live within the ambiguity of the problem that they face.

00:21:49:15 - 00:21:49:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:21:50:07 - 00:22:03:13
Daniel Franco
And it just it, it just hit me because, you know, if you if you are moving at pace and you're trying to, in inverted commas, get shit done, you remove the ability to be creative in that moment, Right.

00:22:03:18 - 00:22:03:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:22:03:24 - 00:22:13:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You can sometimes you do push through and you get the answers you want, but often when you're doing that, you're doing the equivalent just slapping your hands up against the door repeatedly trying to get it to open when it says actually.

00:22:13:25 - 00:22:14:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just Yeah, yeah.

00:22:14:28 - 00:22:15:06
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:22:15:09 - 00:22:16:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's doing that over and over again.

00:22:16:29 - 00:22:19:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'm just being a little different.

00:22:19:04 - 00:22:19:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But also.

00:22:19:26 - 00:22:30:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think it's really important to remind ourselves that if you've got a family or context that's encouraging you to think differently and say, you know, okay, your question about Space Invaders is weird, but I'll grant it to.

00:22:30:22 - 00:22:33:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You. Yeah, allowing a child the space of that. Yeah.

00:22:33:18 - 00:22:35:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And taking that seriously.

00:22:35:14 - 00:22:36:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Can lead.

00:22:36:06 - 00:22:44:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You to develop the habit over a lifetime of saying, Actually, why are they looking at me? What's going on here? And you know, carrying that through to adulthood in really, really wonderful ways. Yeah.

00:22:44:29 - 00:22:58:01
Daniel Franco
That's funny. This space, when we had the second podcast in a row where Space Invaders had bought up, we had Christine Zeitz on who's the CEO of Northrop Grumman on the show, and she said she held the record at the local. I guess it.

00:22:58:02 - 00:23:08:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Was know I was I would be the color offset and I'd say, okay, so you won that one, but did you really win that one? Yeah. Oh.

00:23:08:12 - 00:23:11:15
Daniel Franco
That's awesome. Oh, since I've seen this clip to where?

00:23:11:15 - 00:23:13:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And total respect.

00:23:13:15 - 00:23:28:16
Daniel Franco
That's brilliant. So, okay, so Monae, growing up reading all the books, where does life take you? At what point did you decide, right? Education is my thing. Was it was it early years or was it when you were around 21?

00:23:29:16 - 00:23:41:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's such an interesting thing for a lot of people. First and family. When you think about going to university, what do you study? And for a lot of families, they want to see a kind of an outcome.

00:23:41:06 - 00:23:41:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Mhm.

00:23:42:00 - 00:23:57:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So it's interesting. I went to uni, my dad wanted me to do a science degree and I said, No, I'm not going to do science. Great. He's a bit disappointed, but I married a scientist. That's great. That's and I said, I don't want to do a science degree, I don't know what I want to do. And I went along and asked them inquiries and they said, Well, what do you like doing?

00:23:57:27 - 00:24:00:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I said, I really like arguing and just thinking of.

00:24:00:25 - 00:24:01:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Different things, but.

00:24:01:14 - 00:24:02:21
Daniel Franco
Questioning is probably a better.

00:24:03:09 - 00:24:08:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Argument, she said. And they said, You should think about philosophy. Yeah, right.

00:24:08:03 - 00:24:14:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I went, Oh, what's that? And I said, It's just asking the questions often that people can't answer. Right?

00:24:15:05 - 00:24:15:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And like.

00:24:15:27 - 00:24:17:08
Daniel Franco
Why are the aliens looking at me?

00:24:17:26 - 00:24:32:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Looking at me? And history helps you to understand and some of the context for that. So I thought, Oh, that's great, and I'll do those too. And my parents have great parents. They're fantastic. They say, Well, what are you going to do with that? Right? What are you going to do with that? And I thought, Oh, okay, what am I going to do with that?

00:24:33:07 - 00:24:53:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I feel actually, I've been always raised in a context in which people were generously teaching me to read. They were so generous in giving me the opportunity to go to the library or supporting my reading. I should teach education should go with those two things because it's not just enough to ask questions for yourself and enjoy that for yourself.

00:24:54:12 - 00:25:03:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
If you could help other people to do that, or you could encourage other people to benefit from what you've benefited from, then that would be a really good thing. So yeah, I did a teaching degree and I'm really proud of it.

00:25:04:08 - 00:25:13:25
Daniel Franco
Fabulous. Yeah, I've been in your office and there is a wall. I think it was two walls. It almost, isn't it? It's two walls full of books.

00:25:13:25 - 00:25:14:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's been.

00:25:14:14 - 00:25:15:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Described by.

00:25:15:26 - 00:25:17:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
A wonderful person to the university.

00:25:17:23 - 00:25:18:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
As a book.

00:25:18:05 - 00:25:22:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hug. You get hugged by the book. It's a it's a wonderful.

00:25:22:05 - 00:25:28:03
Daniel Franco
It would be the my favorite place I've been in a long time other than like the Mortlock wing or something like that.

00:25:28:03 - 00:25:31:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's it's a miniature. More like it, isn't it? It's really it's.

00:25:31:10 - 00:25:32:00
Daniel Franco
Amazing.

00:25:32:00 - 00:25:33:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, It's a great office.

00:25:33:13 - 00:25:34:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And people always ask me, Have you.

00:25:34:23 - 00:25:35:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Read them all?

00:25:35:10 - 00:25:38:17
Daniel Franco
Yes, yes, that's up. I think that was the question I asked you.

00:25:38:21 - 00:25:41:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, they asked us the most common question. Have you read them?

00:25:41:09 - 00:25:51:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yes. And others. And then people will often go up to the shelf. I had a meeting yesterday and they said, Oh, you've read this book. And they pulled it off and they started talking to me about how important that book was for.

00:25:51:19 - 00:25:52:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Them, which was great.

00:25:52:26 - 00:25:54:19
Daniel Franco
Yeah, I think I did the exact same thing.

00:25:54:19 - 00:25:58:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's a great thing. It is. Yeah.

00:25:58:17 - 00:26:17:03
Daniel Franco
So moving through your career, you've you study and you become a teacher and you start educating the world with had it. How did you become this globally regarded philosopher?

00:26:17:16 - 00:26:20:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You don't you don't.

00:26:20:12 - 00:26:21:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Seek those things.

00:26:22:02 - 00:26:30:20
Daniel Franco
That's, that's the, that's the, that's the point. So you how do you become something without even knowing it was probably even a thing.

00:26:30:21 - 00:26:32:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think that's the thing you.

00:26:33:16 - 00:26:59:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think if you genuinely ask the questions that are important to you, but I have to credit, I've always believed that students that I've taught and the teachers that I've worked with at all levels of education have often asked the most important and profound questions, and that helps you to sharpen up your thinking. And so I have to credit actually the students and the teachers that I've worked with and lecturers and professors who've really asked me questions.

00:26:59:13 - 00:27:17:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I thought, yeah, that's a really excellent question and how would I answer that? And so you are given that generosity of people helping you to think about things, but it's what you do with it that counts, right? People are telling you interesting things all the time, but are you thinking about what they've said to you? Are you doing something good with it?

00:27:17:20 - 00:27:39:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So I guess interestingly enough, I started writing theory and people don't that's not very useful enough. That actually theory is really useful. It's extraordinarily useful because what a history is and what people do with them, pretty much every place on earth with it, where people people make histories, but they make them in lots of different whys. There is not one history.

00:27:39:04 - 00:27:39:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
No.

00:27:39:17 - 00:27:59:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In the world. And it's a really intriguing question. Why is there more than one way of doing history and why do people do all kinds of things in the name of history, including violence? Right. So really important questions like that, I thought don't really want to get a grip on those questions. And so, you know, just step by step, writing, writing books, some of which are very technical.

00:27:59:03 - 00:28:16:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I keep getting that feedback bit technical and, you know, might be getting more accessible as I go along. But just writing books and I found really important them that were really situated in the teaching that I was doing as well and trying to answer the questions the students were exploring with me just leads to a string of books.

00:28:16:09 - 00:28:38:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And interestingly enough, then I become an administrator and you know, the volume of books I produce goes down. But in philosophy, it's it's not how much you do, it's whether it's good that counts. And interestingly enough, I then took a year out in 2019. I'd been Deputy Vice-Chancellor academic for eight years and I thought, I've done maybe I've really done my bit, I've done really interesting things, I just need a breather.

00:28:38:06 - 00:28:45:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I took a breather and I just did research for a year and I found when I reconnected with my colleagues that I'd kind of aged into my field.

00:28:46:22 - 00:28:47:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So people had been.

00:28:47:27 - 00:29:07:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Reading my books all along and they were describing me as Van Winkle. You've come back to write these books and now you're here again. And it was just a remarkable experience. People just saying, actually, we're finding this really interesting. Had you thought about doing that or doing that? And so 2019, lots of people around the world were saying, oh, gosh, we really use your books.

00:29:07:03 - 00:29:12:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I had not been keeping track of that. So it crept up on me in a way, and.

00:29:13:08 - 00:29:13:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That.

00:29:13:12 - 00:29:14:08
Daniel Franco
Must have been humbling.

00:29:14:24 - 00:29:24:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's extraordinarily humbling. And you still have this disassociation when people say you're good at something, you got, I'm getting better. I like to say to people, you peak in philosophy when you're 95.

00:29:24:17 - 00:29:25:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You.

00:29:26:01 - 00:29:33:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Might be getting better. That's not to say that I'm not good, but to say that I've got so much more to learn and I'm going to get better as I go on.

00:29:33:00 - 00:29:35:05
Daniel Franco
There's things that you haven't even thought of yet.

00:29:35:07 - 00:29:52:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I haven't even thought about it. And that's the thing that I love about it, is that, you know, and often in philosophy you write something and people would disagree with you profoundly. And you have to explain to people that's not a bad thing. It's actually a really good thing when people write critical reviews of your books and engage really critically, that's actually a compliment for your work.

00:29:52:28 - 00:29:56:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So, you know, people said that they loved everything that you wrote. You'd be in deep trouble.

00:29:56:18 - 00:29:56:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:29:57:21 - 00:30:00:09
Daniel Franco
You want them to question because that's exactly what you do.

00:30:00:16 - 00:30:13:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. And to say I don't agree with you and you go, That's excellent. Why don't you agree with me? But yeah, it just kind of crept up on me and it's still creeping up on me. And I still say to people, I don't think I've peaked yet and I think I've peaked yet, which is interesting.

00:30:13:22 - 00:30:44:26
Daniel Franco
You we've talked about question questions a lot, right? And the quality of and there's something I say to my children all the time. The quality of the question you ask will be or the questions you ask will be the quality of your life. Right. And I do honestly and truly believe that. So turn your brain to ask quality questions, I think is why I really love this podcast, because it's actually helped me over you listen to podcasts, number one, it's horrible compared to podcasts you get.

00:30:45:05 - 00:31:17:21
Daniel Franco
That's right. And it is a muscle where as a child you are born curious, you sticking your finger into the PowerPoints. You don't. You know what I mean? You pick it up. Mind you, putting everything in your mouth, you curious about it all? At what point in in life does the curiosity move to the side? And we see this quite a bit, you know, in parents saying, don't put that down, stop doing that.

00:31:18:06 - 00:31:35:21
Daniel Franco
And we're stifling the curious nature of of the human being. What can we do as as humans to encourage curiosity within children, within adults, within everyone within the community? What can we do?

00:31:36:04 - 00:31:56:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, it can be difficult when you're a parent and you're getting questions like a firehose. Why is this? Why is it that it's really hard? There's no quota on questions and so young. Some young people will ask a lot of questions and it's tiring. But it's really important to think if every one of those potentially they're just setting up an endless they want to talk to you.

00:31:57:17 - 00:31:58:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
All day long.

00:31:58:01 - 00:32:02:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Asking lots of questions. I always say to people when they're asking this question, what they really saying is, I love you.

00:32:02:06 - 00:32:04:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right. Yeah. If we just understood.

00:32:04:07 - 00:32:11:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It that way. Yeah, then it's not tiring. Yeah, it is. But it's hard when you're a parent. You've had not as much sleep as you want, and they're just endlessly asking you the.

00:32:11:17 - 00:32:12:16
Daniel Franco
Attention they see.

00:32:12:18 - 00:32:29:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right. But it's how you harness that. And so there are some really tremendously good books written for young people on philosophy. And kids are often asking the questions we don't know the answers to as well. So respecting that and going looking at the answer together, you know, I remember when I was in grade two, I said, you know what?

00:32:29:26 - 00:32:30:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
If this.

00:32:30:29 - 00:32:33:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is just a crumb in the pocket of a giant.

00:32:34:24 - 00:32:35:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or if.

00:32:35:14 - 00:32:37:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You just said, Yeah, right.

00:32:37:05 - 00:32:42:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, I know. And I thought amazing. You know, she would just you right? Yeah.

00:32:42:22 - 00:32:57:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Moving on. And it still sits with me. Mm hmm. Maybe we are a crumb in the pocket of a giant. I still this little kid just saying I don't, you know? And then I was thinking, Oh, gosh, what do we get squashed or emptied out by the jaw? And then I was really worried about it. So existentially, really?

00:32:57:14 - 00:32:59:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. You know, nine year old.

00:32:59:26 - 00:33:00:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:33:00:22 - 00:33:14:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, we could be extinguish extinguished in a moment. Kids can take these things really seriously and they can become anxious about all kinds of things. But as sites, you got to forgive yourself as a parent because it can be really exhausting. Yeah.

00:33:14:12 - 00:33:15:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just deal with it. No.

00:33:16:01 - 00:33:36:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But I always say to kids, it's not quota. And you got to say that I like that. When you're in meetings with people, there are no stupid questions. They're only great questions. If you need to ask a question, you had to ask it for a reason. And when you're asking a question, you're saying, I care about this. Yeah, I care about it.

00:33:37:00 - 00:33:58:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so you as a leader have to recognize that for what it is, which is I care about this. And if you're not too tired, then give hopefully try not to be too smart, but be wise and say, I don't need to answer that question for you. How do you think you would answer that question? How can I help lead you us together to tackle with that question, which is important to you?

00:33:58:12 - 00:34:01:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Clearly.

00:34:01:28 - 00:34:30:22
Daniel Franco
So that that response of not having to answer the question had become what it seems to me is like it's not something that you can just turn on and go, right, I'm going to be wise here. It's experience. It's it's being in the trenches, it's making mistakes, it's making errors, it's receiving feedback. It's all of the above. How can you fast track that?

00:34:30:22 - 00:34:31:25
Daniel Franco
Is that even possible?

00:34:32:01 - 00:34:34:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, let's be clear that I don't think I am wise.

00:34:34:29 - 00:34:36:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And if you.

00:34:36:07 - 00:34:38:21
Daniel Franco
Don't think you're wise and I've got no hope in.

00:34:39:09 - 00:34:40:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Think, I think any of us are truly.

00:34:40:19 - 00:34:43:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Wise. But I always say to people, smart isn't wise.

00:34:43:21 - 00:34:44:20
Daniel Franco
I agree with that.

00:34:44:21 - 00:35:08:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Smart is not wise, Right? It's not how much you know or how quickly you speak, whether you're no more facts and somebody else. That's not lies. The wise person knows when not to speak and when to listen and when to be judicious about what they say. And that is something that none of us ever perfect. We have our whole lives to learn how to do that.

00:35:09:00 - 00:35:10:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And, you know, you just.

00:35:10:04 - 00:35:11:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You I don't.

00:35:11:28 - 00:35:18:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Some meetings. I'm terrible at that. What's the question? Because you just know the answer. Yeah. You really just want to get in and solve the.

00:35:18:21 - 00:35:20:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Problem really quickly.

00:35:20:05 - 00:35:38:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But that's not why. So you have to pull yourself up all the time and remind yourself to take that deep breath. Yeah, the trees grow slowly around here and the trees grow slowly around here and sometimes allowing people to space to work through things. Having said that, yeah, my colleagues would say, you don't always practice that.

00:35:39:00 - 00:35:41:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Absolutely. I agree with that. Yeah, have.

00:35:41:19 - 00:35:50:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To learn to do that. But just even thinking about that and aspiring to do that great makes us better. Yeah.

00:35:51:04 - 00:36:13:21
Daniel Franco
I went, I saw a speaker last night. I won't say the name, but I remember thinking to myself, God, I wish I could speak and articulate in the way that they do and then the way that they have and this comparison when looking at wise people, is that something that helps you move forward?

00:36:14:13 - 00:36:16:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I was going to ask you the same thing.

00:36:16:03 - 00:36:40:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Why you thought that, because, you know, all of us are able to do this, but we sometimes see ourselves short and we look at other people. We the are they really charismatic or they know a lot or they can stand up in a black skivvy and do a podcast that I can't do, or they're taller than I am or whatever, and we sell yourself short all the time.

00:36:40:04 - 00:36:48:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So my question back to you is why? Why you think you thought that? Because I hear person that's thinking deeply about things.

00:36:48:21 - 00:36:49:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:36:49:23 - 00:37:18:21
Daniel Franco
I think for me it's about who I aspire to be. And I don't. I'm like you. I don't think there's an end game here. It's not it's not one day that I'll click the button and I am that person. It's more about I wish I was in more control of my emotions in any given time. Yeah, I think that's probably and you just hear the way that someone would carry them has carried themselves and you go, Actually there's something I could role model off.

00:37:19:07 - 00:37:21:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But she wasn't as amazing that you know that about yourself.

00:37:22:06 - 00:37:23:02
Daniel Franco
Yeah, well, that's true.

00:37:23:11 - 00:37:39:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Give yourself a moment to say, Gee, that's great that you know that about yourself. And when you know that about yourself, then the next step is to know when you're at your best with that self. And when when you're not at your best with that self. I think that's really that's really important. You know, not everybody knows this.

00:37:39:17 - 00:37:40:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'm autistic.

00:37:41:08 - 00:37:42:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Okay. Okay.

00:37:43:05 - 00:38:03:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So that means I'm different. I have superpower ears and I have vulnerabilities as well. But it's about understanding what you're really good at and what you're not good at. And actually just giving yourself some compassion and saying in these contexts, under these circumstances, I'm not going to be at my best. And but under these circumstances and these contexts, I am going to be at my best.

00:38:04:08 - 00:38:14:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And how can I upon that, to actually make myself even stronger or better or more compassionate or more caring? All the things that I think are important in life.

00:38:14:24 - 00:38:20:03
Daniel Franco
Thank you. It's yeah, I think we are our own worst critics, right?

00:38:20:12 - 00:38:41:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We can be. We really can. And we're looking at our past all the time and we're thinking about our future obsessively. So our temporality is often impatiently leading, leaning into the future when we actually might want to take a deep breath and think about our past is a luxurious place because we've got more of that to think through and think about.

00:38:42:00 - 00:38:55:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We've got both the past and, the future and actually the present, and we should think about all those things. So if we're always leaning into the future, then we might not be giving our past the credit that it deserves and the good things that we've done in our past.

00:38:55:09 - 00:39:20:22
Daniel Franco
You perfect segue way into the into the next question which I had there, which was when we previously spoke, we we would talking about the power of the past and how it helps shape our thinking for the future. And one of my I am a Marcus, I like the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. I'm pretty I go with the mainstream stuff.

00:39:20:22 - 00:39:21:07
Daniel Franco
I don't know.

00:39:21:25 - 00:39:23:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Nothing wrong with them. Right? Yeah.

00:39:23:29 - 00:39:54:18
Daniel Franco
But but in his book well, in the book Meditations, there was a quote this is look back over the past with its changing empire that rose and fell. You can foresee the future too and we spoke about this last time when we caught up. Why does looking back and you were just alluding it to it then why does looking back provide such a great foundation for when we're looking forward to this?

00:39:54:21 - 00:40:16:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think there's at least two ways of answering the question when we look back and not just at our own back. Sometimes we're looking back from safety, so we might be looking at a history that's not ours. And there's some early historians who describe it in a way that's like a test vehicle under control conditions, right? You can read this history and you don't need to go through the pain and suffering that these people went through.

00:40:16:28 - 00:40:26:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
If you just read this, you learn something definite. So there's that. That's an old tendency in history to think about as a place that encourages us to reflect, that we don't need to do things.

00:40:27:14 - 00:40:28:06
Daniel Franco
Learn from others.

00:40:28:06 - 00:40:30:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Learn from others. So this is this piece.

00:40:30:04 - 00:40:33:01
Daniel Franco
That's why that's why biographies so, so well.

00:40:33:14 - 00:40:34:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Histories, all of the above.

00:40:34:19 - 00:40:58:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right. The second reason I think, and why I love histories. Histories are often not just statements about the way the world has been. They're the way the world ought to be. People are really interested in telling you things. So that builds on that other point that if I highlight particular things, I'm emphasizing to you what I think the world could be or ought to be not was, but ought to be.

00:40:58:01 - 00:41:21:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And when I use the word ought, I'm thinking future. So I love histories because more often than not, they are statements about the future as much as they are statements now. And right now they powerfully together and they are sources of encouragement and dismay for people. So yeah, they just and that's that's been history for a long time.

00:41:21:08 - 00:41:21:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Yeah.

00:41:22:05 - 00:41:48:08
Daniel Franco
And you touched on this before. I think that my toxic trite you know, this my toxic trait is I'm always thinking about the future and and and minimally considering the current and the past. And so I'm laughing with this next question. I'm going to open a bit of Pandora's box here, But again, I'm going to quote something from Marcus Aurelius, which is every thing we hear is an opinion, not a fact.

00:41:48:08 - 00:42:08:15
Daniel Franco
And everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. So my question is from a leadership position, how do we consider all the histories of those who are that we serve and not be blinded by our own perspective, our own history, our own opinion?

00:42:08:19 - 00:42:36:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Did you just hear what a great question that was? That's awesome. What a great question. So we can't step out of our own self. That's the first thing. So if we think that, you know that we can run our selves out of the equation, we can't. Okay, So we're just going to have to give that away. Because if you if you think that you can, then I don't know what kind of conversation we hear with both of us and brains and that's being programed somebody else.

00:42:36:00 - 00:43:15:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right. And why would we think that we don't need to think that. So I have to acknowledge myself and be comfortable with who I am. But it is a very powerful thing to walk into a room and sit down and to realize that not everybody is in the same has the same historical center of gravity. Right? It's a really critical thing because if you're wanting to talk about the future or even to understand what's happening in the present, if you don't acknowledge that people are in different places with you, then your ability to agree on things and to move forward on really positive things, it's going to be more challenging than you might otherwise

00:43:15:14 - 00:43:41:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
think. You might have to force through things. You might be using leadership tactics that are really more management rather than leadership, because you haven't gone to that place that the person the person is. So it's just a normal thing for historians to say There are lots of histories and they conflict with one another. So I'm quite comfortable with multiple histories and I'm quite comfortable that not all of them are compatible and some of them are mutually exclusive.

00:43:41:27 - 00:44:02:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's just life, right? Yeah, but let's give credit to those things and acknowledge that when somebody walks into the room, their history may be complex because they might have been taken away from their family. They might not know who the family are, they might have experienced violence in their upbringing. They might not have had his fortune in upbringing that I did.

00:44:03:00 - 00:44:24:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And that will sit with that person potentially. It might not always be at the forefront, but it might sit with that person. Other people, it doesn't they you know, they past is they they just leaning into the future like they tried their time travelers. They had five years in advance. Yeah. And then you've got other people that are really sitting meditatively with stuff that's been happening to their families for generations.

00:44:25:17 - 00:44:42:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And as a leader, I think you need to give credit to that because that's called including yes, that's part of inclusion is to understand it's not just what you look like or what your gender is. It's actually that you might be coming different historical positions as well as cultural positions.

00:44:42:05 - 00:45:22:02
Daniel Franco
So how do I be inclusive or listen to those opinions? Or in a world where time, money, speed, all these things come in and through it, add to the complexity, add to the boiling pot. Do you know what I mean? Like as a leader, it's very well, I think it's very easy to sometimes get frustrated because things aren't moving at the pace in which you need, and those are external threats that are present that I don't have time to consider your opinion or how this is.

00:45:22:02 - 00:45:27:16
Daniel Franco
I think it's a constant it's a constant game that's going on in my head.

00:45:28:04 - 00:45:30:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You can afford to take your time because the trees grow slowly.

00:45:30:27 - 00:45:31:20
Daniel Franco
Yeah, that's.

00:45:31:20 - 00:45:31:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
True.

00:45:32:02 - 00:45:35:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And a friend once said to me, You notice the paramedics never run to the ambulance.

00:45:36:13 - 00:45:37:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right. Yeah.

00:45:37:22 - 00:45:38:18
Daniel Franco
So why is it.

00:45:39:23 - 00:45:40:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Because if you fall over.

00:45:40:29 - 00:45:42:07
Daniel Franco
Within, you can look and help anyone.

00:45:42:12 - 00:45:47:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, having to treat yourself right. It's a very simple piece of logic. Yeah, it's actually really, really simple. Yeah.

00:45:47:27 - 00:46:06:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So sometimes when we feel most constrained in time, that's where we sometimes need to resist the most the push to resolve things. So if we feel that there's a frenetic problem sometimes actually just having a bit of a deep breath, not always as sometimes taking that deep breath, actually it helps you to solve the problem a bit more effectively.

00:46:06:22 - 00:46:15:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But if you run, run, run, run, run, you might not see. Having said that, if people are litigating your choice of biscuits at morning tea, going to be a limit.

00:46:15:01 - 00:46:24:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
On what you're going to argue for because you said sometimes you just say, okay, note and thank you very much for that because people can have opinions about. Yeah, that's fine. I agree.

00:46:24:16 - 00:46:44:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But sometimes I think in business we feel tremendously pressured, right? We think everything is a crisis and everything's under pressure. When you squeeze yourself that way, you can run to a tactical place and you can make good tactical responses, but you might be doing yourself out of the opportunity to actually take just a bit of a deep breath and think a bit more strategically.

00:46:44:22 - 00:46:55:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Even better than that. You know, you could be using the furniture around you to preempt some of that. So I always say to people, I love a good risk assessment because it's the world's best opportunity statement.

00:46:55:25 - 00:46:56:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right? Yeah.

00:46:56:14 - 00:47:17:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And it's not some compliance thing where you're writing going, Oh, yeah, we need to think of five things that going to be a risk is actually genuinely an invitation to think about things that could be different in our world. And so taking those very ordinary things and saying, how do I make use of those very everyday things to get people to think not just tactically but strategically, as well.

00:47:18:04 - 00:47:41:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And in the moments where we feel pressured sometimes actually just giving ourselves the grace and compassion to take a deep breath, even just saying to people, just stand up for a moment, have a you know, by a break, come back, take 5 minutes, or when you're meeting with somebody who's really distressed about something or upset actually taking the time to have a cup of tea with them, even just putting a cup of tea in front of them, signals that they've got at least the length of time of a cup of tea.

00:47:41:24 - 00:47:59:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And sometimes people feel they get really stressed about having meetings with you because they think they're going to be in your office. You're going to say, no, get out. Right. And they're not going to be heard. So we measure time in cups of tea, multiple cups of teas. We allow people the grace to have a bit more time.

00:47:59:25 - 00:48:09:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I think that means that if we sometimes we run, sometimes we walk. Some people are running, some are walking simultaneously. You've got some of that diversity that makes for good business decisions. To be honest.

00:48:11:19 - 00:48:42:05
Daniel Franco
It's funny because I would I would consider myself quite self-aware. Yet in the times where things are frenetic, I sometimes lose control of of the ability to manage the frenetic ness, if that makes sense. And the team and everyone around me. This is something that even when I was playing sport as a, as a junior, it was, it was always one thing that it's like the bull out of the gate sort of thing.

00:48:42:05 - 00:48:55:18
Daniel Franco
So I just need to go and fix I need to do something here. If I'm not doing something, then I feel like I'm not achieving as opposed to what you're saying, which is actually you're better off doing nothing or less.

00:48:55:18 - 00:49:09:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's we don't always have to win everything as quickly as possible. Right? So, you know, we're it's interesting, some of the Ghana elders have said to me, you know, you're trained in school to get there fastest first.

00:49:09:18 - 00:49:09:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right?

00:49:10:11 - 00:49:37:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And sometimes that works because in business, you want to be competitive. You want to be out of the market and doing things that nobody else has done. You want to be first to market, you want all of those things. But getting to that point sometimes will involve luxurious moments where you've taken the price and all you can do is forgive yourself when you're not quite at your best in those moments and just say, Well, next time could I just do a bit of that rather than get myself from 0 to 100%?

00:49:37:07 - 00:49:38:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Could I just do a little bit of.

00:49:38:12 - 00:49:39:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That and build on it and.

00:49:39:11 - 00:50:02:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Build on it from there? And I think that's important, but also encourage other people to do that because, you know, when things are frenetic, some people can be really overwhelmed. Yeah, respond in different ways. And often the most important thing you can do is to work with them, break the problem down, and just smile with people and be compassionate and be inclusive and help them to deal.

00:50:02:02 - 00:50:13:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And sometimes you know, Rob MacLaine's, he's a wonderful man, he said, sometimes when you're dealing with massive, ambiguous situations, just ask the most audacious question and forgive yourself when you it wrong.

00:50:13:03 - 00:50:13:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:50:13:14 - 00:50:31:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So forgiveness and audacity are probably two really great things, because if you take your time to think about it, you might corner the market in a different light. You might see things from a different corner. You might see the future in a different way, or you might actually be thinking 20 years in advance. If you give yourself a little bit of time to do that.

00:50:31:28 - 00:50:42:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So in your life, if you can cultivate moments of frenetic ness and a little bit of deep breath, yeah, work on all the spades that are available to us.

00:50:42:06 - 00:50:43:13
Daniel Franco
There's no one size, is there?

00:50:43:13 - 00:50:55:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
No one size and no. And as I say, you've got the past, the present and the future to work with you for those things. So why would you, if you were playing a sport and you just only did one cricket shot over and over again, you'd be bowled.

00:50:55:19 - 00:50:56:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Out? Yeah, yeah.

00:50:56:21 - 00:50:58:08
Daniel Franco
I'll figure it out pretty quickly when.

00:50:58:08 - 00:51:02:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I pretty quickly. So in business, don't just use one shot. Mm hmm.

00:51:03:03 - 00:51:07:17
Daniel Franco
Yeah, I like that. Sporting analogies always win me over. So thanks for that one.

00:51:08:20 - 00:51:09:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So on.

00:51:09:23 - 00:51:30:25
Daniel Franco
But so flipside. Okay, so I'm going to tell you a story to ask this question. So I was in Fiji recently with a family and we went, as you do in Fiji, you go out to all the islands and whatnot. We got on this beautiful sailboat and we went out to one of these, you know, amazing little little island when we went scuba diving and everything, it was a great day.

00:51:31:14 - 00:51:54:09
Daniel Franco
On the way back, the weather changed. So open sailboat, there's about 50, 60 people on board, maybe 2030 crew. The the the changed and it just it got windy the water got to be choppy choppy for me anyway for someone that hasn't been in a situation very often.

00:51:54:27 - 00:51:55:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:51:55:29 - 00:52:30:04
Daniel Franco
Correct. Yeah. And yeah. And that's the thing And my daughter sitting there, she's she's almost at the point of vomiting, rain coming in sideways like, you know, everyone's just drenched and cruise running around chaotically trying to pick things and stop things from falling over the edge. Some people are freaking out. Everything's going on. And I look over and I look at the captain and he's standing there behind this will, holding and holding on the wheel, you know, that's steering the boat.

00:52:30:18 - 00:52:42:12
Daniel Franco
He's looking forward into the distance and nothing is facing him at all. Nothing. And and I sat there in that moment, and I just thought to myself.

00:52:42:12 - 00:52:43:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Like, that's.

00:52:43:21 - 00:53:11:08
Daniel Franco
Hagrid is that's what I want to be. And I and I think so too. The question of frenetic ness where we come back is what about in a world where everyone else is frenetic? How do you not get involved? And, you know, I've often been described as someone with an overactive empathy gland, like I get I feel the the I feel the emotion in the room and I find myself getting caught up in it.

00:53:12:15 - 00:53:14:19
Daniel Franco
How do you stay calm in those moments?

00:53:15:03 - 00:53:17:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
How do you know whether the captain wasn't freaking out.

00:53:17:15 - 00:53:20:05
Daniel Franco
And what time? He looked pretty calm.

00:53:20:12 - 00:53:23:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
He looked pretty calm, but he might have at least that it's the.

00:53:23:09 - 00:53:24:10
Daniel Franco
Perception right.

00:53:24:22 - 00:53:29:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Now of, you know, things he could have been thinking, Oh, crikey, You know, but he might.

00:53:29:08 - 00:53:32:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Have been thinking, Look, I need to look out for everybody else. Yeah, right.

00:53:32:10 - 00:53:33:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the first thing you got.

00:53:33:25 - 00:53:48:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To say is, well, maybe in moments we might be just the thing that's most of where we need to be, most aware of who we is and how we can be helpful to other people in those contexts so we can privately be freaking.

00:53:48:03 - 00:53:49:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Out. So if he's.

00:53:49:05 - 00:53:50:17
Daniel Franco
Calm, everyone else.

00:53:50:17 - 00:53:51:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Feels Well.

00:53:51:22 - 00:53:54:17
Daniel Franco
Isn't that, isn't that just leadership? One on one right there?

00:53:54:29 - 00:53:55:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:53:55:25 - 00:54:01:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
If I smile, everybody else smiles. Yeah. If I include people. Other people include people.

00:54:01:05 - 00:54:02:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. That's what leadership.

00:54:02:28 - 00:54:19:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is. Is really just saying, you know, you might have a whole range of internal emotions. I think I'm not very good at this or I'm not going to do it well. But actually other people say, Gee, you really included me when you did that or you remembered my name or you smiled at me, or you really encourage me, or you just think, okay, that's cool.

00:54:19:06 - 00:54:21:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's really cool. We don't always.

00:54:21:01 - 00:54:21:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Get it all.

00:54:21:13 - 00:54:25:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right all the time, though, right? We could be 90% calm and 10% go.

00:54:25:05 - 00:54:26:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, nice flapping.

00:54:27:03 - 00:54:53:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, really Well, but the truth is, even the 90% is great effort. Yeah, it's a great effort. Right. Even those moments were just small, everyday moments. I always say to people the way you open a door, you smile and people great, somebody in the supermarket, those are leadership moments. That doesn't mean that there's a huge burden on all of us to think of every single moment as being right.

00:54:53:16 - 00:55:14:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But think of all the small things that we do, which is so great for other people and the impact that they can have. People say to me, cos she smiled at me and I'm just going, Yeah, because I'm so pleased to see you. And that's awesome. It made me feel so confident work when I wasn't sure, you know, So the captain could be standing there behind the wheel looking really confident.

00:55:14:10 - 00:55:16:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And that's often our images of the guy.

00:55:16:23 - 00:55:18:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, that's what the hell I'm doing.

00:55:18:02 - 00:55:35:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
The really confident thing. But sometimes it's the person who just says, Hi, how you going? And smiles at you. He's the equivalent of the captain. Yeah, I agree. And you don't have to do it over 4 hours. Whatever the length of your journey was, even just a five minute interaction with somebody can be equivalent of that captain saying the seas are pretty choppy right now.

00:55:35:21 - 00:55:38:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, but I'm with you.

00:55:38:01 - 00:55:48:07
Daniel Franco
It's the power of a smile. I heard. I heard a story recently and it was by the I think it was the world's best coffee barista.

00:55:48:28 - 00:55:50:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Wow. That's an awesome.

00:55:50:15 - 00:55:51:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Achievement.

00:55:51:07 - 00:56:14:17
Daniel Franco
Or something like that. It was. It was it was one of the world's leading coffee baristas. I don't know the exact title, but he said the rate. But he made a coffee and he hands it over and he smiles as he hands it over before like talking espresso. And he smiles and he hands it over before before they drink it.

00:56:15:06 - 00:56:21:04
Daniel Franco
And he watches them with a smiling face as they drink it. And that is the best coffee I've ever had.

00:56:21:09 - 00:56:21:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right.

00:56:22:06 - 00:56:46:20
Daniel Franco
And and he said, it's scientifically proven that if you smile as you hand over coffee, that the coffee will taste better. And then and so I took that. And I think about it all the time and I'm like when you are asking someone to help you with something and you're smiling or you're in a courteous way, it's so much more effective than if it is, Hey, do this for me.

00:56:46:25 - 00:56:56:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hurry along. Yeah. Signaling that the person's a transaction. Having said that, I do get feedback that I have very serious face and my response is, okay, cut me a break.

00:56:57:03 - 00:57:03:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And Google philosophy and tell me whether those guys are having a good time. Yeah, you know, and the only woman that you're going to find there.

00:57:03:18 - 00:57:04:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is Amani.

00:57:04:06 - 00:57:07:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Granger. Yeah, this is the Philosopher's Stone. There's no women.

00:57:07:20 - 00:57:10:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
On there, and they're all guys looking tremendously.

00:57:10:04 - 00:57:18:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Serious. I just caught me a break on last night to thorough my brows every now, and I'm just thinking. So I do get a bit of that feedback and I.

00:57:18:17 - 00:57:19:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just say I can't smile.

00:57:19:26 - 00:57:21:10
Daniel Franco
I call that bitch resting faces.

00:57:21:27 - 00:57:28:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's called philosophers now, you know, it's philosophers and women can have lots of surprises. Well, yeah, which is.

00:57:28:24 - 00:57:34:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, I'm just really thinking about something, and I can't be maintaining every muscle on my thighs.

00:57:34:06 - 00:57:35:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, well, I'm thinking. Well, it's.

00:57:35:24 - 00:57:39:08
Daniel Franco
Funny. You said it's hard to think about something in depth while smiling.

00:57:39:12 - 00:57:41:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I know. Yeah, I know.

00:57:41:05 - 00:57:52:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Sometimes you just really caught up in the thought, and he's really reflecting on something. And because you're doing that, people just think, Oh, gosh, I'm in trouble. She looks really? Yeah. I'm just thinking yeah that that might.

00:57:52:13 - 00:57:55:09
Daniel Franco
Cool that the glass head you can see the cogs turning in.

00:57:55:09 - 00:57:55:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

00:57:55:22 - 00:57:57:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or some people say your astral plane.

00:57:57:24 - 00:58:06:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Seem to have gone to another place. Fine. Whatever. Whatever you have you ever you want to describe that. But hopefully some good thinking is going on through him.

00:58:07:09 - 00:58:47:04
Daniel Franco
So the business that I run is Synergy IKEA and we're a consulting firm that specializes in organizational change and really complex change. And think about that from the human element is where the complexity comes in, right? And with so much change going on and we're going to get into some of the changes happening in your world shortly, but why when we're embarking on change, we as a business, we understand perspectives, is one of the most important things to understand when when you are embarking.

00:58:47:04 - 00:59:10:09
Daniel Franco
And we use a systems thinking approach, which I know you appreciate and we often I often use the example of a street corner which is in the middle of a street. There is a car accident in the middle of that street and monitor one corner and I'm on another. And we see this car accident and you saw this little black cat that ran across the road.

00:59:10:09 - 00:59:47:26
Daniel Franco
And I saw the guy in the back car on his mobile phone and we saw the exact same car accident, exact same crash from a different perspective with a different reason. And none of us are wrong. And I think for us, that's really important when we're embarking on organizational change to understand the perspectives of all. I guess the question I have for you is when we are embarking on change, what is the role of a leader when trying to understand all those perspectives?

00:59:48:03 - 00:59:53:16
Daniel Franco
How do we help make sense of the changes that are coming in your opinion?

00:59:54:13 - 00:59:57:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's it's not standing up on the helm and saying.

00:59:57:27 - 00:59:58:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Follow me.

00:59:59:00 - 01:00:23:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right. Do this and do that and do this. That's that's not what it is. When you're facing great change, that's when your leadership skills and persuasion and inclusion skills are at their highest test. Right? Because people let's think about not just that we were standing on those street corners, but how we feeling about being on those street corners, Right.

01:00:23:17 - 01:00:41:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So, you know, I might be standing on the street corner because I'm looking for a job or you might be standing on the street corner because you're in a hurry like me. And you got every red light this morning and you're trying to get to an interview. You know something? So I always go back to saying, okay, why are we standing on the different corners that we're at?

01:00:41:12 - 01:00:42:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And, you know, that's.

01:00:42:21 - 01:00:43:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
S So you were.

01:00:43:14 - 01:00:44:21
Daniel Franco
Even going deeper again.

01:00:44:21 - 01:00:55:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I think it's really important because when you're facing a change, people's horizons of change are really different. As I say, they're bringing different histories with them.

01:00:55:15 - 01:00:57:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Which will not come.

01:00:57:10 - 01:01:02:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is not the right word. It is who they are and what they bring to that process. And that's a magnificent contribution.

01:01:02:25 - 01:01:03:20
Daniel Franco
It's the sum of.

01:01:03:20 - 01:01:05:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
All the roles.

01:01:05:00 - 01:01:18:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Because we saw lots of different things. That's a really powerful thing for a business. But how I think about the horizon of change in the future is also different to some people think the future is right in front of their face and maybe then really anxious about what's happening and some people.

01:01:18:28 - 01:01:20:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

01:01:20:07 - 01:01:39:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That's right down the track. And they're not worried at all. And some people are thinking 50 years in advance. So you've got people again at various temporalities and some people very inclined in the future get on with it everybody. Right. It's very simple. Do this other people going, Whoa, I'm not comfortable about this. I don't understand what's going on here.

01:01:39:28 - 01:01:41:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I occasionally, like you, want to say, let's.

01:01:41:29 - 01:01:44:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Solve the problem. And we one of the.

01:01:44:29 - 01:02:02:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Things you can do as a leader is say there's a lot of different views here, but I'm hearing this and this. Is that right? Yeah. So cutting through and saying, is this the most important thing? Is this the most important thing? Is this the value that we want to hold? Who is this the value? What what are we trying to do here?

01:02:02:27 - 01:02:16:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
What's the purpose of the change? Not just because we want a change. Yeah, why are we trying to do it? And when you say why are we trying to do it? There's lots of different scale opportunities for answering what what we want to do it because we, we want to be competitive in the next six months, Right. Terrific.

01:02:16:15 - 01:02:35:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In our local market. Why? Well, because we want to be the best in the nation for this. Great, fantastic. That's another way of looking at it, actually. We want to be the best in the world. No, I want to make a difference 20 years down the track. I can answer that all those different scales. Yeah. So the most important thing as a leader is to say, Am I going to one scale all the time?

01:02:35:26 - 01:02:55:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Into an answer the question and is it a six month scale or am I actually using that 50 year scale as well? And am I only thinking locally or am I thinking globally when I'm answering because I'm using all the scales of time and space that we have to think and saying, okay, if I answer it on those four different scales, is the answer the same thing?

01:02:55:02 - 01:03:16:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Did I see the cat? Did I see the mobile phone or did I see three things? Are they mutually exclusive? How can I think about it? So it's it's giving permission for people to live those lives on the different scales that they have. And viewing that is probably the potentially the most important thing you can bring to a change is that scale dynamism that people have.

01:03:16:11 - 01:03:19:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's an asset. It's a massive asset in change.

01:03:20:02 - 01:03:20:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It is.

01:03:20:17 - 01:03:27:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Let's be honest, in change. How people feel is far more important than how they think.

01:03:27:09 - 01:03:27:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:03:28:18 - 01:03:30:09
Daniel Franco
Because it's the what's in it for me.

01:03:30:24 - 01:03:53:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, not not necessarily. All of us want to know that we loved and that we cared about. Yeah. And that people value us as people, right? Some people are. What's in it for me, that's a small group of people. Most people actually just want to know that somebody knows their name and really cares about them and is, you know, looking after them and that they will be part of the process.

01:03:53:14 - 01:03:56:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, get to speak and they'll get to be heard and they'll be respected.

01:03:56:21 - 01:03:57:26
Daniel Franco
Maslow's hierarchy in it.

01:03:58:05 - 01:04:04:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Totally, totally.

01:04:04:00 - 01:04:30:20
Daniel Franco
I think there's so much in that to unpack. Do you do you think that I mean, organizational culture is an outcome, right? And if everyone could think in the way in which you just explained, we would be living in working with many organizations whose culture is remarkably high performing. What do we need to do as a collective to get to this norm?

01:04:30:27 - 01:04:33:20
Daniel Franco
These think that way of thinking that you've just explained.

01:04:34:09 - 01:04:34:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:04:35:03 - 01:04:41:22
Daniel Franco
And you know, again, it can it goes back to the slowing of time and pressures and all the above.

01:04:41:22 - 01:05:04:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's always just a simple thing, which is performance is neither. You need directional or unique. You know, there's not one way of thinking about performance. You know, if you thought about Australia's economy, for instance, and its simplicity and our need to complexity, all it all doing the same thing is not going to solve the problem. Yeah, right. We are going to need to encourage a bit more diversification thinking and diversification of action.

01:05:05:03 - 01:05:23:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, in order to address some really macro economic issues as well as the ones that we all face individually. But if we only ever think about one solution to the problem in a hurried way in our own organizational context, then we are not perhaps using all the talents that we have to the full here.

01:05:24:13 - 01:05:26:12
Daniel Franco
I think we all get caught in that.

01:05:26:22 - 01:05:29:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We're all guilty of it. Yeah. Again, we've got to forgive ourselves.

01:05:29:26 - 01:05:43:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, but, you know, try and remember that we have these capabilities and we can use them. And some people are better at it than us. And we have to have those people around us and encourage them to speak and to be different to us and to value that difference.

01:05:43:00 - 01:06:15:25
Daniel Franco
Yeah, we're talking about leadership a lot here. And given the amount of historical research that you've done on, on, on everything historically, I guess, but more from a point of, from a philosophy philosophical point of view, what ideology or leadership style Do you look back at history and go, There's one that really resonates with me and I think could resonate with a lot of people.

01:06:16:26 - 01:06:18:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
The best answer for us to give you is I'm not sure.

01:06:19:02 - 01:06:19:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:06:19:22 - 01:06:20:03
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:06:20:12 - 01:06:41:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But I do love it when the people in the past who kind of know that they need to stand up for things and they find really ingenious ways of persisting. Yeah. In those spaces and doing differently. So the last book I've just eds on history is written from the losing side now.

01:06:41:08 - 01:06:41:19
Daniel Franco
Wow.

01:06:41:24 - 01:07:05:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Really interesting. It would be nice, right? And we say to people, it's not the polar opposite of a winning history. People use different ways of approaching the making of history when they're under existential threat, and they do that to help their history survive. Yeah. So in the literal case of the Holocaust, people wrote their archives down and they buried it in the ground because they knew that they had more chance of that material surviving.

01:07:06:21 - 01:07:26:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In other cases, people decided to write novels. So Jane Austen was an historian as well as a novelist. She wrote a History of England, and her way of coming at history was to write novels because there was no spice permitted her to be an historian in the context. So we said to people, sometimes we we can view the leadership.

01:07:26:19 - 01:07:40:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Our love is people that resourceful almost as saying the rules don't let me do this, but I can create my own opportunity here to stand up for what I believe in and to try and get change in a different way.

01:07:40:26 - 01:07:43:27
Daniel Franco
Yes. No coloring within the lines, right?

01:07:43:28 - 01:07:48:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Totally not coloring within the lines. You'd expect a philosopher to say that towards people.

01:07:48:14 - 01:07:49:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We think differently.

01:07:49:13 - 01:08:04:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah, absolutely. Is there any particular readings or strategies that you've read, though, that that you think back on and go? Actually, I really like that. And it's a philosophy that I'll leave to or work with.

01:08:05:16 - 01:08:32:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think there's particular philosophies that I really like reading. So I do like Aristotle really enjoy because, you know, he says we we we philosophy starts with wonder this notion that seeing things differently and being struck by that in the moment, recognizing that it is different, that's a really powerful observation and a really, you know, take advantage of that.

01:08:32:03 - 01:08:52:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So he's got some really interesting things about, you know, not everything that we do is by consensus. The whys also speak. Yeah, right. So he's he just has lots of thoughts. How do we think about ethics? He says, you know, I'm going to paraphrase it in really modern language, but you know, navigating to a good life is like going through a railway tunnel.

01:08:52:05 - 01:08:54:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, you can see some light at the end, but you're going to bump into the walls.

01:08:54:29 - 01:08:55:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:08:55:10 - 01:08:56:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Along the way.

01:08:56:10 - 01:08:57:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right.

01:08:57:05 - 01:09:11:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, lt's my guide you to the exit, but you're probably going to jostle, bump into things, fall over things along the way. Yeah. There's some really nice thinking in there. So I do like Aristotle. I like Hegel. I can't. I like, you know, there's just a lot.

01:09:11:14 - 01:09:12:10
Daniel Franco
It's too many to name.

01:09:12:10 - 01:09:12:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is too many.

01:09:13:14 - 01:09:36:18
Daniel Franco
Does it frustrate you, though, that, you know, you mentioned you mentioned it before with Harry Potter and Harmony Granger saying that that there is no female philosopher. And looking back at history, it almost seems as if the voice of the female philosopher has been suppressed and it's not out there for mainstream to to to learn from. Does that frustrate you?

01:09:37:03 - 01:09:41:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think it was great watching The Good Place and then featuring Hypatia in there, and I love that too.

01:09:42:01 - 01:09:42:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:09:43:04 - 01:09:53:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Woman philosopher in there. It's not frustrating. It's it's actually interesting how surprising it is for people that, you know, that you might be the first woman philosopher that they've ever met.

01:09:53:08 - 01:09:53:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hmm.

01:09:53:23 - 01:09:57:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
There was somebody I met recently said, I didn't realize we had any philosophers in Australia.

01:09:58:00 - 01:10:04:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right. So let alone a woman, I didn't realize, Oh, goodness, what do you work on? And tell me about some famous Australian.

01:10:04:06 - 01:10:13:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Philosophers and what do they do? And you know, so level of awareness can be for people because sometimes people think, well, gosh, that's a luxurious lifestyle you have. And you go, No, no, it's it.

01:10:14:07 - 01:10:19:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Can be, can be tough. Yeah. Picking up in favor of things that people don't like or thinking.

01:10:19:22 - 01:10:25:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Differently about things not always a comfortable place. Okay. Yeah. I.e. Socrates. What happened to him? Yeah Not good. Yeah.

01:10:25:29 - 01:10:28:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So you in a.

01:10:28:09 - 01:10:32:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Way, people do have stereotypes about philosophy. When you say I'm a woman philosopher, like Oh no, you're not.

01:10:32:23 - 01:10:35:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or Oh, okay.

01:10:35:21 - 01:10:49:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But most of the time they're just genuinely surprised how well you work on it. How does that work? Yeah, how did you decide to do that? And you go, there's some great women philosophers out there in the world. Yeah, phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal.

01:10:49:12 - 01:11:04:22
Daniel Franco
And you know, there's a saying that, you know, ignorance is bliss. And do you think that the more you know and the more you think, the more you have the ability to become depressed?

01:11:05:04 - 01:11:07:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:11:07:05 - 01:11:08:03
Daniel Franco
Didn't I mean like.

01:11:08:18 - 01:11:11:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, you could use some help. Some of my friends are like that because you could.

01:11:11:21 - 01:11:34:29
Daniel Franco
Sit here and I mean, you ponder the questions of the world and of the universe and the existence of, of the human race. And in life itself, I guess you would ask all those questions and almost certainly would have come. The conclusion is that wearing insignificant and that can be sort of quite draining.

01:11:35:12 - 01:11:50:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
History is not always a joyful subject. Yeah, and particularly if you if you teach or you study world history or global history and you look on large scales, it can depress some people. You just say, gosh, we're just a blink of an eye and, you know, Oh, and by the way, the sun's going to swallow the earth in due course.

01:11:50:26 - 01:11:53:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
This really depresses people long ago. That's happening a long time from now.

01:11:53:29 - 01:11:54:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, it's.

01:11:54:17 - 01:11:58:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Okay. But it does depress some people. And as I said before, you know.

01:11:59:07 - 01:12:00:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Google philosophers.

01:12:00:02 - 01:12:01:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
They don't always look joyful to be around.

01:12:01:29 - 01:12:05:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right? It's not always the case. Yeah.

01:12:05:13 - 01:12:23:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You're a joyful person to be around or that all philosophers are joyful. But I actually also think you got one life. You might as well, you know, take your time. Yeah. He's going around here. Enjoy yourself, immerse yourself in the moment and celebrate. So. Yeah. Glass half full.

01:12:23:00 - 01:12:24:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Philosopher. Yeah.

01:12:24:12 - 01:12:49:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Which doesn't make me lesser of a philosopher. No, I have to say. But I do think that sometimes that awareness of scale, I don't see it as disempowering. I see it as quite empowering because when you look at the scale history of the earth, you see, for instance, you know, a friend of mine, David Christian's big history. You see humans harnessing energy in lots of different ways and he talks about us accidental, accidental planetary managers, right.

01:12:50:01 - 01:13:08:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just by virtue of harnessing energy. And we fell into this role. Yeah. Okay. So if we fell into the role, how are we going to make good of it? So what? What's what's it possible for us, even if we didn't choose the circumstance, how can we make good of the circumstance that they're in? So you do. But you do find some people who say, I don't like reading history and I don't.

01:13:08:22 - 01:13:09:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
My philosophy depresses me.

01:13:09:21 - 01:13:12:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And I go, That's fine. That's okay. It's okay.

01:13:12:26 - 01:13:13:28
Daniel Franco
It can have that effect.

01:13:13:28 - 01:13:15:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It can have that effect.

01:13:15:25 - 01:13:17:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So, you know, but again.

01:13:17:13 - 01:13:19:15
Daniel Franco
Perspective, perspective, again, respective.

01:13:19:15 - 01:13:20:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Go on, go for a walk.

01:13:20:25 - 01:13:23:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
By sport, Do all the things that make you joyful and be joyful.

01:13:24:22 - 01:13:50:18
Daniel Franco
So looking back in history, right where and this is still in the leadership topic where we've seen that, you know, particularly some of the most successful businesses that have existed have been they've been built into empires. Right. Well, let's just use the word empire. Empires have been built on the back of on the back of dictatorship, ruthlessness, all the above.

01:13:52:11 - 01:14:15:18
Daniel Franco
So more so than the alternative, I believe if you look back at history, so more so than the fun and collaborative environment right. So can you can you help us understand why now there's this big shift towards this fun and collaborative environment and why people are no longer accepting the the dictatorship and the ruthlessness that once was.

01:14:15:29 - 01:14:16:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I don't think.

01:14:16:15 - 01:14:28:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That we ever had just the one cricket shot, but sometimes the two the stories we tell. Yeah, very selective stories, very true. And our notions of leadership are very, very selective ones. So are you, Google philosopher.

01:14:28:06 - 01:14:28:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, yeah.

01:14:29:01 - 01:14:48:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You see certain people over and over again held up as examples of leaders when there's plenty of others that possibly have had have grown their businesses potentially in a normalized way, potentially more dynamically than some of those big ones. I say it's not always the biggest thing. That's the most interesting. That's true. It's the ones that have the most normalized gain or grow the most.

01:14:48:07 - 01:14:50:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
They might have been led by quite different people.

01:14:50:10 - 01:14:51:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, but yeah.

01:14:51:14 - 01:15:16:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Selectivity in telling that history can lead people to think that we don't have that range of opportunities for different kinds of ladies in there. I'll tell you what, it's interesting. Since COVID and a lot more people are able to articulate that they don't want work to be all of their life, and I think that's good. Yeah, I've said, you know, I've got a hobby, I've got a dog, I've got a family, I like biking, I like doing that.

01:15:16:16 - 01:15:39:20
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And you go, That's great. It's actually really great that people perhaps are breaking out of the notion that it's going to be just done at one pace in one Y with one style, and that yelling at people or bossing them around is the way to get things done. So it is unfortunate that some of our stereotypes of leadership are really, you know, we we highlight the behavior, but we still celebrate it in a way.

01:15:39:20 - 01:15:50:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And you I say to people, it's great that there was a great documentary on there. And also and it's really interesting that a female founder was, you know, focused but not a great example.

01:15:50:03 - 01:15:50:12
Daniel Franco
Know.

01:15:50:12 - 01:15:59:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right? But there are highly successful women who've started businesses and scaled, you know, who don't have notoriety and be really nice to actually celebrate.

01:15:59:08 - 01:15:59:26
Daniel Franco
Absolutely.

01:16:00:00 - 01:16:17:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In that space. So I think we just a bit of a victim of being highly selective in the way, you know, we've had a traditional approach to leadership books which are around individual case studies, when of course, again, you've got different scale options. You could write a global history of leadership, which is, you know, around thousands of leaders.

01:16:17:03 - 01:16:35:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We can't write just about one person. So why are we repeatedly going to the same scale and talking about one person or the same group of individuals? Like when we talk about innovation, why do we talk about the Post-it note all the time and wireless? Why we repeatedly going to those examples and not thinking about all the things that could be just as inspiring and.

01:16:35:21 - 01:16:37:11
Daniel Franco
Kind of more fun, you know, something like that.

01:16:37:11 - 01:16:37:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:16:38:08 - 01:16:46:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, but you know, also really simple things like, you know, shopping bags with two handles. Yeah, somebody thought of that. That's pretty interesting.

01:16:46:29 - 01:16:47:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Do you think, like.

01:16:47:29 - 01:17:12:19
Daniel Franco
As a the stories that it's how would it because there is generally some edge to it like you have some leaders who have built some great businesses and highly profitable and don't really have the ups and downs. Well, they have the ups and downs, but it's just more generic. There's more it so therefore less talked about because it's more, more general.

01:17:12:19 - 01:17:27:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You raise an important philosophical question. You're right. We do love a bit of notoriety. And some of the earliest histories, like Tacitus, this history is just emperor after emperor displaying really pathological behavior. And we find that really interesting. Yeah, it's kind of compelling.

01:17:27:20 - 01:17:29:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, but.

01:17:29:12 - 01:17:32:19
Daniel Franco
Like Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, there's always.

01:17:33:00 - 01:17:34:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
There's always hope.

01:17:34:08 - 01:17:34:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But the truth is.

01:17:34:27 - 01:17:36:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To the.

01:17:36:09 - 01:17:40:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Other examples that we might write off do have interesting features about them.

01:17:40:26 - 01:17:41:14
Daniel Franco
You could just.

01:17:41:14 - 01:17:42:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Give them the time of.

01:17:42:09 - 01:17:42:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Day. Yeah.

01:17:43:10 - 01:17:58:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And said some of the people that have been really inspiring leaders have come from backgrounds of not much and have shown incredible tenacity, you know, generosity despite different kind of leadership. So leadership based on generosity rather than boss and people around.

01:17:58:24 - 01:17:59:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:17:59:04 - 01:18:11:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And we just don't have a rich canon around telling that story. But what a great opportunity for us to continue to iterate and think about that and diversify our leadership stories just a little bit more rather than funnel them in.

01:18:12:05 - 01:18:32:17
Daniel Franco
Yeah, right. So moving on to the next subject, you are well, I want to talk about I Yeah, cool. Which is I know you're a little bit interested in in the moment and I believe you're working on how A.I. might improve performance and ethics through the use of historians approaches to logic. Is that.

01:18:32:17 - 01:18:33:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Correct? Yeah. No, Look, I'm.

01:18:33:23 - 01:18:36:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Interested in whether historians have to be human.

01:18:36:25 - 01:18:42:27
Daniel Franco
Yes, sure. But doesn't the information that's being loaded into this thing have to be from a human?

01:18:43:12 - 01:18:45:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, originally. But kind.

01:18:45:18 - 01:18:46:04
Daniel Franco
Of change.

01:18:46:08 - 01:18:46:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:18:46:15 - 01:19:09:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Machines can iterate. Yeah. So they're often supervised. So they take data. That's our data. We can supervise. They use of that data, but in some cases they can produce things in an unsupervised way. So I'm just curious to know whether that means that we have to acknowledge that there are known human historians that we might be living with now.

01:19:09:00 - 01:19:09:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well.

01:19:09:21 - 01:19:25:19
Daniel Franco
I think this poses the bigger question in well, in my head right now, it's a bigger question. The in two or 300 years time, will I have changed some of the story? Like when does when does a story get locked in? That was fact.

01:19:25:19 - 01:19:28:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, well, according to check, if it.

01:19:28:29 - 01:19:29:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Wasn't.

01:19:29:06 - 01:19:29:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
A 19.

01:19:31:06 - 01:19:37:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Twenties data set runs out which is really interesting. Yeah. So they do have endpoints which is really we have endpoints that.

01:19:37:24 - 01:19:58:08
Daniel Franco
Will eventually get updated. Oh yeah. And I think that's the scary thing. It's just the old Wikipedia things that anyone can change. Uh, anyone can go on and update it and change potentially what is, what is the right history. Um, but yet isn't history just what the majority believe?

01:19:58:24 - 01:20:20:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So there's been a couple of interesting changes that I think are really worth thinking about, and those are the takedown laws in the US. So Wikipedia has actually changed. I might not have noticed this. The legal settings around libel and around hate material, there are laws in the US that if you are the provider or the service carriage of those things, you could be liable for that.

01:20:20:28 - 01:20:53:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh wow. So you might not have notices, but actually it is harder to edit that Wikipedia article than has been before, and they have gone through and removed a lot of information nation that might have been seen as potentially libelous around information. So it's it's interestingly enough, it's kind of the edges of cut off it if you think about things like large language models like chat you and llama and all the other ones that are out there at the moment, they are capable of being inquired about in ways that can generate hate material, right?

01:20:53:22 - 01:21:30:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So people can put questions in that, nudge the algorithm in the direction of very hateful things and violent things and terrible things. But there's an army of not well paid workers in Africa, generally India, other places like YouTube, who sit behind those inquiries, who are re correcting the material to make sure it stays within parameters. So there's actually a very human side to this bolt inside of this of of parts of the globe that are steering within the curbside, these materials so that they stay within legal parameters.

01:21:30:04 - 01:21:42:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And that means the edges are cut off in a way because it's open, people can generate violent and horrible material, but we are employing lots of people in order to moderate that information for us.

01:21:43:03 - 01:21:53:03
Daniel Franco
But given that these machines are 10,000 times smarter than us, won't it the ability to self automate and cleanse now.

01:21:53:03 - 01:22:19:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
They're dumb, they're really dumb. They're not intelligent in the way that you and I are. But they can either, right? Yes. Correct. Yet they will be able to do that in due course. Right. But it is quite challenging because languages we have we have a logical feature called intention in philosophy which says that that AI word can be interpreted in lots of different ways and it can be interpreted in a really helpful way.

01:22:19:24 - 01:22:26:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And in a really malicious way. It can be hard for a machine to understand the intention.

01:22:26:23 - 01:22:27:13
Daniel Franco
Yeah, okay.

01:22:27:17 - 01:22:32:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Of a context or a sentence, it will better over time. But humans find that difficult to.

01:22:33:09 - 01:22:37:10
Daniel Franco
Text messages don't. Yeah, emails. You can understand the tonality.

01:22:37:10 - 01:22:39:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Of it all. So you think of all those little.

01:22:39:01 - 01:22:43:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Turing tests that we come across where it says click or click on all the boxes with the traffic light.

01:22:43:11 - 01:22:43:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, and.

01:22:43:27 - 01:23:05:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I've written about this in the book and I said, Does that include the stalk of the traffic light at the edge of the traffic light? Does it include this? You know, we find some of these instructions really difficult too. So the challenge is programing computer to do this. It may struggle in the way that we struggle or we might program it so that it excludes us from this because we don't understand what's going on.

01:23:05:29 - 01:23:23:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the the ambiguities of our thought, well, the generosity of our thought, I'm going to put it that way. Yeah. Than the begging nature of our words, our concepts, the fact that people can interpret things three or four ways going back to your of the car. Yeah, lots of different perspectives. How does a machine know what to do?

01:23:23:27 - 01:23:41:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the opportunity for historians, because we do this all the time, we think about your car example and go, okay, how am I going to make sense of that? Yeah, a good historian will present the different views on this side, but actually, because I'm writing a history of mobile phones, the mobile phone bit is the one that's really critical.

01:23:41:26 - 01:23:44:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or I'm writing a history of feral cats in Australia.

01:23:45:03 - 01:23:45:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So I'm going to.

01:23:45:21 - 01:23:53:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Highlight the cat there or going to highlight I'm writing a history of autonomous vehicles and I'm remarking goodness back in the day where people drive cars were a.

01:23:53:07 - 01:23:54:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Shocking thing that yeah, right.

01:23:55:06 - 01:24:17:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the purpose of my history can be a determinant of the things that I actually choose to focus on. The rules that we use to make those decisions sit in our heads in such interesting. And for somebody like me, you know, how do you program a machine to write a history? If you look at some of the what they called ontologies, the knowledge frameworks are used for, things like chatbots.

01:24:18:00 - 01:24:21:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
They say history is always in chronological order. And I go.

01:24:21:23 - 01:24:23:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, no, there are some.

01:24:24:01 - 01:24:46:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Places on earth where histories are not told in chronological order, and one of the best examples are Aboriginal histories. They are not told in chronological order, right? And then they'll say, okay, one of the best things about a history is that you should start and you should talk about things geographically, approximately, right? That's the history. And you go, Well, know some of the best global histories don't look at proximate things at all.

01:24:46:27 - 01:25:09:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So the programing, the frameworks that are used or the rules that are used for these machines, rules that come from computer scientist. MM. And my aim is to say, well actually the way they story and think about history, they might not have articulated using mathematical symbols or logic statements or tables but if we look at the way that they write, we're looking at logic in the wild, so to speak.

01:25:09:13 - 01:25:25:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, there are some ways that they think and do things that actually could be helpful. Yeah, we think about large language models because they are dealing with past data, making decisions about past data in order to present information to you. That's what an historian.

01:25:25:14 - 01:25:33:13
Daniel Franco
Of the is the computer scientist today seeking the advice of historians, I think is. But I mean, ethically.

01:25:33:27 - 01:25:36:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I computer.

01:25:36:03 - 01:25:37:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Scientist seek the advice of.

01:25:37:25 - 01:25:40:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just yeah great. I don't think it occurs.

01:25:40:23 - 01:25:41:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To most people.

01:25:42:00 - 01:25:42:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That.

01:25:42:17 - 01:25:52:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Historians that they might be in this because when you say to people actually I use an historical discipline because the bulk of it is around recognizing patterns in past.

01:25:52:19 - 01:25:53:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Auto correct.

01:25:53:15 - 01:25:54:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's an historical discipline.

01:25:54:19 - 01:25:55:27
Daniel Franco
And it's only as good as what you feed.

01:25:55:27 - 01:25:56:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It isn't right.

01:25:56:23 - 01:26:01:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so people focus on its future aspect, right? You know, remember, we talked about leadership when we said we're so.

01:26:02:01 - 01:26:02:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In such a.

01:26:02:12 - 01:26:14:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hurry, we lean into the future. Yeah. See, the future piece, we haven't understood that. Actually, the bulk of what's going on there is the reading and the processing of past information. Yeah, redefining AI and saying actually an historical discipline.

01:26:14:23 - 01:26:17:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. People go, Whoa, you're actually right.

01:26:18:08 - 01:26:34:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And we might need to have different people in the room helping us out with AI. Yeah, we do ethicists, but we might need some historians as well. But then we historians have got to work on how we articulate what a good history is and what good histories are in order to be able to take advantage of that opportunity.

01:26:35:05 - 01:26:37:18
Daniel Franco
Who decides what history, right, though?

01:26:37:29 - 01:26:38:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, we.

01:26:38:21 - 01:26:40:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Stories never agree on that. There is one history.

01:26:40:29 - 01:26:41:16
Daniel Franco
Yeah, that's.

01:26:41:16 - 01:26:41:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
True.

01:26:41:27 - 01:27:05:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But we do some, you know, important rules around not making stuff up and don't generate footnotes that aren't real. And don't lie about the archives. And if you see something in the archives, don't deliberately leave it out in order to make your story a good story. We do have some ground rules that are really good. Ground rules show people respect, you know, don't believe it when somebody tells you the crash happened because of the mobile phone.

01:27:05:03 - 01:27:14:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Don't just take it on credence that that's the only way it happened. Yeah, we do have some pretty good fundamental rules around history making are pretty useful Pretty useful rules.

01:27:16:01 - 01:27:23:16
Daniel Franco
Is there anything else like in this episode that you're interested to share? I think. I mean, does it scare you where it's going?

01:27:23:16 - 01:27:46:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We don't know. And that's really intriguing. I think it's a good age for theory and good age for philosophy because, you know, the fact that a machine can generate content, we often view it as a tool. I often see it as a thing to be trained. Yeah, if you want to train something to do something really well, you've got to know like a sports coach, you've got to know how to do something really, really well.

01:27:46:02 - 01:27:47:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, right. Yeah.

01:27:47:06 - 01:28:01:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So if we switch positions there and say, I don't just use it as a tool to generate X and Y for myself, but I'm going to train it to be better, then I'm going to have to be a lot clearer about how better looks. And that means that I probably am going to need to stop. Take a moment.

01:28:01:21 - 01:28:14:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Mm. The trees grow slowly around here. I think about it. Think about what the opportunity is in that space. So don't just deal with I'm one Y, so I'm actually look, I'm pretty positive and I'm a pretty positive person.

01:28:14:22 - 01:28:15:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Yeah.

01:28:16:28 - 01:28:23:13
Daniel Franco
I'm actually writing right down, down right now. The trees grow slowly around. Yeah, I'm going to use that one in my life, I think.

01:28:23:17 - 01:28:26:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Cool, isn't it? Especially in Tasmania. They go pretty slowly.

01:28:26:28 - 01:29:06:21
Daniel Franco
Yeah, right. I am conscious of your time. I know you need to be out of here in a certain time and I cannot be in a podcast with you without actually asking about what is currently happening in your world with the universities at the moment. For those who are living under a rock, earlier this year, the two universities, University of CI and the University of Adelaide, decided that they will come together, calling themselves the Adelaide University and what some are calling it is going to be a unicorn in the university, which aims to be the number one in Australia, top 100 in the world.

01:29:06:21 - 01:29:16:24
Daniel Franco
It'll bring 500 million to the state, 1200 new jobs, an additional 6000 international students by 2034. It's pretty exciting.

01:29:17:01 - 01:29:19:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It is exciting. It is exciting.

01:29:20:18 - 01:29:21:23
Daniel Franco
What excites you the most?

01:29:22:17 - 01:29:32:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Two things. So two pieces of unfinished business. Yep. First is that not everybody is able to get a university education.

01:29:33:01 - 01:29:33:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Mm hmm.

01:29:33:15 - 01:29:57:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or the beneficiary of one. And we know that when you do have university education, you're more likely to live a healthy and more prosperous life, both you and your community. So why are some communities still missing out? Right. That's unfinished. We have to address that. The second we talked before about Australia's economic complexity. We have to work on this.

01:29:57:01 - 01:30:00:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Mm. So we have to use whatever talents we.

01:30:00:07 - 01:30:00:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Have.

01:30:01:13 - 01:30:23:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To bring to bear to these two very difficult things. And for me there's lots of complexity in this and lots of arguments for and against it and lots of things that have to be done. But it's as simple as that for me, which is people ought to be able to get access to the best possible education because we know what makes the biggest difference in their lives.

01:30:24:08 - 01:30:27:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And we ought to do everything we can to make that happen.

01:30:27:15 - 01:30:33:00
Daniel Franco
So could it not be done in separate entities? Are you saying it's more powerful by bringing them together?

01:30:33:08 - 01:30:55:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Look, philosophically, I'm in research. Arguably, we're not two separate entities in some way because we already collaborate on lots of things. Yeah, things. Right. There's always more than one way to answer question. The truth is this This new university will have multiple campuses, so there is not strictly one entity that's doing one thing in one way, and it's not got one course.

01:30:55:24 - 01:31:00:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So it's got one name, but we say two people. Universities are multi-functional.

01:31:00:17 - 01:31:00:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:31:01:12 - 01:31:22:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Opportunities that have multiple pathways, multiple programs, multiple campuses multiple modalities of doing research and different ways of doing research. So we have to bring to bear that diversity of activities towards these two really difficult problems. And we have to commit ourselves, even if we don't feel comfortable about that. We have to open ourselves.

01:31:22:01 - 01:31:22:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To.

01:31:22:21 - 01:31:31:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That ambiguity and say, Have I given it my best shot to leave Australia in a better place educationally and industrially?

01:31:31:24 - 01:31:33:11
Daniel Franco
And this could be the answer to that.

01:31:33:17 - 01:31:36:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We have to do our best to and say none of us are wise.

01:31:36:27 - 01:31:37:23
Daniel Franco
I just think.

01:31:37:23 - 01:31:38:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
To our.

01:31:38:01 - 01:31:38:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Best.

01:31:38:15 - 01:31:48:18
Daniel Franco
Yeah, that's true. I think as a, as a proud South Australian, this will bring some amazing people to the state. I, you know.

01:31:48:19 - 01:32:09:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. And people have talked about the scale. I would say that's true. We've all worked in big organizations, but let's go back to that five minute interaction. When you smile and you open the door, at the end of the day, organizations are made from individual people and the size of an organization is not as important as its culture.

01:32:11:01 - 01:32:36:00
Daniel Franco
Which leads me to my next question. How do you see these two entities? I know you said you collaborate, but they are essentially two entities right now with both with rich and wonderful cultures as it stands. And how do you plan on creating this cohesive, well, cohesive vision as one?

01:32:36:13 - 01:32:55:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Okay, so remember our example of people sitting around the table and having the grace of acknowledging that everybody brings a different history in a different place and allowing that to be the case. That's the first thing. Yeah. Don't deny people their heritage or the name of their organization or where they've come from, or the fact that of us have worked at different organizations.

01:32:55:19 - 01:32:56:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Those are all good things.

01:32:56:26 - 01:32:57:22
Daniel Franco
So acknowledgment.

01:32:58:01 - 01:33:17:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Acknowledge, include, be generous, be compassionate, forgive ourselves. But the thing that we're going to need to do the most is ask those audacious questions. As Robert Klein says, Think of some really big questions and try and cut through. Like I said to you before, the reasons do this is because we want people to get a great education and we want the economy to be better.

01:33:18:09 - 01:33:19:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's not more difficult than that.

01:33:20:08 - 01:33:21:00
Daniel Franco
It's a pretty good vision.

01:33:21:05 - 01:33:21:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's a.

01:33:21:13 - 01:33:21:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Really.

01:33:21:23 - 01:33:22:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Important business. So if we.

01:33:22:27 - 01:33:42:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Can keep it nice and simple, that helps us to say, you know, when you and I are standing on the street corner, is that helping to get attainment up? Is that helping the economy, you say? Well, I see it slightly differently to you, but maybe we are or maybe we're not. But we got to bring ourselves back to the fact that you and I both standing on a street corner.

01:33:42:13 - 01:33:43:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Absolutely.

01:33:43:01 - 01:33:50:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And we're both looking together at something and we might see things differently. But the goals that we have, our big, pretty audacious goals.

01:33:51:07 - 01:34:14:08
Daniel Franco
So I've I've been told by numerous people that this is this is bigger than what we're all thinking. It is actually, if that makes sense. Right. We all think it's a big, big piece of work. It's it's a big change. It's a complex change, but it's actually bigger than what we know it to be. And so what what are the risks?

01:34:14:08 - 01:34:21:21
Daniel Franco
What what are the you know, what are the both universities currently thinking about right now?

01:34:21:21 - 01:34:23:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Life is bigger than we think it is.

01:34:23:10 - 01:34:24:00
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

01:34:24:00 - 01:34:51:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
As we go on, we know less. But it's the comfort, being comfortable with not knowing everything in that space. Yeah. And being open to the fact that the two organizations have remarkably talented people and allow them to co-create this. So if I am expecting to sit in a control room and just articulate what everybody does, that is not going to bring to bear the best of the talents of the people that we have.

01:34:51:17 - 01:35:08:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
No, we have to allow for I don't know the answer. People will ask me lots of questions and I said, you know, I don't know the answer to the question because we've only started conversation. And and frankly, some of these things will not be known until a decade in the future. But I can't stop myself from trying.

01:35:08:19 - 01:35:09:06
Daniel Franco
No doubt.

01:35:09:08 - 01:35:09:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Even.

01:35:09:16 - 01:35:20:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
If I don't have all the answers to those things, I'm going to be comfortable with that. Yeah, comfortable being comfortable with ambiguity and caring about people are the two most important things right now.

01:35:20:10 - 01:35:32:22
Daniel Franco
100%. And I think if you think about the stages of change, right, there's the creation of change enablement, of change, management of change and sustainability, right? So four stages, really simplifying it, obviously so much.

01:35:32:29 - 01:35:37:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But yeah, I think about all of the above. Yeah.

01:35:37:10 - 01:35:58:15
Daniel Franco
And for you, do you get into it? We know that there are people who are going to have an adverse reaction. We know that there are people that are going to go down into the trenches neurologically and knock it out. We know that these changes are coming. So typically what we see as an organization is, is a lot of companies going from the creation of change, right?

01:35:58:15 - 01:36:07:23
Daniel Franco
University were emerging and then or where new digital products or whatever it might be. And then they jump this enablement phase, they go straight to manager. How do we get.

01:36:08:03 - 01:36:09:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Done moving on.

01:36:09:05 - 01:36:34:29
Daniel Franco
Exactly how you as a as two organizations going to manage the enable Women of this change as you move through it? How are you going to make sure that your people and the leaders within the organization have the maturity to be able to take this and turn it into one over the next ten years?

01:36:35:01 - 01:37:02:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, look, my friends are working in M and I and this is not a it's a merger of equals. We'll always say culture and customer first, and now in our case, culture and students and community first, right? So we have to think beyond ourselves and think about who we're doing this for repeatedly. So it's not you can become so obsessed with your own universe, and that's all that matters, and that's not what we're doing it for.

01:37:02:12 - 01:37:25:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
We've got to remind ourselves and that that hopefully is an inspirational reminder for us. But also, as I said before, you can avail yourself of just one scale setting or one solution, and you're got to be wise rather than smart. Don't jump. You know, people will want to just solve every problem. Correct. And some things need to be solved quickly and other things don't need to be solved quickly.

01:37:25:21 - 01:37:44:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
But we have to allow the people to create and be in those spaces and generate the solutions to the two things that I talked about, which is those are difficult things to address. And, you know, you got to use the everyday tools like that risk assessment, like that meeting, like opening the door for somebody smiling and saying, how are you going to die?

01:37:44:27 - 01:38:02:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And what did you think about that? Or every moment we have an opportunity to create. So people say to me, Our culture comes from the past. You're in story. And I said, No, no, it comes from the past. But we make it in the moment, every moment we have the opportunity to think about those two things I talked about, but we've got to be focused like that.

01:38:02:17 - 01:38:04:16
Daniel Franco
So you said that again, culture.

01:38:05:16 - 01:38:07:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Culture comes from the past. We make it in.

01:38:07:19 - 01:38:08:26
Daniel Franco
The we make it in the moment.

01:38:09:06 - 01:38:13:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
In the moment. People say, Oh, you're so different. You're the issue that and I'm going.

01:38:13:26 - 01:38:14:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Lots of people are different.

01:38:15:28 - 01:38:21:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, lots of people. Actually, it's interesting because there are some families where half of them are employed at Adelaide.

01:38:21:27 - 01:38:22:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
UNISON Yeah.

01:38:23:04 - 01:38:25:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
They must have interesting dinner table culture.

01:38:25:18 - 01:38:28:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So different. I don't understand. So that is, you know.

01:38:28:28 - 01:38:34:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's people can very easily draw up pictures of the two. Yeah.

01:38:34:14 - 01:38:36:09
Daniel Franco
And you can tell themselves a story.

01:38:36:09 - 01:38:51:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Tell themselves a story. But look, in a high there's also stories to be told and hopefully there's going to be lots of really interesting histories written about it. And people have already asked me, Will you write the history of this thing? And I go, Yeah, possibly available to do that. And you know, you better be nice to me because always.

01:38:51:17 - 01:38:53:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, I know people.

01:38:53:03 - 01:38:57:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Have already asked me, which is really, really interesting, really interesting.

01:38:57:21 - 01:39:05:03
Daniel Franco
Now I am a little bit frustrated because we could talk for hours or think longer. We've already been going a year and a half or.

01:39:05:05 - 01:39:07:11
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
What oral No question.

01:39:07:26 - 01:39:13:05
Daniel Franco
Order and questions. I say it's going to be more new when you read the biscuits.

01:39:13:05 - 01:39:16:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah, that's biscuits.

01:39:16:00 - 01:39:34:21
Daniel Franco
But I am conscious of your time and we've got 5 minutes remaining before you have to duck out some. I'm just going to sort of finish off with one last question before we get into quickfire questions. So what does the future for Marnie look like in the next ten years?

01:39:34:21 - 01:40:01:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
The best answer is I don't know. But the very best other answer is I'm going to make a stand for education like a 21 year old. And I have only, again, like the 21 year old, the sketchiest notion of what that is. But being open to that is a phenomenal opportunity. So Marnie probably with her Zimmer frame good future, will still be standing up for education, but how she's doing it will be best for the future too.

01:40:01:26 - 01:40:02:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So really, Yeah.

01:40:03:04 - 01:40:04:06
Daniel Franco
Wherever it takes us.

01:40:04:20 - 01:40:05:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Texas.

01:40:05:20 - 01:40:09:09
Daniel Franco
Beautiful. Right. Quick for our questions. What are you reading right now?

01:40:10:23 - 01:40:28:04
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's I am reading a couple of things, so I'm reading growing up Aboriginal in Australia. Okay. Oh, really? Enjoying it? Yeah. Great edited collection. Yeah. I don't understand it? I'm reading a 900 page Chinese history theory book that I know you're.

01:40:28:04 - 01:40:28:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just looking at.

01:40:28:18 - 01:40:30:19
Daniel Franco
No, I'm just I heard it on other pages.

01:40:30:28 - 01:40:32:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or something and it's, it's, it's.

01:40:33:09 - 01:40:34:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's first time it's ever been translated.

01:40:35:02 - 01:40:35:20
Daniel Franco
Okay It's.

01:40:35:20 - 01:40:45:22
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Extraordinary book where he's giving really firm advice about not writing overly histories and remonstrating with historians and telling them settle down.

01:40:46:06 - 01:40:47:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And just get on in.

01:40:47:11 - 01:40:50:24
Daniel Franco
100 pages. So he's saying to everyone, Yeah.

01:40:51:04 - 01:40:56:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'm okay. So I'm, I'm nearly there on that, really enjoying it. I'm really enjoying it.

01:40:56:12 - 01:41:09:21
Daniel Franco
Fabulous. So self-development, we've talked a lot about that leadership. What is one of those nonfiction leadership books or self-development books that you believe stands out from the crowd?

01:41:09:21 - 01:41:12:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hmm. I'm not a big, big reader of leadership books.

01:41:12:29 - 01:41:13:14
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I have to say.

01:41:13:15 - 01:41:39:12
Daniel Franco
I can appreciate that. Is there one where it won't even be? We've had Jim McDowell on the show and Jim doesn't read the same thing, but he reads literature, which is which talks about the stories about the leadership, and he learns his lessons that way. It could be anything like that. What's one book that you go? You know, from a leadership perspective, this is this is great.

01:41:39:28 - 01:41:52:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I think Aristotle's. Nicole macKinnon ethics. Yeah. Which is, you know, ethics is never precise thing and there's a notion of not getting it quite right, but forgiving yourself and allowing yourself to grow over time. So he calls.

01:41:53:01 - 01:41:54:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Ethos, ethos.

01:41:54:15 - 01:41:56:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Ethos means effort.

01:41:56:15 - 01:41:56:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Hmm.

01:41:57:01 - 01:42:03:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Ethics is effort. So it's a lifetime of effort to become a good person, a wise person.

01:42:03:09 - 01:42:10:19
Daniel Franco
Absolutely it is. What's one lesson that's taking the longest to learn being wise, be wise.

01:42:10:19 - 01:42:12:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's and slow down.

01:42:13:18 - 01:42:15:06
Daniel Franco
Slow down and.

01:42:15:13 - 01:42:15:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Be.

01:42:15:17 - 01:42:16:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Smart.

01:42:16:00 - 01:42:19:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
All the time. That's the longest lesson.

01:42:19:23 - 01:42:23:10
Daniel Franco
If you're going to have coffee with one historical or current figure, who would it be?

01:42:23:24 - 01:42:27:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh my goodness.

01:42:27:17 - 01:42:38:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh my goodness. I've got so many that I'd really like to meet. Hmm. Oh, gosh, that's hard. That's really, really hard.

01:42:39:14 - 01:42:46:07
Daniel Franco
That's what I want to throw to our Who's going to be one that's coming to you? One of five, probably 22.

01:42:46:07 - 01:42:51:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
So, yeah, there's 20. I mean, really difficult. That's really, really difficult.

01:42:51:23 - 01:42:55:25
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I would like to meet some of the historians that wrote those histories from the losing side.

01:42:56:00 - 01:42:56:22
Daniel Franco
Yeah. Yeah.

01:42:56:23 - 01:43:04:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I really, really like to meet some of them and understand the resilience and why they decided to do what they saw Jane Austen become.

01:43:04:15 - 01:43:04:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:43:05:10 - 01:43:11:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And say, how did you switch from writing history to writing novels? You know, that was a winning and good move.

01:43:11:06 - 01:43:11:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yes.

01:43:11:27 - 01:43:17:20
Daniel Franco
Financially? Yes, absolutely. So what's some of the best advice you've ever received? I think I.

01:43:17:20 - 01:43:22:16
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Know my dad's going to go back to the trees again, so the.

01:43:22:19 - 01:43:25:22
Daniel Franco
Trees go slow. I grow slower around here.

01:43:25:22 - 01:43:27:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You can afford to take your time.

01:43:27:24 - 01:43:29:08
Daniel Franco
What's one habit that holds you back?

01:43:30:09 - 01:43:31:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Being smart.

01:43:31:12 - 01:43:31:23
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:43:31:28 - 01:43:32:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:43:32:26 - 01:43:34:24
Daniel Franco
You overthink things. Yeah. Yeah.

01:43:36:04 - 01:43:37:29
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And over. Try to solve things. Yeah.

01:43:38:12 - 01:43:39:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. That holds you back to people.

01:43:39:27 - 01:43:41:08
Daniel Franco
Get frustrated with because of it.

01:43:41:15 - 01:43:41:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah.

01:43:42:23 - 01:43:49:26
Daniel Franco
Because, you know, sometimes it's those. Those conversations. You know what? I don't want you to try to think about other alternatives. Just tell me that I'm.

01:43:49:26 - 01:43:54:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Right, you know? I know. I have to recognize that that's worse. So.

01:43:54:20 - 01:43:58:13
Daniel Franco
But what's your biggest pet peeve.

01:44:00:22 - 01:44:04:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
That people think that only some disciplines are important in.

01:44:04:15 - 01:44:05:01
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Australia?

01:44:05:01 - 01:44:20:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And so I'm a proud humanist and social scientist, and I think we have a really important contribution to make to the economy and society. That's a peeve when people think that only some disciplines are going to be the secret to Australia's future.

01:44:20:10 - 01:44:28:29
Daniel Franco
Everyone's own perspective. That wasn't it. Yeah. If you could pay someone to do your chores, what sure would it be?

01:44:28:29 - 01:44:29:15
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'd just.

01:44:30:10 - 01:44:31:11
Daniel Franco
Like one chore.

01:44:31:18 - 01:44:33:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
One chore that I really done.

01:44:34:21 - 01:44:35:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh.

01:44:35:15 - 01:44:38:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
People love me at home because I don't mind ironing. I really.

01:44:38:03 - 01:44:39:03
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Quite like they.

01:44:39:03 - 01:44:40:13
Daniel Franco
Can be quite meditative.

01:44:42:00 - 01:44:49:00
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Or what I like to do. Actually, I do get somebody to come and more powerful every week and I think that's a magnificent.

01:44:49:00 - 01:44:49:28
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yep. I always talk.

01:44:49:28 - 01:44:50:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
About our cleaners.

01:44:51:00 - 01:44:53:06
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It's the Australians of the Year. They often know.

01:44:53:12 - 01:44:57:24
Daniel Franco
It's the worst chore in the world and I always want to hurt my back off.

01:44:58:03 - 01:44:59:27
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Rotten. Janet, you're amazing. What?

01:44:59:27 - 01:45:00:06
Daniel Franco
I'm right.

01:45:00:06 - 01:45:03:19
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
And Janet is struggling of the year. I think you're incredible.

01:45:03:29 - 01:45:11:22
Daniel Franco
Oh, hit you up for some work. What's one word that you absolutely hate?

01:45:11:22 - 01:45:12:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Pivot.

01:45:12:18 - 01:45:13:01
Daniel Franco
Oh yeah.

01:45:13:02 - 01:45:13:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. It's been.

01:45:13:26 - 01:45:14:08
Daniel Franco
Years ago.

01:45:14:25 - 01:45:23:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Done. Destroyed that work. Yeah. Oh, range with a baby's armpits. Need to unpack that like a Yeah. You know, there's a whole range of what I.

01:45:23:24 - 01:45:27:01
Daniel Franco
Found myself using. I'm just going to circle back. I don't like that.

01:45:27:02 - 01:45:34:10
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I'm not. Not a fan of that. No. Oh, range of words and learning. Yeah. Yeah, that happened.

01:45:34:24 - 01:45:39:26
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
There's just some words people use. You know, we need to, you know, pivot and go back to our learning circle. Back to our own.

01:45:39:27 - 01:45:44:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. So, you know, know the line English. I was English.

01:45:45:05 - 01:45:46:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Plain simple.

01:45:46:22 - 01:45:56:20
Daniel Franco
Yeah. English. It's English. Good, isn't it? What is the first thing that you would do if you became invisible?

01:45:57:05 - 01:46:04:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, what a phenomenal.

01:46:04:07 - 01:46:06:21
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
I would find people that were really sad.

01:46:07:07 - 01:46:07:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, really?

01:46:07:24 - 01:46:13:08
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, I would sit next to them and I would that my presence would make them feel happier.

01:46:14:18 - 01:46:16:18
Daniel Franco
That's interesting. I've never had that answer.

01:46:16:25 - 01:46:22:18
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Oh, philosopher. Yeah. You know, you're thinking that's possible. Well, just think about visibility.

01:46:22:20 - 01:46:24:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Just means you can't be seen.

01:46:24:11 - 01:46:25:06
Daniel Franco
But you can be felt.

01:46:25:15 - 01:46:28:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Yeah. Mm mm. It's only one.

01:46:28:25 - 01:46:31:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
You know, you're all thinking that.

01:46:31:06 - 01:46:40:26
Daniel Franco
You're thinking about things. Way to deal with that person. I go straight to it like the fly on the wall stuff. What's your most useless talent that you have?

01:46:41:06 - 01:46:49:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Useless being a philosopher? Yeah. I mean, this is useless. People tell me they were not very useful. I'd to say that. Really?

01:46:50:02 - 01:47:14:13
Daniel Franco
That's it for us. Thank you so much. Money. I absolutely loved this chat. It's been. It's been phenomenal. The way your brain works is beyond that of anyone I've ever spoken to. So I just really appreciate everything that you you're doing. And I'm. I think I'm going to speak on behalf of the community of South Australia. Thank you for all that you're doing within the university sector and teaching us.

01:47:14:13 - 01:47:22:13
Daniel Franco
And, you know, aspiring to fulfill your vision of of creating a world where everyone deserves to be educated. So thank you.

01:47:22:16 - 01:47:28:24
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Well, I got two thank you's. The first is the answers that you give to questions are only as good as questions that you're asked. So thank you.

01:47:28:24 - 01:47:30:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Thank you. Give yourself more credit.

01:47:30:09 - 01:47:32:12
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
For, you know, the way you think about things.

01:47:32:12 - 01:47:34:13
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Forgive me. I will be a lot.

01:47:34:13 - 01:47:49:09
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Wiser than you think. Yeah, and thank you to the community as well for all the ways in which they are so generous and have made me welcome and my family welcome to South Australia. You are an extraordinary community and love it. And we are hiking our way around the country. Bakeries of.

01:47:49:09 - 01:47:51:02
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
South Australia. Very good.

01:47:51:15 - 01:47:53:17
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Best time. We love this state.

01:47:53:20 - 01:47:58:03
Daniel Franco
Fabulous. So if people wanted to get in contact with you, where could they find you?

01:47:58:11 - 01:48:12:07
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Is one of those things which is money. You don't use hyphen Warrington net uni aside or you don't are you? I'm also on formerly known as Twittersphere H.W. I'm also on LinkedIn. Reached out and say hello.

01:48:12:16 - 01:48:30:18
Daniel Franco
Perfect. All the links will be in the show notes. Yeah, yeah. Get in contact with her. She's amazing. Thank you again. Thank you, everyone. We'll catch you next time. Thanks for listening to the podcast so you can check out the show notes if there was anything of interest to you and find out more about us at Synergy IQ dot com.

01:48:30:18 - 01:48:39:27
Daniel Franco
So use. I am going to ask though if you did like the podcast you would absolutely the world to me if you could subscribe, write and review and if you didn't like.

01:48:39:27 - 01:48:41:05
Marnie Hughes-Warrington
It, that's alright too.

01:48:41:13 - 01:48:51:04
Daniel Franco
There's no need to do anything. Thank you guys. All the best.