1 The Allure of Conformity Women & Leadership, Innovation and Sustainability Em Professor Elizabeth Taylor AO ICWES 2011 Leadership Innovation Sustainability
Apr 16, 2017
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The Allure of Conformity
Women & Leadership, Innovation and Sustainability
Em Professor Elizabeth Taylor AO
ICW
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I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Kaurna people, and pay my respects to their Elders, men and women, past and present.
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Women in engineering and science have achieved much and can be justly proud.
Lead
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Engineering and science are richer for the diversity of experiences and insights that are entering, and gradually seeping up the ranks of, the profession.
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Sustainability
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Businessman p16Financial Review Aug 26 2005
“Any examination
of mainstream, malestream leadership
theorywill show that it is predicated on
the model of leader-followers”
p220 Limerick
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Struggling with the allure of conformity Having the courage to ask difficult
questions Continuing to ask why (and why not) Does our leadership make the world a
better place for all?
Even as leaders, challenges continue:
– positive change
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Sustainability
LeadershipsInnovations
Open to diverse ways of thinking and being
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Struggling with the Allure of Conformity
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The Allure of
Conformity
What’s a girl to wear?
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Having the courage to ask difficult questions
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© Taylor 2001
Are we assuming
that the future will be a linear
extension of the present?
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What if it isn’t?
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A metaphor for our times?In 1845 Sir John Franklin set out on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage.The ships were equipped as replicas of English Royal Navy officers’ clubs. Each ship had• A 1200 volume library• Copious amounts of china place settings,• Cut glass wine goblets• Sterling silver table ware and cutlery.
The cutlery was engraved for the
individual Officers,
with each officer’s
initials and family
crest
Unfortunately, items such as these took up so much space that room could be found for only twelve days supply of coal for the auxiliary steam engines.
They took no special clothing for the Artic
conditions, just the rather splendid naval uniforms,
and equipment was standard: there were .. no
sleds.
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the ships had been destroyed by the pack ice,
frozen bodies were found in groups, many kilometres from where their ships disappeared.
some members of these parties were still dressed in their fine blue uniforms, edged with silk braid and gold buttons
Surprisingly, in the improvised sleds and the ships’ boats they had dragged for tortuous kilometres were large quantities of ornate table silver!
It took twenty years to find the remnants of the expedition:
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What has been done in our organisations in the past can come to appear so inevitable and so right that we forget that past behaviour is simply a set of workable solutions to past problems, Dunphy & Stace, Under New Management: Australian Organisations in Transition, 1992, McGraw Hillarticwebsite.com/FranklinBodies
and that, if the problems
change, we must actively
seek new solutions to survive and reach our
goals.
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Are our social institutions and company structures appropriate for our times?
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Are there other possibilities?
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Continuing to ask why
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We engineers construct ourselves in the community
in terms of grand and noble
narrativesfor the greater common good.
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www.ehs.org.uk
'We are the priests of material
development or the work which
enables men to enjoy the fruits of the great resources of power in nature, and the power of mind over matter
George Morrison, Presidential Address to the American Society of
Engineers, 1895.
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www.paper-dragon.com
We are the priests of a new epoch,
without superstitions
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We tend to construct the future using the same grand visions – always bigger and better!
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Engineers without Borders
Engineering culture
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http://nicolemariella.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/singing_ringing_tree470_470x353.jpg
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During the trip he ran out of water, was forced to shoot all his stock and was on the brink of disaster. Salvation lay in a party of blacks who led his party to a waterhole. Mary Durack describes the scene:
In the Australian classic Kings in Grass Castles, Mary Durack describes her grandfather’s pioneering trip into Queensland in search of rich pasture for cattle. He was one of the first white people to explore Queensland.
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“One of the (white) party, about to move on, dipped his leather water bag into the well. Instantly there were lowered brows and upraised spears, for the blacks were masters still in this timeless country where life was sustained by a stern discipline of mind and body uncomprehended by the white. These little reservoirs in an arid land had succoured the traveller from time beyond memory and were a sacred tribal trust, not to be camped on for unnecessary time, their contents never to be carried away. The water was tipped back and following the example of the blacks, the white men placed pebbles under their tongues …. Le
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And already (white) people were saying of a people whose lives had been pared and restrained to a system of survival remarkable among all races on earth – ‘The blacks have no thought for tomorrow’.”
(Durack, 1973, 90-91)
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Engineers Australia Sept 2001 cover
Engineers Australia Sept 2001 p29
Engineering World Jan 1999 p10
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I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Kaurna people, and pay my respects to their Elders, men and women, past and present.
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place for all?
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Within Australia and other developed countries there are still major cultural, social and organisational hurdles for women to address.
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However these are insignificant compared to the reality of most women in the world. It is important that we explicitly acknowledge that participation in leadership, innovation and sustainability, is still, for most women throughout the world, an unrealistic dream.
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I think many of us feel that we are unqualified on these subjects, and
so hand them off.http://www.bizstorytellers.org/Images/Sustainability.jpg
"There are huge numbers of people specifically trained to think about this stuff -
because it's complicated! So how do we expect to have anything to contribute?"
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The practice of engineering and technology development increasingly requires practitioners who can incorporate their understanding of the
complex relationship between technology and the natural and human ecosystems into the artefacts
and processes they design, construct and maintain. It is also recognised that engineers have
a role beyond the physical development of artefacts.
Your technical literacy enables you to provide valuable knowledge, not just data or information, to the decision
making process.Taylor in Technology Assessment resources UTS as at July 2000
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Concept Design Construct
Linear processes are terminal
Circular are ongoing
LifeCycle
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"We must be the
change we wish to see in
the world."
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Nussli
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