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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.

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ty As we have experienced in this conference the formal leadership of industry and the professions now has a (fragile) sprinkling of women where once there were none.

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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tyThe next challenge for women is to decide whether our entry into professional leadership does lead change …..

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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ty……and why not?

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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.

34Pakistan floods 2010

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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

Open to diverse ways of thinking and being Le

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"We must be the

change we wish to see in

the world."

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