Shifting to Ethical Systems

Do you want to have a meeting, or do you want to have a conversation? Kent Frazier put that to a leader heading into a performance discussion. The reply came by email a week later. Kent joins host Jules Harrison-Annear from Denver for this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. He is a...

Postscript moment: Diane White returns to Humans at Work, the special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, a year on from her first conversation with host Jules Harrison-Annear . She is a Melbourne-based consultant to not-for-profit organisations, and has spent the year in a workplace leadership development programme. That gave her room to think,...

A board chair once explained to Melissa Clark-Reynolds , very slowly, that a board is more like cricket and she should stick to her specialist slot. She spent the rest of her governance career avoiding chairs like that. Melissa is a New Zealand futurist, company director and former tech chief executive who runs a foresight practice. Host Jules Harrison-Annear meets her for this Humans at Work conv...

Jay Naidoo 's neighbours had a plan for the baboons: cull the lead males. He heard a human problem answered as an animal one. Jay is a South African elder, a former general secretary of COSATU and a minister in Nelson Mandela's cabinet. In this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, he talks w...

Craig Pattison grew up in a railway community where every family grew vegetables together and gave them away for free. He has worked in risk, governance and ethical decision-making ever since, still starting from that lesson. Humans at Work is a series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, recorded between December 2022 and July 2025. Here host Jules Harrison-Annear talks with Craig Pattison — a New...

We have more powerful tools than ever. So why do so many leaders seem to trust their own judgement less? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta asks where intelligence actually lives in an organisation, a project, or an ecosystem. He keeps seeing the same pattern: the more we can hand the hard questions to a dashboard or a model, the less confident people a...

Most investors say they are patient. Far fewer have built the conditions that make patience real. In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta goes past the idea of patient capital and into what it actually requires. Not as a philosophy, but as a set of conditions that either hold an investment relationship together or undermine it. Building anything real takes t...

There is a version of strategy that happens in a room with the executive board, and a version that happens with everyone. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink makes the case for the second. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink is a Dutch strategy consultant and the author of The Strategy Handbook. In this Humans at Work conversation, one of the special series episodes recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now sitting...

Nina Field was asked to write a piece of strategy and had no idea what strategy was. Every experienced person she asked told her something different. That gap became her work. Humans at Work, a special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, brings host Jules Harrison-Annear together with Nina Field, a business psychologist and former...

Fear is a blunt word. Break it apart and the butterflies turn out to be partly excitement, the dread about letting someone down. Humans at Work is a series within Shifting to Ethical Systems, drawn from conversations recorded between December 2022 and July 2025. In this one, host Jules Harrison-Annear talks with Andy Longley , a performance psychologist on the Tutukaka coast of Northland. Andy was...

Ask a group of senior leaders to introduce themselves and you get the LinkedIn line on autopilot. Ask them to draw it and something unfiltered arrives within minutes. Tom Cotton is a psychotherapist and executive coach in Northwest London who once directed music videos. In this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now inside Shift...

Marketing is part of the problem. That is Claudia Guerreiro 's verdict on her own industry, and she nearly left it. Humans at Work gathers the conversations Jules Harrison-Annear recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, now running as a special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. Here she sits down with Claudia Guerreiro, a Portuguese conscious marketer based in Dresden. What stopp...

This one will land somewhere uncomfortable for a lot of us: rest as resistance.  In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear makes a case for rest that has nothing to do with productivity.  Not rest as a hack. Not rest as strategic recovery so you can perform better next week. Rest as a genuine, non-negotiable part of ethical leadership, and as a form of resistance a...

When someone offers to pay for the change you're trying to make, what does that actually mean? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear turns to one of the most quietly important skills in ethical business: reading the funding on the table.  Money is never neutral. It comes from somewhere. It was accumulated somehow. And it arrives carrying intentions, sometim...

Two per cent in BP and Shell. One per cent in tobacco, one in weapons. Dan Sherrard-Smith found all of it in his own pension. Host Jules Harrison-Annear meets Dan in this Humans at Work conversation, the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. He is founder and CEO of MotherTree, based in Bratislava. Earlier there was Good Com...

Singapore did not go to plan. The first 21km was a breeze; in the second, something seemed to grab Enver Samuel by the shoulders. Months on, the harder question is what this work is doing to him. This is a postscript: a Humans at Work follow-up inside the Shifting to Ethical Systems series, recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, with host Jules Harrison-Annear returning to Enver in the same...

Some months Enver Samuel is on a cooking show, tasting the bakes so he knows what to ask next. Others are with a family whose parent was killed by the security police thirty years ago. Enver is a South African television producer and director making social impact documentaries about the unsung heroes and heroines of the struggle against apartheid. He talks with host Jules Harrison-Annear in this H...

What happens to the person everyone offloads to? Sophie Bretag spent about fifteen years in HR, seven and a half of them in aged care, watching people hand over what they carried and walk away lighter. In this Humans at Work conversation, a special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, host Jules Harrison-Annear sits down with Sophie, who runs kind...

Diane White will tell you the croissant voted best in the world is overrated. What she is really interested in is power, and who is willing to name it. Humans at Work is a special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, and here host Jules Harrison-Annear talks with Diane, a director in EY's Infrastructure Advisory team in Melbourne who trained...

Saying no sounds simple. In practice, when opportunities are scarce, relationships feel fragile, and the need for capital is real, it's one of the hardest things ethical leadership asks of us. In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear explores the art of saying no, and why getting better at it might be one of the most important things you can do for the long-te...

When a woman holds a principle firmly, there's a word that tends to get used. Stubborn. When a man does the same thing, the words are different. Clear. Focused. A strong negotiator. In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear explores the cumulative weight of small decisions, and goes somewhere adjacent but distinct: the extra weight women carry when those decisi...

What if the decisions that shape your business most aren't the big, dramatic ones, but the small ones you make on a tired Tuesday afternoon? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear explores the power of small decisions, and how everyday choices compound into the business, and the leadership, you actually intended to build. We talk a lot about systems change a...

What if the ecosystem you’re building depends too much on you? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta speaks directly to ecosystem builders — leaders working across organisations, sectors, and communities to create lasting change. Because there’s a common but rarely challenged assumption: That we need to be at the centre to hold everything together. But her...

What if “value for money” is actually costing more than you think? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta explores ethical supply chains and the hidden human and environmental costs behind the pursuit of the lowest price. Because the real question isn’t just “What does this cost?” It’s “Who is paying the price?” Through reflections from JERICA Global’s Cata...

What if designing for inclusion wasn’t a cost… but a competitive advantage? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear explores universal design as a powerful business strategy: one that expands markets, unlocks innovation, and creates better experiences for everyone. Most businesses design for the “average user” and retrofit accessibility later. But ethical and inc...