How I came to this work.
I grew up on a dirt road in the hinterland behind the Sunshine Coast, and I went to a state primary school with fewer than a hundred children in it. It was not, on paper, the sort of place that hands you the two things you will build a life on. It handed me both.
The first came from the principal, Lyn Winch, who believed in Montessori teaching and in philosophy, and let both run through a small Queensland state school in a way that was almost unheard of then. Because the school was tiny our classes were composite, several year levels in one room, and that suited her method exactly. You followed what gripped you and went as far into it as you could, whatever your age. I learned young that learning was a country you could live in, and that you were free to wander as far as your curiosity would carry you.
The second came from a teacher named Cathy O'Hara, who was a technologist before that was an ordinary thing to be, let alone for a teacher in the bush. She filled the school with computers, an Apple lab and a jumble of older Commodores and Toshibas, and she used to tell us the future was computing, and databases in particular. We thought we were playing. We typed pages of BASIC out of magazines on our breaks to make crude haunted houses and moon patrols, with no idea we were learning to code. It would be twenty years before I understood what she had given me.
Two teachers, in a school of a hundred kids, handed me philosophy and technology. I have spent my life since finding out what happens when you refuse to keep them apart.
I was not a straightforward student after that, good when something held me and bored when it didn't, and a serious sportsman until an L3/L4 injury took that away in my teens. I became a father at sixteen and left school to work, first propagating plants in a nursery, then in an abattoir. My father painted houses and my mother worked in retail. I had a child to raise and not a single qualification to my name, and to be given a chance at anything I had to be better than the people around me, and to be respected once I had it I had to be better still. Excellence, for me, started as survival. It was years before it felt like anything as comfortable as ambition, and I am not sure it ever fully has.
What I did with the hours that were left, I spent reading, and travelling, and cooking. I grew up in the shadow of Chenrezig, the largest Buddhist monastery in the southern hemisphere, and eastern thought drew me precisely because it was so abstract and difficult and unlike the life in front of me. I read the Vedas and the Puranas and followed the Vaishnava commentators, Ramanuja and Chaitanya. I learned to cook the food that belonged to that world, first as a cook and then as a chef in an Indian vegetarian kitchen, and I travelled to India more than once to study the cooking at its source and sit closer to the language and the philosophy. I learned tabla there, the polyrhythmic drumming of Hindustani music, which is the discipline of holding several tempos against one another at once. I did not know I was learning the truest description of the work I would spend my life doing.
I want to be clear about one thing, because it is most easily misread. None of this was a means to something else. Philosophy, in the old Greek sense of a love of wisdom, was itself the point. It still is.
When I decided to study it formally there was no programme within reach of where I lived, so I found one of the first of its kind, a new venture called Open Learning, and took every philosophy subject it offered, alongside sociology, religious phenomenology and Hindi. I was poor, and since I could not afford software I taught myself Linux and the open-source tools instead, on the theory that a stubborn person could solve almost any problem in that world for nothing. In 2008 I built a platform and ran the first fully virtual undergraduate philosophy conference for Macquarie University, remote and interactive, years before the world had a name for working that way. O'Hara's databases had never really let go of me.
The working life began the way these things do, by accident and proximity. My mother was in Mount Isa, so I went, and took a job in employment services, helping the long-term unemployed and remote and Indigenous communities into work. Learning was the doorway. I was running a training organisation before I had ever heard myself called an HR person.
Then came the project that fused everything. I joined the UNIFY programme at Virgin Australia as a consultant, hired for learning and change, to help turn a cash-based airline into a globally ticketed one. I was green, surrounded by some of the sharpest people in the country, and I could not stay in the box I had been hired for. I kept wandering into the machinery of the business itself, the schedules and fares and inventory that are the real engine of an airline, because I could see something there the org chart could not. What I could do, it turned out, was hold the whole of it at once. I could see the vision and run a single thread of logic through work that everyone else was doing in separate rooms, and tie it together until the result was worth more than the sum of its parts. It is the closest thing I have to a craft, and UNIFY is where I found it. Everything since has been the same verb at greater scale.
The scale did grow. I led people and transformation through remote Queensland health, across a mining region during five simultaneous enterprise agreements, and eventually across a global resources business, where I built the case for a worldwide technology transformation and saw its first phase through. Somewhere in those years I chaired a small charity, the Casa Grande Benefit Fund, which existed to put something back into the communities a mining company worked in. We backed a local teenager who was a gifted BMX rider but could not afford to travel to his races, and we re-roofed a community childcare centre, and a hundred small things besides. I have governed large and consequential systems since. I am not certain any of them taught me more about what a system is actually for.
Not all of it was ascent. There were years, through the pandemic and after, that asked more of me than the work ever did, when the job was isolated and the distance from my family was long and the ground was genuinely uncertain. I got through them the way I had learned to get through everything, on knowledge, on craft, and on a stubbornness a childhood like mine leaves you no choice but to develop. Marcus Aurelius sat on my desk through the worst of it and sits there still. Some lessons you have to keep relearning.
I lead HR technology strategy at BHP now, and I chair the committee that governs how artificial intelligence enters the working lives of its people. It is the right problem for me, and not only for the reasons you would expect. The hardest questions in AI are older than AI. They are the ones I have been reading my whole life, in Ryle and Nagel and Block and Searle: what it is to understand something, whether there is anything it is like to be a machine that judges you, where the line falls between behaving intelligently and being intelligent. Most people governing enterprise AI have had no cause to ask those questions. I have never quite been able to stop. I sit on the advisory boards of the two technology companies whose platforms shape most of that work, and my profession has given me its highest standing, though those are the parts of the record that matter to me least. Governing this technology well, I have come to believe, is less an exercise in control than in practical wisdom, the judgement the Greeks called phronesis, held honestly in a situation no rulebook has caught up with.
People ask me, reasonably, what I want to do next, and I find I don't have the usual answer. I am fascinated by what artificial intelligence is doing to enterprises and to us, and by what quantum computing will do when it arrives to meet it, and I expect to spend years learning both. But I am not climbing toward a final version of the work. I never have been. I am philosophy, in the plain sense that a love of learning is what I am made of, and a life built that way is lived inside the thing itself, in every moment it is happening. For me, the present is my future, in the truest sense of the phrase.