Brent Feike - Chief Information Officer

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall, Manager of Culture & Wellbeing, gets to know Brent Feike, Chief Information Officer.

During our conversation, Brent shares how his fascination with space led him to study science and turn his passion into a career. 

He talks about how growing up surrounded by many different cultures in Europe enriched his perspectives and shaped his approach to equity and inclusion.

Brent speaks about how saying yes to every opportunity during his professional career helped him build a unique skill set and helped him to grow as a leader. 

He talks about getting used to jumping into the deep end and getting comfortable in the uncomfortable.

He also talks about his experiences with Performance Development Discussions in both the public and private sectors have led him to view them as important tool in understanding our places in an organisation’s purpose.

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the Palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. My name's Dorian Broomhall and I'm the manager of culture and wellbeing for the Department of Health here in Lutruwita, Tasmania. In this third series of the podcast, we're continuing to get to know executives from across our organisation as people, as well as leaders. For this episode, I got to know Brent Feike, our chief information officer. During our conversation, Brent shares how his fascination with space led him to pursue a science degree, ultimately turning his passion into a career. He talks about how growing up in Germany and many different cultures enriched his perspectives, but also experiencing the busyness of Europe made him appreciate Tasmania as a special place that he could call home.

Brent speaks about how saying yes to every opportunity during his professional career helped him build a unique skill set, opening doors and allowing him to grow as a leader. He talks about getting used to jumping into the deep end and getting comfortable in the uncomfortable. He also talks about the importance of performance development discussions. Having experienced them at many different companies in the private sector before working in the government. Brent explains that it isn't simply a compliance tick, but an important tool to understand one's purpose and the company's purpose. Lastly, Brent shares his approach to equity and inclusion and how he has experienced challenges in the past. I start every conversation with the same question, so let's get into it. What did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Brent Feike:

Space, science, Scientist, which is what I came out with at the university, bachelor of science. Always in the pursuit of the methodology that sits behind it. So factual evidence, my partner's the exact opposite. So the two of us have great debates. As a scientist, I'm very much based on fact and methodologies and science.

Dorian Broomhall:

What was it about space that attracted you at a young age?

Brent Feike:

I think when I first realised that what we see is historic by definition, light travels at a certain speed, so what we see when we look up isn't now. It's happened a long time ago and when that penny dropped and I thought, "Oh, that thing I'm looking at up there could be no longer there." That mind-boggling reality for me was so fascinating. I must know more about this.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's quite profound. I'm imagining a very young version of you having that fairly deep philosophical realisation, which for many of us we don't think about very often, but it's quite earth-shattering.

Brent Feike:

My mother was a hobby astronomist and so looking up through telescopes for a very young age, looking at stars and then being told that that's actually no longer there potentially.

Dorian Broomhall:

Wow.

Brent Feike:

But what we're looking at is took millions of light-years to get to us, many millions of years ago. That's the thing it was that we're looking at now for me was the thing that piqued my interest.

Dorian Broomhall:

An interesting level of curiosity that would've been generated for you as a young person. So you went through university and studied science. What sort of science did you start with?

Brent Feike:

There was no computer science degree when I started. There was no information systems degree or computer science degree. It was a bachelor of science and then you could major in computer science. And my father was a stonemason and therefore I grew up with computers being foreign in the family or understood to be a discipline in its own right. It was computers were the size of buildings and were there only for NASA and others of that scale to be used. The concept of a personal computer only just came in as I was going through high school, and so by the time I went through education, the ability to do something as a discipline in its own right in that vertical simply didn't exist. And so I actually started a bachelor of surveying, spent all my time on the computing part of the degree and failed all of my surveying part, because I didn't like going out in the field with it as a trainee.

I often talk to people about career paths now, what is it that you want to do going forward from here? When I'm asked the question, it was about passion. It doesn't matter, but if you have passion for it, things will come easy to use in my experience, you will just want to know more. Things will gel and computers for me, their way of working came so natural to me that I couldn't understand why others found it difficult. It was so natural to me, ones and zeros and how this all worked in a bubble was so obvious that it not being obvious to me was a challenge in its own right. I couldn't understand why others couldn't see what I could see.

Dorian Broomhall:

So when you went through this degree then, where were you were? Are you a Tassie boy? Are you from elsewhere?

Brent Feike:

No, I was born in Tassie, but I lived in Germany for eight years. So I grew up in Germany. Couldn't speak English when I came back. I was very young when I went, came back as a teenager and that's when I started learning and I think part of that gave me some of the tools I used today in terms of multiculturalism. There wasn't much in Tassie in the early '80s. I grew up amongst many different cultures in Europe. I missed that terribly. When I came back to Tasmania, I reflected on the holidays we used to go to in Europe and used to have to rent a spot on a beach. There are 19 million people that want to be on that beach and so you have to book it and when we first landed, I was taken to Seven Mile Beach only to discover, it was basically there was no one there and I actually thought they were playing a prank on me. So we went around to Clifton Beach and that beach was just as empty and that's when I made the decision I didn't want to leave Tasmania.

So I wanted my children to grow up here and I was sort of a teenager thinking this is paradise. This place, Tasmania, is an absolute paradise. Why would you want to live anywhere else? The only challenge for me has been my career path. Can I be successful in a career when really it's a small village approach down here? Are there that will support a fledgling industry like the industry I'm in in Tasmania and I was very lucky. One of the reasons I've moved around quite a bit is to gain that experience.

Dorian Broomhall:

What was your path then? Once you arrived back in Tasmania you've gone on to study surveying and then jumped into computers in some sort of great depth. I imagine what happened next for you?

Brent Feike:

The university allows you to claim credits against courses you've already completed and I've quickly worked out that I can switch across to a bachelor of science and use the bits I did pass and did well in and then drop the surveying part out. Hard to imagine now, but this is the mid '80s when you weren't really sure if you're going to come out with something worthwhile as a job. I finished my degree as a bachelor of science and I was actually asked to create my own company quickly at that stage to help some bits and pieces work while I was finishing off my degree. So I discovered what ABNs are and company names and things pre-email. So you wrote letters to apply for jobs and I was good at not doing too much. I went through all of the computer companies from ABCDEF, got to F and thought, "Well that's enough for today," and wrote the letter.

So one of the companies was Computerland, which was a local computing company and they responded by Tuesday, because we used to get the mail every day back then and said, "Come in for an interview on Wednesday," and then went to an interview and the boss interviewed me and said, "I'm okay to put you on, but your actual boss will be the service's manager that you will work for and he wants you to come in on Friday." So I came in on Friday. Back then interviews were at the pub and took me to the pub and I thought I knew how to handle a beer or two from my university days, but this guy got me absolutely rotten drunk.

I fell out of the pub and wasn't sure if I actually got the job or not. So I turned up on Monday at the company to say, "I think I've got the job," and they were expecting me thankfully. So within one week it went from start to finish and got the job and started in computers. These were the days where there were already just fledgling local implementations of systems for finance mostly. So I started doing work, all different types of work.

Dorian Broomhall:

So we've got a CIO then now who very much started his career through a curiosity of computers. Fast-forward 30 or so years, what are the key bits that you think have helped land you where you are now as the chief information officer at the Department of Health, which is a profoundly different job in a profoundly different world to what you entered?

Brent Feike:

Yeah, so again, the industry was new enough where there just simply weren't enough of us. So we didn't really apply for positions, any of us, for the first 10 years. You were headhunted, you knew something. I think what was different for me was my upbringing was say yes first, work out how to do it like that. If somebody believes in you and is offering you something, say yes. Don't think twice, don't get petrified about what might or might not work. Don't be frightened as to what the next step might be. Can you do the job? Back yourself. Say yes and get there. And I've often said that to people who've come to me to say, "How did you get to here?" "I kept saying yes, I fell into it." And so I think for me, I was lucky, one, in that industry, because I didn't have to fight too hard to find new work and I kept saying yes to opportunities.

What I didn't realise until much, much later, and I've been very lucky, I think I'm the only one in the state at the moment at least that's been a CIO of three different departments. And so I've been able to travel around. So I'm a generalist CIO if you like, not a vertical CIO. So my predecessor was very, very strong in health, very specifically for health. I've got different strengths. Mine lay in the fact that I have a broad ranging set of sectors experience as CIO. So we didn't overlap too much in terms of the Venn diagram if you like. But how did I get to here? I kept saying yes, opportunities came up, very frightening opportunities. So I cannot tell you how many times I've said yes to going into a job, but I really wasn't sure if I could even do the job, but somebody thought I could.

So you have to deliver and that meant long hours and learning new things and every day I'm doing that here still. But my career therefore took many, many different steps. Most of my career has been, in fact statistically I've been in any one role about three years longer, often in organisations, but I get promoted up then for one reason or another. It's just in terms of my CV, that's what's happened. So I've worked in five different government departments now over the last 30 years, twice at university, five different companies, commercial companies, multinational companies in places like Logic and CGI, the University of Tasmania, and then the five different departments to keep me here. And many of those have had me back a second time.

So I must have done something right otherwise they wouldn't ask me to go back and spend some more time there. But I think as a career path, almost by accident I've learnt diversity is super important, not diversity in the cultural aspects that we've talked about already. That is certainly important. Diversity in experience, knowing that doing something different is a positive understanding that this is a challenge is a positive. You keep doing that. You will be offered new things over time.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, again, there's so much there to break down, but a couple of beautiful principles there of saying yes. What's your approach there when you're not quite sure and something's new and you are jumping in the deep end?

Brent Feike:

I've done so much of that in deep end now in my career that I'm actually sadly comfortable saying, "I don't know." I think that's very empowering. I think it depends on where you are and in what context. My experience is people will want to know that they're in safe hands if you like, and not every answer being, I don't know, is not the right way to go about it. So I think it needs to be asterisked with, I don't know today in this context, but I have a toolbox full of tools of things that have worked in this situation before from other places and it may not work here, because every place is different but it may work here, so why don't we try out this and this and this.

So I think in the deep end, being serene or comfortable being uncomfortable is really important. But also being able to portray a level of confidence to say, "I've got your back, I've got this. I don't know quite how I'm going to do it, but I've done this many times before now that I'm pretty sure one of these things will work. And if I don't, I'm going to phone a friend. I'm going to ring around and see who else can help me, who are my peers or who are the people on the ground that might have the best answer that I haven't heard from you yet, so maybe let's workshop this out. Let's see where we can go from here."

Dorian Broomhall:

And what advice would you give somebody who is terrified at the idea of getting in the deep end?

Brent Feike:

I think there's a blunt message, which is sometimes important to hear. You'll fail 100% of the things you don't do. If you say no, well, you're guaranteed not to be successful. My view is you say yes, you probably will fail some things. I have failed many things, but I have succeeded in many more and therefore for me giving it a go, you may be successful nine times out of 10, but having said no, I would've failed 10 out of 10. So for me, I think don't be frightened to say yes being in the deep end, because chances are you will probably be okay and next time you're in the deep end you'll go, "Well, last time I was in the deep end I was okay. So this time in the deep end I'll probably be okay." And when you keep going into the deep end, eventually you'll go, "I know this feeling. This is uncomfortable. I don't like it. But I've been through this so many times now that I'm going to become comfortable being uncomfortable and I can move forward."

Dorian Broomhall:

Do you have an approach or an example that you can think of in your career where you have something hasn't gone to plan? What's an example of you doing a useful after action review?

Brent Feike:

There's a couple of components to that. One is I think how I feel or how we feel when we're wrong or it's failed. For me, it's important to take a step back and go, "Okay, that actually was wrong. It didn't work. Or we failed at delivering something." It's actually really easy to find reasons to explain that out and to blame somebody else potentially or blame the situation. Everything except you. And for me, I've learnt over time to say, "No, I'm not walking away from this. I'm going to fall on my sword. That was my action that caused that to happen." It in itself is not comfortable. You're saying with all the evidence of being in the deep and being able to survive, suddenly you can't and suddenly something didn't work and that's not comfortable. It's something I make myself do. I think it's important to come back and say, "That didn't work. Now let's unpack, how do we make sure that doesn't happen again?"

How do we be honest about that in a way that is constructive? How do we take this to the people I'm working with or my peers or the people above me and say, "Sorry, I got this horribly wrong. I had all these tools, I applied them all. It didn't work out the way it did. Now what can we do? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? How do we turn that into an opportunity for improvement in future so that others or me, myself in other roles will not make the same mistake?" So I think part of it is being honest with yourself to go, that was actually you. And the second part is, and how do we flip this around? How do we turn this into something that will work better going forward?

Dorian Broomhall:

Starting with accountability as the great leveller. And then what I love about your approach there is that then you ask a question, you don't say, "Right, well I got this wrong so I'm going to fix it. I'm going to take accountability here. How can we work together? What could we do differently? How can we learn from this?"

Brent Feike:

I think we've talked about our CARE Values and I think that accountable part is not just about performance management, it's not people recognising they're accountable for some things, I think it's also us as leaders being accountable in accepting that things didn't go to plan and therefore we're accountable for finding a way forward now. When we don't have the answers, how do we find those answers? Who do we talk to?

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, it's a subtle yet important difference between actually doing those values rather than talking about doing those values. So let's get back to perhaps your career then, you've been with the Department of Health for-

Brent Feike:

I've been here five years before. Fourth organisation I've been back twice to.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, there you go.

Brent Feike:

But yes, five years. Started in 2007, finished in 2012. I've been here a little bit over three years now.

Dorian Broomhall:

What's the last three years been like since you've been back?

Brent Feike:

My original role was quite siloed. I was here to do a programme of work approach, so I think most of my three years was spent doing that. I had a very patient boss. Warren as CIO previously knew that for the first couple of years he wouldn't see much of me as the deputy CIO that I was as well. In the last 18 months I've stepped more and more into the deputy CIO space and that gave me the broader visibility. What's the rest of the department doing now and standing in for him as proxy for numerous meetings and other forums. When I was here last, the investment in health was the bare necessity. Health is being the biggest and the largest as also the most expensive.

And so it's very dependent on the appetite for investment in the department. What I've seen coming back to health is there is a level of trust in the leadership that's here today to do good with that investment. And that's such an important part, was part of my thinking in accepting the role of CIO. I said yes because I think we can truly make a difference in what we're doing in this system. That's because the people we have on board are doing something worthwhile with the money they've been granted by government to do something with. And I think that's such an important dynamic to it that people may not be aware of.

Dorian Broomhall:

So the little boy who's come back to Tasmania from Germany or not little boy, teenager before he's kicked off his career, did you foresee any of where you might find yourself now with this responsibility for this enormous change?

Brent Feike:

No, but also for me it's a privilege. It wasn't ambition that drove me to here. It was the opportunity, I kept saying yes. And through the process, I guess I gained experience and capability and the trust of others to follow me on this journey as a leader where people believed that we can and could deliver. And you keep doing that, especially in an ecosystem the size of Tasmania that people believe in you and trust in you. And I was lucky enough to be given that opportunity here as CIO. So no, never thought I would ever end up being CIO. In fact, that term CIO didn't exist not that long ago. A leader of technology if you like, at the department.

But I'll caveat that with in all of those different areas, all those verticals that I've worked in, all those different sectors, commercial, government, university, higher education, et cetera, I've never found any as worthy of getting out of bed for in the morning than health. You can make profit for companies, you can build budget systems for treasury, I'm sorry, treasury people. It's exciting to build the budget system and it was almost the impossible, but we did it. But it's a budget system. What we do at health, if we do it right, impacts every person in the state. There is no other department to my knowledge that does that at that level.

Dorian Broomhall:

There's some really wonderful learning for many of us in there who strive to continue to be better leaders or learn more or to jump in the deep end. I want to talk about something that isn't everybody's favourite topic of discussion in the world of management and that's performance development discussions. What's your experience or your relationship with performance development discussions as I talk about them, what immediately comes to mind for you?

Brent Feike:

My experience came from my earlier part of my career in that larger commercial companies, the multinationals, these are companies of 100,000 worldwide, they're in 40 countries and very diverse service delivery. And it was my first foray, and this is 25 years ago now. How do organisations have a methodology, a way of working? How do they manage 100,000 people consistently across the globe? How do they build an alignment of the investment in their people against what they're looking to do as a company against their brand? And so my experience through those periods was being exposed to very strong investments in time of anything that we did. Essentially, any hour that you spend in the commercial world is an hour of profit margins or an hour maybe you can't invest in billing cycle with a customer. And so their performance management is one of those ones. It best be worthwhile, otherwise we won't be doing it.

And what they did was build visibility as to the value proposition. Why am I going to turn up for performance management? What's in it for the manager? What's in it for the employee as an investment of time? Let's make the most out of this so that it's sensibly done. It's not just a compliance tick. What I observed, and I was midway through my career, I suppose a little bit later or a bit earlier, was understand suddenly that this was actually worthwhile doing. It helped me, I understood why I was coming to work and what my contribution was to my team and then the state and then the country and then the company globally. So having a lineage, having a line from the very top that says, "Strategically, these are our objectives for the company." For Australia, that means these objectives.

So they would distil it down and say the AU market looks like this, the Tasmanian market with all of its levers and opportunities and constraints to size and other things, your objectives look like this. Brent as a team leader, and I had about 100 people back then, it was my first real step into leadership, was your area is responsible for these objectives. And that allowed me to have a meeting and sit down with my leadership to say, "Right, my objectives are these, I can't do all those. I need you to help me get those done. That's what we're here to do." And then I would talk to each of my leadership team to say, "Right, let's divvy up which one of these makes sense for you to be responsible for." And then they would sit down and say, "Well, how does that feed down to the next lot and the next lot?"

And then eventually we had a line from the very most junior position in the organisation all the way through to the very top that said, "Now I understand how I'm contributing to the greater good of this organisation." So stepping into government, that discipline didn't often exist. Now I'm a big fan of our secretary's strategic objectives on a page, because they directly align to the methodology I'm used to in a commercial world where on a page or two if we cheat, we flip it over and print it on A3, because it's small font, but that's okay still on a page.

It allows me as CIO here today to align what I'm doing this year and the investment I've been granted to do it within my services, against the priorities that our secretary's defined as important to her. I know she has validated with her minister to say, "This is what I'm doing as a department. Does that align to what you need us to do?" And then I have my performance meetings with my next layer down and they do the same. And in theory, every one of us coming to work understands how we are contributing to making me successful, how I make Kath successful, how Kath makes the minister and the government successful in delivering services to the public. So for me, there's a very clear benefits component to this if we get that lineage there.

Dorian Broomhall:

How's that working for you now? I know you're relatively new in the role, but how's that working within ICT at the moment?

Brent Feike:

It's simplicity. What we've not talked about is it's not easy. It's actually quite hard to do this properly. Broadly speaking for me, there's two sets of objectives and we talk about smart objectives, simple, measurable, realistic, tangible, achievable, et cetera. Broadly speaking, I've got two types. I've got what we call the BAU, Business As Usual objectives. They're actually, depending on the type of work, typically relatively well-defined. We do so many widgets per day, per hour per week. We've got so many patients coming in or going out and we measure our business as usual type metrics. Some we don't measure well, and when we don't measure them well, we don't know how to define success. So we have to maybe take a step back first and say, "Well, how do we do that?" And then we've got the more strategic objectives and they're about moving the current state forward. So there are pieces, discrete pieces of work.

They're easier in many ways to define, because almost by definition they're a project, because they start and they finish. And so we can define at each of those junctures, the gating process that says, and we've got typically projects are well-defined in terms of methodologies, how do we measure success? We delivered something new. So I think if we carve those two up, so coming in new to this role, relatively new in the last few months, the first thing I've asked the team to consider is what are our services? So as a service catalogue, how do I take that up to my leadership and my peers and ask the question of the services we're providing today that we think we're providing, are they aligned to your needs? I'm a part of a corporate service. My challenge is how do I make sure that the corporate services we're providing support the business, the business need?

We've also got our 2024 calendar, although I think we're going to have to go to 2025 as well, strategic objectives. And they're directly aligned to the work that the office of the secretary is doing right now around defining the next round of strategic objectives for the secretary. What are we doing for the next couple of years? She's done the 2021 to '23, now we're looking for '24 and onwards. How do I define those in a way for each of the areas that align to the broader objectives of the secretary? Out of those two things come measures. So services have key performance indicators and strategic objectives have their own project-related initiatives.

Dorian Broomhall:

If you're that middle manager and you're not sure which direction to take a performance development discussion in or even where to start, what might your advice be? What might you say if someone in your team came to you and says, "This is all well and good and I love where this'll get to once it starts happening, but what can I do right now?"

Brent Feike:

Great question. Very frequent problem. I think naively we expect it to be almost gifted to us in terms of a process that this happens and it doesn't sometimes for all sorts of good reasons. I don't have the secretary's 2024 onwards objectives today. I've got the 2021 to 2023. I know they're working on it. What I'm not doing is saying, "Well, I'm going to down tools and wait." What I'm doing is I'm validating what we're doing today and what I think we should be doing and taking it up. So in my previous example where I was working down to say, "I know what the global corporation's after, I know what the Australian market's for." I'm saying, "Well, I don't know what the department's needing from us on paper, but I can guess." So I'm going to write that down and I'm going to caveat with to be confirmed at some point.

And we're going to take it up to say, "I think this is where I'm heading." In the absence of anything else, that's where I'm starting. Now you're welcome to pivot. Ask me to pivot at any point in time. I'm good with that, but I'm not going to not do these performance objectives for my staff who need clarity in what they're doing just like I do. And I'm going to put the work together now. And to be fair, I think in this first 12 months that I'm coming in new and that others might be in the same position I'm in, it's hard to write down for my staff what I think their priorities should be today. It's actually flipped. I've asked them, what do you think your priorities are for the next 12 months? Over the next 12 months? I'll have the time to digest this and validate this and seek comfort from others that that is correct. But I'm flipping it round.

In 12 months time, I'll probably have more of a say as to what I think it needs to be, as opposed to what you are telling me it needs to be today. But you know this better than I do today. So I'm respectful of their time that they've had in the seat to tell me rather than the other way around. We will then caveat up with, okay, well I do need you to do these other things. I've asked my staff to work on their service catalogues. I asked my staff to work on their 2024 priorities. That wasn't on their work list of things to do until the new person turned up and said, "I'd like you to do that, please. It's really important." So we're working on it together, but I think not doing it is the first mistake.

Dorian Broomhall:

I'd really like that permission that you've provided there or invitation to go, well, in the absence of no one giving me direction, don't do nothing. Create the direction and lead upwards and push information upwards. I think that again, you've got a system that's used to being told what to do. That flip is actually profound. And to have people be asked, "Well, what do you think we should do?" Is quite different. And for many people in the organisation, not what they're used to, but realising that permission doesn't have to come from an executive, that it can come from a middle manager.

Brent Feike:

Yeah. And I think it's important for the executive or for people like myself to then if I say have their back, what I mean is that we've agreed in the absence of validation, we've agreed their objectives, which means if they're wrong, it's not on your head, it's on my head. We haven't had the chance to validate. So wrong, meaning we now know more, we may have to go more left than right that we didn't know about when we started the journey. Well that's okay. So for me it's back to that nine times out of 10 we'll probably get it right, but we'll guaranteed not to get any of it right if we don't start at all.

Dorian Broomhall:

Back to that idea of accountability, you ultimately own the risk, right? I really appreciate your time sitting down with me. I've got one more for you. I think we need to find different ways to do equity and inclusion. What do you think, how do you think we should be thinking about the challenge of disadvantage or entrenched disadvantage or perceived disadvantage? How do you think we should approach it?

Brent Feike:

I don't know. It's a challenge. I think I've been part of departments previously where diversity and gender was pushed extremely hard and I felt, for example, if we were to shortlist for a position, we were challenged to say, "You must have a 50/50 roughly gender balanced approach to this and you have to explain why you wouldn't." And I think that doesn't lend itself well to merit-based selection. The two conflict each other, but the intent was sound. Just the application of it didn't work out as well as I thought it could. So I think if the intentions understood, if the intentions are to seek diversity, if it's based on the knowledge that there is value in diversity, which is where I've come from, then taking a risk around somebody who may not be fluent in English or may have a completely different cultural background, there's a percentage of value in that hard to quantify directly.

It's an intangible benefit that will come later through the diversity that we've built. I think it has to immediately start with a unconscious bias, understanding that you're going into this where comfort is how we all operate as humans. That if they're like me, I love my coffees. If you're a coffee drinker, I would like you more because we will go and have coffee together as a really basic example. Does that mean if you don't drink coffee, you won't do as good a job? Absolutely not. And if you think about that process on the way through and go, well, they don't like coffee. Why is my reaction the way it was? Even my facial expression there was, what? You don't like coffee? Don't count that.

Consciously put that aside and say, "Won't it be good that there may be a tea drinker? Maybe they'll have types of teas that I've never tasted before. They might come from a culture or country completely different to Australia and I'm going to be exposed to a new taste that I've never had before. I may start liking tea a lot more than I like coffee. Won't that be a good thing?" I know it's a simple example, but I think going into it that way, so how do we do that is tricky. I don't have the answers, I don't think. But I think being aware of the unconscious bias and making it a conscious bias and then therefore stopping it is one of the first steps.

Dorian Broomhall:

I love the three points that you just sort of mentioned there. One is the knowledge that the evidence says that diversity is a good thing no matter pretty much what outcome you're chasing, it almost doesn't matter, right? Need that awareness at a starting point. We need to make sure the people know that. Then check your bias, be aware of it. Know that you've got it. Realise that there's a positive intention for that too. But then to lead with curiosity, what can I learn from this?

And even if it is as simple and as selfish as that for what personally can I learn from this, whatever that might be able to be. But also what question can we ask and how do we carry that forward? I think that you might say that you don't know, but the advice that you've embedded in there I think is really good, and I think we can all keep striving for that. Brent, it's been a great conversation. Thanks again for taking the time to be part of it and look forward to continue to work with you as your journey continues through the role of the CIO here at the Department of Health.

Brent Feike:

Thank you. Keep saying yes.

Dorian Broomhall:

Thanks to Brent Feike, the chief information officer, for taking time to speak with us and to you for listening. Hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away into your own work and life. Join me again for our next episode when I speak with Brendan Doherty, the Deputy Secretary of Hospitals and Primary Care.