There are some mornings when you wake up, look around, and think, Yes — this is exactly how a day should start.

Waking up at Pullman Magenta Shores Resort felt like that. I had been approached 3 months earlier to speak by Crossmark Australia (DKSH Smollan) at their annual leadership conference where they bring together their leaders from across the country and spend a couple of days learning and working together to plan and grow. It’s a great event with panel sessions where the hear from their impressive list clients such Google, or JB Hi-F and an innovation forum to help identify opportunities. Sounded perfect and an ideal opportunity to deliver the opening keynote.

I awoke to sunshine (a little bit), ocean air, crisp sheets and the knowledge that I’d worked closely with the Crossmark team to develop content that would align with their event and audience and deliver insights on on AI and innovation and leave the team with new knowledge on their capacity to be adaptable into the future.

And then… my room went dark.

At first I assumed it was just a was a localised problem to my room, an overloaded circuit when I was ironing my shirt of something. Nope. The entire resort — and the surrounding area — had lost power. Not quite what I’d hoped to for when I’m about to present but given I’d been asked to talk about navigating disruption maybe I could spin this to my advantage. If I’m going to talk to people about being adaptable I should at least be able to show a little of my own adaptability.

With ~200 people from across the country onsite and 90 minutes until kickoff, the morning schedule gently dissolved. What replaced it was something I always appreciate in organisations: quiet, competent improvisation. No panic. No over‑reactions. Just a lot of smart people calmly working out what could be done with zero electricity and, more traumatically, zero coffee.

From the backstage perspective, the news kept rolling:
No projector.
No audio.
No lighting.
No slides.
And not much time to work with.

So while teams shuffled rooms, tested half‑formed ideas, and improvised with the sort of solution-finding you don’t put on a capability statement, I sat there rebuilding a one‑hour keynote to deliver unplugged. It turned out all that watching MTV unplugged in the 90s didn’t help a bit.

And then — naturally — the power returned minutes before we began.

The lights, the screens, the sound system… all cheerfully lit up just as the last Plan B (or maybe Plan F) was falling into place. But by then, it didn’t matter. The room was ready. The people were ready. The day had already proved its point before I’d even stepped onto the stage.

It ended up being a brilliant couple of days for the Crossmark / DKSH Smollan group — from the keynote to the client panel, focus sessions, innovation workshops, and more.

A shaky start. A great event. And a very on‑theme reminder that you don’t need to talk about adaptability when you’re already living it before breakfast.

 

Huge thanks to the Crossmark group, specifically Yanet Isdale and her team for engineering everything leading up to the event, and to CEO, Andy Kirk for shepherding the morning with exactly the kind of steadiness you hope for when the lights actually go out.