This article was written by Nathan Robertson-Ball, for the Finding Nature blog. Finding Nature is the “HQ for sustainability professionals to connect and be nourished in meaningful ways.” Nathan also spoke with Alex Hillman, Cara Wood and Cameron Tonkwise on what it means to be a Maverick.

I grew up a punk rock kid dreaming of one day mohawking my hair or dying it crimson red, skateboarding, attending low roofed venues and taking blows in the mosh pits at the gigs of my favourite bands. I simply liked the music and then in high school music studies I studied the origins and philosophies of some of the early punk bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash. Something about the anti-authoritism and contrarianism spoke to me. Following punk music, being sports-mad and also animal loving was an unusual combination. Sometimes it felt alienating, as if in whatever the circumstance I was a bit on the outside but always able to fit in. Then in university I discovered the world of climate change knowledge and I’ve been there ever since. Not a particularly popular topic to not only be passionate about but also have a sense of the coming future that many others seemed determined to ignore or avoid. I often didn’t know how to feel secure in those environments and with a propensity to righteousness it wasn’t uncommon for me to undermine the potential for that security.

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In 2018 that changed though. I had the immense privilege to meet both Kees Dorst and Cameron Tonkinwise in my day job and they introduced me to the innovative process of frame creation. This fundamentally changed how I have practiced my craft since, for better or worse. Complex, systemic problems beyond the scale and capability of human civilisation to date need new methods and tools and activities to understand, contemplate and respond. Within this brilliant process lies one tiny little method – The Maverick. What this was about was identifying and studying the mindset and actions of the people or organisations or alliances succeeding despite the obstacles, the challenges, the odds being stacked against them. The Maverick was someone to be learnt from. Suddenly my world opened up, and I began to find security in the idea and identity of the Maverick.

Maverick is described in the dictionary as unorthodox or as an independent-minded person. Unorthodox means an individual, non-conforming, a contrarian or free spirit. In a world of needing to address systemic, structural, endemic and chronic environmental, societal, cultural, political, psychological and spiritual challenges we know that the thinking and acting that got us to here isn’t the thinking and acting that will get us out of it. More of the same consigns us to more of the same. All of a sudden the Maverick is a potential antidote.

Since 2018 I’ve garnered self worth and value in the persona of the Maverick. A million hallway conversations where others have offered their verbal agreement have preceded only a handful of meeting room experiences where that verbal agreement has materialised to anything substantive. I’ve come to realise that the Maverick is permissioned to exist in little landscapes, in tiny conversations, in contexts where the consequences don’t matter. Step into where they do matter and the unity that existed in the hallway mysteriously evaporates most (9.99, minimum) times out of ten.

Why?

Why is the bravery and courage and integrity and reality of truth so difficult to extend beyond those little but totally inconsequential moments? A million times I’ve taken those conversations as meaningful and binding, only to feel let down 999,999,995 times afterwards. Am I the crazy one? Is attempting to be a Maverick – that is, to raise truth with honesty – meant to be this difficult?

All around us we see pledges and promises and commitments and targets and aims and goals. The illusion of progress has become the delusion of reality. Air New Zealand decommissioned their 2030 and 2050 emissions reductions targets this month. Are they now a Maverick for saying what many ‘leaders’ are seemingly increasingly realising – a fundamental failure in appreciating the quantum of change required to really reduce emissions and re-align actions within the boundaries of the planet the they’ve signed up to (emissions and a changing climate are the example here but suspect could be substituted with any environmental and societal problem)? Is it really easier to accept planetary calamity than to change how an organisation operates?

Over the last month the framing and understand of choices has continued to bubble to the surface in the situations I’ve found myself in. Underneath that though is a very fundamental question – what are we here for? To act as custodians and links in the chain of life who deeply contemplate and embody our duties as inhabitants for just now in service of what was and what is to come, or to act as mindless and spiritually impaired individuated units who favour gratification and convenience? Surely the Maverick should be latter. What a tragedy the Maverick is the former.

– Nathan Robertson-Ball

Unbounded – Alex Hillman Is Free

I first came across Alex when he referenced the freedom of life outside the corporate bubble. Not only had he escaped, he was contributing his knowledge to a higher order – something I, and I suspect many others, aspire to.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of big oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) in the energy transition. In fact, I used to say that the best part about my job as Woodside’s Climate Advisor was getting to learn about the energy transition and then using my role to try and convince Australia’s largest oil and gas company to reduce its emissions. This was an interesting time ‘inside the tent’ of Australia’s largest fossil fuel company.

But I left Woodside and I don’t have any regrets about that. I left for two main reasons. Firstly, in 2021, the International Energy Agency concluded that we no longer had any room for new oil or gas projects if we wanted to halt runaway climate change. My earlier belief that helping decarbonise the gas supply chain no longer felt like a useful contribution – we need less gas, not cleaner gas. Secondly, as Woodside started to realise the existential threat climate change posed to its business model, it became harder for me to advocate for change from within. If I wanted to drive meaningful change, I had to leave the tent.

So I left Woodside in 2021 and became an analyst at the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) – a non-profit shareholder research and advocacy group. We review the climate and business plans of companies and then work with investors who want to encourage better climate strategies from these companies. I’m only half-joking when I describe my job as debunking the reports I used to write. As part of this transition, I’m sure I’ve lost a few of my old Woodside friends.

So I’ve had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the drivers and barriers to change from inside and outside a large company. Whilst they’re informed by my time at Woodside, I expect they’re broadly applicable to other companies and sectors as well.

Do we need more Mavericks?

To give one example, ACCR research (slide 9) has shown that Woodside underperformed the oil and gas sector over the last 3, 5, 10 and 15 years; whilst the oil and gas sector has itself underperformed the broader share market over the last 5, 10 and 15 years. This crucial insight suggests oil and gas production growth hasn’t been an effective way to create value, yet I never knew this as a Woodside staff member and my old colleagues often don’t believe me when I tell them.

But change is critically important. Scientists are telling us we’re breaching the planet’s boundaries and risking irreversible changes to our climate systems whilst our engineers and economists also tell us that it’s technically and commercially viable to mitigate this. And while amazing progress is being made on issues like electric vehicles and solar power, our companies and institutions are rarely the force for change that they could be.

I think it’s critically important that people speak up and challenge the status quo. One way to think about Mavericks is that these are the people who buck group trends. They speak their minds and make their own decisions. In a corporate setting, this can make a Maverick’s peers feel uncomfortable.

The Mavericks that I’ve respected in my career

I have deep respect for a lot of the people I’ve worked with and followed over the years – especially those that effectively drive change. I’ve seen lots of different ways this can be done. Some present a positive view of a different future, most have an intuitive understanding of who the key decision makers are, what motivates them and how hard they can be pushed. Others create the intellectual space for a different future by boldly criticising incumbents.

I don’t think any one of these approaches can single handedly create broad scale change. But all of them have a place and can reinforce each other. A company, for example, is more likely to change if it faces sustained criticism from civil society, is losing its political influence, and its staff have identified a way to profitably transition the business.

Do we need more Mavericks?

Most people agree that society faces some serious challenges. Almost by definition, the big problems we face, including my personal focus on mitigating climate change, are wicked problems resistant to simple solutions. The status quo has typically created these problems and we need to change things in order to fix them.

It’s institutions and individuals where these changes need to happen.

At the individual level, there’s a huge opportunity for people to take bolder stances in their careers. I’ve dealt with thousands of clever people in influential positions. It would be amazing to see more of them speaking up in their workplaces, criticising superficial and self-serving justifications for business as usual, promoting issues they care about, quitting jobs that they don’t believe in, and taking the risk of moving into different sectors or organisations that are genuinely helping.

I’d love to see more institutions being bolder. Institutions, including companies and institutional investors, are hugely powerful in our society and without their support, making change is cumbersome, if not infeasible. So we need organisations to support and drive change too.

Tips for budding Mavericks

Your career is probably the most powerful tool you have to make the world a better place. Be deliberate about your values and how these inform your career goals. Develop the skills that allow you to get there. This could mean formal education, or within a large organisation you can probably move between roles to develop transferable skills.

There’s a huge information asymmetry between the corporate sector and those that are meant to hold it to account, such as government regulators and civil society organisations. So the skills you developed within a large organisation may be most effectively used to hold that organisation to account from the outside. This is certainly true in my move from big oil to ACCR.

Don’t become financially dependent on a large salary. If you want to be free to buck the trend and make your own decisions, it will be a lot easier if you have the flexibility to move to another job. Even if you don’t make major career changes, having financial freedom provides an additional layer of confidence to take risks, stand your ground and speak up where you think it matters. This comes down to really practical things – do you really need that boat, can you postpone a new car?

So am I a Maverick?

I don’t think I’m the best-placed person to judge this, but I can comfortably say I’ve made up my own mind about what’s important and I’ve tried to stick with it. I speak my mind if I don’t agree with or understand what’s happening. I can be impatient with insincere people or those who bluff their way through issues they don’t understand.

These characteristics probably haven’t helped me get promoted, but I certainly don’t regret them. I see them as a key part of my personal integrity.

While people responded to me leaving Woodside with a range of different reactions, probably the bit of feedback I was most proud of was that I’d normalised staff questioning the status quo.

Creating Mavericks – Cara Wood is Building

I met Cara when we both had very strange corporate titles and permission to attempt to do even stranger things in those corporates. Her light shone then, burns bright now and she’s got good claims on being a Maverick Making Maven.

So, here’s a radical little case study. Sort of like the little train that could.

I used to think that I was a community developer but in fact what I was doing was facilitating. Community has, and always will, know its own solutions. The messiness and unpredictability is the very glue that binds it. Often in this world of high costs and even higher loneliness, it is the absence of proactive top-down and bottom-up (such as community wealth building) governance that prevents the unlocking of social value. Often doing things ‘for’ rather than ‘with’ communities. This social value case study helps stitch community centred practice, relevant to any organisational ways of working, and the good thing about it is that it’s entirely repeatable in a very small or large complex bureaucratic setting.

It goes beyond ‘greater good’ or philanthropic gestures, into Country centred, purpose-based practices built on; Investment in innovation, Future relevance in the marketplace, Governments restoration of trust, and the inherent adaptive capacity of local systems to thrive. More nuanced win-win, less ‘trade off’.

The not for profit sector saw me work on environmental advocacy and disability confidence campaigns. In local government we partnered with communities going through the pain and joy of significant urban renewal. A few years later I landed, rather dizzyingly, in a leading tier one developer. In the commercial and mixed use urban development space I worked under super innovative leaders and secured investment in some really interesting mission-led economic development initiatives. A big chunk of this was inspired by John Hagels power of pull, Sirolli Institute’s enterprise facilitation and the power of ten bottom up place-shaping method. Flash forward to now being employed at Transport for NSW, where with a $211 billion pipeline and staff literally in every community across New South Wales, affects change through its everyday work.

In all of these sectors, the continued theme is not our ability to work within but across these inter-dependant complex systems. And for all the mavericks out there, the role at Transport while inherently about public benefit didn’t explicitly include social value or systems thinking. I negotiated that in as a term of employment. I knew we had a lot of work to do, building on some incredible work already well underway.

Partnership is about collaborative practice and that requires vulnerability. Often, it also requires us to slow down, and rethink our program boundaries or project milestones. Not everything should be determined by scale. This is where legitimising that messy glue of community in and across larger systems is profoundly important for our wellbeing agenda here in Australia. Like the Welsh Future Generations Commission Five ways of working, it’s about our connective tissue, not the linear transactions or control command KPIs.

Let’s cover off on the definition of social value. It is the net public benefit of everything that we do for the wellbeing of people and planet by design. That is to say, it is holistic. It should be able to demonstrate values aligned investment anchored in place-based need and accountable for its execution. It’s beautiful because small things, like Social Value Collective which I co-founded for this very reason, have limitless ripple effects.

A month in at Transport, I kicked off the Social Value Community of Practice, critical social infrastructure to support our upward journey across the organisation. Three years later, we look back and call this phase one. A big focus in this initial phase was adding value to what was already within the system, joining dots and harnessing language of the system to be considered, legitimised and ultimately adopted. As a good friend, Di Kapera said it’s about going from exceptionalism to normalism. And so I approached the bravest and most passionate senior leader in the organisation that I could, Kierstan Fishburn – now Secretary for Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure and asked if she would be my executive sponsor to signpost across the organisation that social value wasn’t going anywhere. Luckily for me, she said yes. Five members became 15 and today we have 316 people across the cluster, with 15 sessions of our participation-based community of practice held and over a thousand hours of capacity building delivered across the organisation. Our Social Value principles of practice have now been adopted as the Transport for NSW social value principles of practice.

It was our members that helped identify the need for mapping areas of social value across the organisation so the small but mighty mapping project was funded in 2023. My fellow systems thinkers and Mavericks will appreciate that the mapping sought to understand the environmental conditions beyond compliance for social value to thrive within a state government delivery agency. In fact, one of my favourite bits is the ‘attributes of social value champions’ section. And many change agents and systems thinkers reading this will see themselves in these words, and may need to take a hot minute to contemplate and relate based on their experience.

Collaboration with others in and outside of work: Mavericks pursue initiatives that are effective in forging social value are a collective effort and champions tend to seek out connection with change agents internal and external to the organisation.

Being reflective and considering how their own biases, blind spots and experiences might inform their perspective:Mavericks are keen to integrate their own lived experience with the lived experience of others.

Challenging of institutional norms: Mavericks seek out means to go above and beyond the minimum expected standard, driving social value to meet community needs now and into the future.

Uncompromising about the nature of change: Mavericks are resilient in the face of resistance.

Agile and nimble in the face of change: Mavericks have to be pragmatic, agile and have strong problem-solving abilities to steward social value through barriers and obstacles.

Proactive in pursuing solutions: Mavericks seek out opportunities to drive social value and don’t wait to have a mandate from above.

So when we talk about Mavericks navigating ambiguous circumstances, challenging the status quo and often dismantling individual territories there really is never a dull day. Every community is different, so it needs to look different. It isn’t design, services, engagement, procurement or decision-making carried out in isolation of each other, but the holistic enshrining of them together up front. This is the fun responsive part well beyond regulatory process, where organisations can go (if they fear to tread) to re-imagine their business models as a vehicle to affect change by design. Patagonia after all had very happy shareholders because as my friend B Hardy, Dharug and Gamilaraay Sovereign woman regularly says, water is the CEO. From a business architecture perspective a big chunk of this is going beyond metrics and compliance, to embrace uncertainty as an attribute of a healthy system. This is about blending formal and informal ways of working, collecting and interpreting data, valuing sense making and investing in diversity of thought.

Is it hard?

Yes!

Is it sometimes exhausting?

Of course!

Is it worth every minute?

Absolutely!

The Maverick is there to spot real time opportunity, blockages and fast track highly resource efficient change based on relational credit. They exist – if somewhat transiently – to create and maintain the connective tissue across interconnected systems. For the same reason that the above attributes are highlighted is the same reason Mavericks, while critical in organisational health, tend to be somewhat temporary – acting as a catalytic visitor to systems. Invariably, it is the champions they have cultivated that come up the flank to drive this change toward business as usual.

As a systems thinking Maverick and passionate steward of flow it is my job to help weave this thinking into the organisations that I partner with, being led by Country and bringing transdisciplinary wisdom into the process. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t. Whether you work in energy, education, finance or housing, you can absolutely affect great and enduring change using this agnostic model as Kev Carmody said From Little Things Big Things Grow. Harvey Milk proclaimed that you have to give them hope. Find your passion, partner with two or three’s as it can be a lonely but deeply fruitful space. Set your horizon and go for it because the world needs Mavericks, change agents and systems thinkers like we’ve never needed them before.

And if anyone tells you, ‘you can’t boil the ocean’ you can tell them  – we already are.

Extended Lifestyle Stewardship – Cameron Tonkinwise Is Speaking Wise

Cameron Tonkinwise changed my career. He gave me ways to put form and structure to my ideas and thinking unlike what I’d had previously been exposed to. The idea he raises that we’d be doing anything other than addressing planetary boundaries and the climate crisis is obvious to me. Why aren’t we?

I had the privilege of living for five years in New York City so I often hear in my mind the subway announcements extolling, ‘If you see something, say something.’

Announcements like that are necessary because, it seems, many do not say something. There are apparently people who can see that something is wrong, that some situation is unjust or even harmful, but will decide not to say anything.

I have the opposite problem. I do have the privilege of being able to speak up with moral indignation about things I see that could and should be otherwise; though my career is not free from consequences of being someone who tries to speak out.

In the context of New York City back then, what you might see is something suspicious, a potential harm. The reason people might not ‘say something’ is that they could be wrong. Some, it seems, worry that it would be embarrassing to have misjudged the situation, made a false accusation.

When I returned from the USA, I got to work on a range of bank-based projects that I came to realise all involved trying to create safe environments for bank service staff to ‘say something’ – to a customer who might need help escaping domestic violence, or a customer who might be subject to elder abuse or a scam, or a customer who wants a loan for a house that will become uninsurable because of climate change. In each of these situations, our societies would be very different if banks said something every time they saw something, even though these were not core business responsibilities.

Saying nothing to avoid misjudging can be disastrous. If the things that people say something about are 99% of the time not dangerous, it is still necessary to say something every time, given the scale of harm that might come from that other 1%.

The best version of what’s involved here was the lovely definition of the precautionary principle I once read: ‘If you act as if it matters, and it doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter; but if you act as if it doesn’t matter, and it does matter, then it does matter.’ So there should be absolutely no shame saying something about all you can see that is threatening.

There is a pretty good chance that we, the modern global consumer class, are not just causing a 6th mass extinction right now, but are creating climatic conditions that will collapse our civilizations. The last time atmospheric CO2 was this high, the oceans were 20m higher than they are now. The only reason the oceans are not that high right now is because we have put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so quickly that there is a lag in climatic changes. The last time average global temperatures were this hot, the human genome had not yet evolved. Humanity has never experienced these conditions before.

It seems to me that even if all this had only a small chance of being the case, we should all be talking about absolutely nothing else. I want to be proved wrong about this. I want to be shamed as chicken little or the boy who cried wolf. You should not have to be a Maverick to raise issues of sustainability in any and every meeting, at work, and with friends and family.

This has nothing to do with doomerism or virtue signalling. What we might see are not just risks and threats, but actions. If you see an opportunity for decarbonising, a way of living and working that degrows our resource consumption, we need to feel impelled to say something. And not just nicely; say it persuasively, forcefully, repeatedly: ‘we can just do this instead of that; if it is harder to do, it will never be harder than trying to endure what will happen if we just keep doing what we are doing now.’

If all that we value is at stake, the imperative is not just to say something about what we might see can be done, but to be looking incessantly for all that might be done.  Every situation needs to be re-seen in terms of how it might be ‘Mavericked’ into something that helps us change the direction of our societies.

I must confess that I find all this a bit exciting. It might sound relentless, and perhaps sanctimonious. It requires being forever critical of all that fails to take seriously the risk of collapse. But there is also something exhilarating about challenge of trying to rethink everything.

It might be because I am a teacher. Or rather, I am teacher because I love learning. I love coming to realise that what I thought I knew was all wrong, that what I had come to rely on is part of the problem. I am teacher because when I come to know something, I immediately want other people to know it. When I see something anew, I cannot not say something.