INTHEBLACK November 2021 - Magazine - Page 24
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remind me that I was completely outside my comfort
zone. It would be a situation I’d never had to deal with
before, and I loved it. I was grieving the loss of a great
sense of purpose.”
She rang the project sponsor back, and just like that
the job was hers.
HUMANISING THE STAKEHOLDER PROCESS
Some leaders intentionally shy away from thorough
stakeholder consultation, because often it can become
a proverbial can of worms. With RV Investigator,
Moate took the opposite approach. She was managing
the design and build of a ship that would be used by
researchers and scientists for several decades. The only
way to get it right, she decided, was to bring everybody
into the conversation.
“The Investigator had a very large stakeholder
community,” Moate says. “We exchanged over 3000
drawings, from a couple of pages to over 20 pages each.
We had a shipbuilding team in Singapore, a coordinating
point here in Hobart, and the entire Australian marine
community engaged.
“I talk a lot about values and putting people first. I
truly believe that, if you have a choice between task and
relationship, you must always choose relationship. This
was vital – the project was 24/7 for five years. Energy,
commitment, passion and attention to detail were never
negotiable.” With that many stakeholders, disagreements
and difficult conversations were common. Moate says the
24 ITB November 2021
best way to handle such tense situations is to encourage
people to remain respectful, to allow everybody to have
their say, and to listen deeply to all sides of the argument.
When people feel they have been heard, they will be a lot
more receptive to a decision, even if it goes against their
wishes.
“We had a budget of A$7.6 million for equipment,”
Moate recalls. “We went out to the community and
asked what they’d like to have on board. There must
have been 100 items that people wanted, and many of
those we couldn’t afford.”
Representatives from the various research communities
scored each piece of equipment and, Moate says, at the
beginning the assumption was that specific communities
would vote only for their own needs.
“We asked everybody to present a little bit about their
requirements, and it was really interesting,” she says.
“There was one piece of gear, a marine gravity meter
worth A$500,000, wanted by one of the geoscience
communities. It was so expensive they assumed it would
never be approved.
“But when they presented, the oceanographic
community realised this gear was also able to measure
the height of the ocean, which can be used to measure
sea level rise over time.
As a result, it was funded and is on the ship now. That
epitomised the value of the consultation process, of
people parking their biases and being galvanised around
a community goal.”