Just wrapped eight weeks of 5am starts for Not An MBA with Alicia McKay — and it's changed how I think about leadership, delivery, and where I'm headed next. A few reflections on systems leadership, and why it looked so familiar.
I just finished Not An MBA with Alicia McKay — hands down the most thought-provoking and interactive professional development I've done. Well worth the 5am starts for eight weeks. notanmba
The programme covers five areas: flexibility, decisions, problem solving, performance and influence. Woven through all of them is a concept I hadn't encountered by name before: systems leadership.
What's stayed with me since is a realisation about my own experience in iterative software delivery — time-boxed planning and prioritisation, a clear definition of done, and regular cadences to collaborate and surface risks and blockers — is basically systems leadership operating at a small scale. It's about being clear on what's actually a business priority, what "good" looks like, staying alert to critical success factors and risks, and co-designing an operating environment that lets people do their best work.
I have a real example of this. In my first contract in Perth, I doubled a software team's productivity just by moving our key meetings to the afternoons. That gave the developers a long, uninterrupted block in the mornings — when they were freshest — to focus. They loved it, and the output showed it. That's systems leadership in miniature: designing the environment around how people actually do their best work.
Alicia summed up the cohort as "highly-motivated, highly-intelligent, impact-driven, hilarious, brilliant senior professionals" — and honestly, that tracked. Learning alongside people like that, in a genuinely interactive format rather than a lecture, was a big part of what made it work.
What's next
I think what's next for me is sharing what I've learnt and making it visible, partly to help consolidate my own learning. I'm still working out the practical shape of that, but it will likely involve some writing and talking, shared here and on LinkedIn.
It also sits alongside a longer-term plan. Over the last couple of years I've been upskilling in cybersecurity — building the technical and analytical foundations to formalise experience gained in recent contracts. Over the next year, I'm adding a governance and risk qualification, CISM, aimed at higher-value opportunities in a domain with real demand and a genuine skills shortage — and one with a direct crossover into AI governance.
NaMBA is going to help with all of it: sharper critical thinking, better tools for unpacking problems, and more mental models to draw on.
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