I have a great passion for human connection and working with people to resolve complex challenges through holistic system redesign. This takes time, so I love playing fast with big concepts, failing and learning just as fast, piloting in the real world, and bringing others into the game so that there is a collective feel of constantly achieving and learning, all the while accumulating small progressions that ultimately achieves 'the impossible'.I currently play in the Murraylands and Riverland sandpit as Chief Executive of the region's Regional Development Australia (RDA) body. We are a not-for-profit charity that connects our region for a resilient and sustainable future ... yep, we do the often invisible work of 'making shit happen' ;)My passion for systems play was fueled during a twelve year career in the South Australian Government, starting as an ecologist interested in aquatic ecosystems (there's that 'systems' word!) and moving on to an advisor role to the Department for Water's Chief Executive where I took on multiple stretch projects with some great mentors. After being pulled over to the Premier's Murray-Darling Basin Plan Taskforce, I ended up facilitating a $420 million deal and went on to manage the $265 million South Australian River Murray Sustainability Program (SARMS). Lots of people told us that what we were proposing to achieve was impossible. It wasn't ... as evidenced by SARMS winning the 2017 IPAA Prime Minister's Gold Award for Excellence in Public Sector Management for the best performing public sector program in Australia. This experience taught me how to negotiate across broad and impassioned interests, to develop and nurture high performing teams, to manage large programs with complex governance, financial and reporting requirements and, most importantly, to deliver on time, on budget, and beyond expectations. After leaving government in 2017, I commenced a PhD on identifying critical success factors for water recovery programs in the Murray-Darling Basin while also running FeeZable Solutions: 'finding feasible solutions for the food-energy-water nexus'. During this time, I was approached to act as Chief Executive of RDA Murraylands and Riverland (RDAMR), developed a fruit fly preparedness plan for the Riverland area, led international delegations through the Murray-Darling Basin, and led a team of Australian water experts to Arizona for the 2019 Desert Waters International Symposium. This is where I caught the RDAMR bug and, when the position opened in October 2019, I jumped at the opportunity and haven't looked back!