About the Webinar

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the world’s largest unsupervised workplace sociology experiment in history. With 20/20 hindsight, the race to recover and rebuild would be won by organisations that took the new constraints, especially the dismantling of the traditional office workplace, and turned them into a competitive advantage.

Some companies were already on that journey since 2019, no longer restricted by the talent pool in their city, and letting go of armies of middle managers ensuring workers were busy at their desks. Instead, they focused on outcomes, remote employees, local and offshore partnerships and suppliers, communications platforms, business processes and collaboration tools that were 100% digital, while often working across one or two contiguous time zones. What can we learn from them?

As the ‘rebuild’ phase becomes a refocus on new opportunities for our business survivors, can Australian organisations thrive in a global market for talented people? Is our obsession with face-to-face work going to reduce our resilience in the face of the next normal? How can company culture be maintained over Zoom? Join us and find out!

Meet your speakers

Layla Foord

VP Product, Go1

Layla is a global digital leader and authority on new business models, digital marketplaces, product and technology, scaling globally and leading happy and productive teams.

Layla is currently the VP of Product at GO1, the world's largest educational content marketplace. GO1 is now an established leader in online learning and education, and continues to work alongside some of the largest companies in the world covering a wide range of industries and regions.

Layla has coached and led teams from 1 to 50+ globally for the past 20 years, She helps the modern leader to understand how they can find meaning in everyday experiences and get them most from their teams. She works on confidence, self-belief and how to find a human connection with colleagues, peers and managers.

Mark Rees

CTO, Xero

Mark leads the platform, security, data, engineering and architecture teams at Xero and is responsible for enabling Xero’s platform for innovation, growth and operational excellence. Prior to leading the technology team at Xero he was Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft New Zealand and Chief Product and Technology Officer at Trade Me. Mark graduated from the University of Canterbury with a PhD in Chemistry and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Mathematics and was a research fellow at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in The Netherlands.

Patrick Collins

CTPO, Zip

Patrick Collins is a technology leader with 12 years’ experience in product development in Silicon Valley. He joins Zip from San Francisco based Moovweb. Collins moved to San Francisco in 2008 when he was founder and CEO of venture-backed technology start-up, 5th Finger. Before that he was a founding technical member of Fairfax Digital, where he launched Domain, Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review.

Patrick Kua

CTO, Independent - last with N26

Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with almost 20 years of experience. His personal passion is accelerating the growth and success of tech organisations and technical leaders. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organisations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including The Retrospective Handbook, Talking with Tech Leads and Building Evolutionary Architectures

Nigel Dalton - Host

Social Scientist, Thoughtworks

As a social scientist, Nigel equips organisations with the tools and thinking that can accelerate them to become a Modern Digital Business - seamlessly managing online to offline in a post-consumer, more human-centric world.

Scale-Up Workshop Offer

If you’re looking to scale your business, we have an exclusive offer for a complimentary 1:1 half-day Scale-up workshop for a select number of organisations to help you assess your portfolio and identify strategic opportunities aligned to your organisational goals. During this session, we will collaborate with you to pick strategic bets in your portfolio that are well suited to potential scaling options. We’ll also discuss how Thoughtworks can partner with you to successfully deliver the initiative and recommend an engagement model for your consideration.

There are a limited number of places available, so if this is something that would be of interest to you, please fill out the form, and one of our representatives will be in touch to discuss.

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