Telstra operates at the convergence of two defining macro forces; the escalating polycrisis of interconnected geopolitical, climatic, and societal risks, and the transformative disruption of the Future of Work, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). This report analyses these forces, concluding that they fundamentally challenge Telstra’s operational resilience, competitive strategy, and risk profile. Success requires an evolution in leadership behaviour, from a command and control model to one grounded in humility, virtues, and systemic thinking, to foster a culture of agility and psychological safety. To enable this, Telstra must build three core organisational capabilities: Anticipatory Resilience, Agentic Workforce Orchestration, and Ethical AI Integration. This report recommends: (1) Institute Polycrisis War Gaming, (2) Launch a Human AI Synergy Upskilling Program, (3) Embed Indigenous Leadership Principles into the Telstra Leadership Model, and (4) Re-engineer Performance & Incentive Systems around ecosystem contribution and capability development.
2. The Strategic Imperative: Polycrisis and Technological Disruption
2.1 The Polycrisis and Telstra’s Operating Context
The concept of the polycrisis describes a situation where discrete crises interact so that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part (Tooze, 2023). For Telstra, this is a daily operational reality, where such interconnections include:
Climate & Infrastructure: Increasing frequency of extreme weather events (e.g., floods, fire) causes physical network damage, triggering widespread service outages. This is not just a technical problem, but a crisis of public trust and regulatory scrutiny, as telecommunications is designated critical national infrastructure (The Australian Financial Review, 2023).
Geopolitics & Supply Chains: Global tensions threaten the fragile supply chains for network hardware, from fibre optics to 5G components, potentially delaying Telstra’s infrastructure rollout and T25 strategic goals (The Economist, 2022).
Societal Polarisation & Cybersecurity: The WEF (2025) identifies misinformation and cyberattacks as top risks for data custodians like Testra, which face relentless state level and criminal cyber threats. A significant breach could cripple essential services and erode consumer confidence in an era of deep societal distrust.
McKinsey’s The State of Organizations 2023 frames the organisational response to this environment as requiring a shift as the polycrisis renders traditional, hierarchical command and control models not only ineffective but dangerous, as they create organisational brittleness and blind spots (Guggenberger et al., 2023). Telstra’s traditional, plan driven, and siloed operational processes are inherently vulnerable in this context. They are designed for predictability and are therefore brittle in the face of the polycrisis’s emergent, interconnected shocks.
2.2 The Future of Work: From Automation to Orchestration
The second disruptive force is the advent of AI systems that can act autonomously on high level goals (McKinsey, 2025). This moves beyond simple task automation to a future where the most valuable human work is agentic: guiding, prompting, and overseeing AI agents to solve complex problems. The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 reinforces this, identifying analytical thinking, creative thinking, and AI and big data proficiency as the top growing skills.
For Telstra, this presents both an existential risk and a historic opportunity. The risk is in failing to reskill its vast workforce, leading to a skills obsolescence that makes the company uncompetitive. The opportunity lies in leveraging AI to not only drive efficiency (e.g., in network optimisation and customer service chatbots) but also to enhance human decision making in polycrisis scenarios. For instance, using AI simulations to model the cascading effects of a network failure. However, this shift raises profound questions about human agency, the feeling of control and purpose at work (Pew Research, 2023). Managing this psychological transition is as critical as managing the technological one. Simultaneously, the future of work requires leaders to be orchestrators of human and AI potential, rather than directors of human labour (McKinsey, 2025).
3. Behaviours, Culture, and Capability
3.1 The Interplay of Formal and Informal Leadership
The required shift calls for a focus on the interaction between formal and informal leadership structures. In a volatile environment, the mandate of formal leaders (their authority) is constantly tested against the credibility of informal leaders (their influence). The capability to generate innovative, high quality solutions is directly dependent on a workforce that feels psychologically safe to experiment, challenge, and occasionally fail, without suffering moral harm (Edmondson & Lei, 2014).
A leader operating on a virtues based model, demonstrating humility, courage, and justice, creates a culture of psychological safety (Crossan et al., 2021). This is the foundation that enables informal leaders to speak up with bad news or novel ideas without fear, a critical capability in a polycrisis. A stark contrast to the strongman leadership model, which centralises decision making and suppresses dissent, rendering the organisation blind to emerging threats (Ben-Ghiat, 2022).
Additionally, the principles of Indigenous leadership, such as the Māori concept of leading through service and community focus (Harr et al., 2019) and the Aboriginal practice of Dadirri (deep, respectful listening) (Goreng Goreng, 2022), provide a powerful framework for this shift. These models inherently value the collective over the individual and understand that authority is earned through relationship and stewardship, not just bestowed by title.
3.2 The Dynamics and Tensions of Interplay on Culture and Capability
The interplay between formal and informal leadership is a dynamic, often contentious, negotiation of power. For example, a formal leader may mandate a top down AI adoption strategy to achieve T25 efficiency targets. However, if influential informal leaders within engineering teams voice scepticism about its technical robustness or ethical implications, they can orchestrate a silent veto through passive resistance, negatively impacting the initiative. This illustrates how informal networks can actively inhibit capability development if the cultural context is misaligned.
Conversely, formal leaders who attempt to forcibly co-opt informal networks by appointing innovation champions risk sterilising the very organic trust that makes those networks valuable. The core leadership challenge, therefore, is to create a context where formal authority is used not to command or absorb networks, but to enable informal influence. This means formal leaders must act as architects, removing systemic barriers and providing resources for emergent, agentic and boundary spanning practices to flourish (de Smet et al., 2023). The outcome of this successful interplay is an organisational wide culture of agile learning and psychological safety, which directly supports the development of future proof capabilities (McLaughlin, 2025).
4. Building Future-Proof Organisational Capabilities The Future of Work
To respond to the leadership and strategic challenges, Telstra must systematically build three core organisational capabilities.
4.1 Capability 1: Anticipatory Resilience
This is the capacity that sense, anticipate, and reconfigure rather than being reactive to external threats, moving beyond business continuity planning to a more dynamic, systemic view, essential for navigating the polycrisis (WEF, 2025).
Supporting Processes: Telstra’s existing network operations centres are a foundation, however to build this capability, processes must evolve to include integrated risk sensing platforms that use AI to scan for signals across geopolitical, climatic, and cyber domains, as well as formalised, cross functional crisis simulation exercises.
Inhibiting Processes: The primary inhibitor is the legacy organisational design, rooted in the industrial era, which prioritises functional specialisation over systemic integration. These silos are a cultural and procedural outcome of a performance management system that rewards vertical excellence (e.g., a perfect network uptime metric for the infrastructure team) over horizontal, including external collaboration, creating a fundamental misalignment. While the polycrisis is horizontally interconnected, Telstra’s processes for sensing and responding are vertically organised. Therefore, the very processes designed for industrial era efficiency actively inhibit the development of resilience by preventing the integrated situational awareness mandated by the polycrisis context.
4.2 Capability 2: Agentic Workforce Orchestration
This involves managing a blended workforce of human employees, including full time staff and external contractors, as well as AI agents as a single, synergistic ecosystem (McKinsey & Comapny, 2025).
Supporting Processes: Telstra’s investments in AI platforms and supporting processes include agile project management and dynamic talent allocation tools that allow humans and AI agents to be matched to tasks based on their evolving capabilities, embodying the orchestration principle.
Inhibiting Processes: Rigid job descriptions and legacy performance management systems that reward individual task completion are significant barriers. For instance, a performance system designed for a human only workforce actively punishes an employee who spends time training an AI agent that eventually automates part of their role. This illustrates a critical systemic failure of HR processes built for stability and role clarity, directly inhibiting the fluidity and learning mindset required for Agentic Orchestration by creating an incentive to resist, rather than embrace the productivity tools of the future, stifling the very innovation Telstra’s T25 strategy seeks to promote.
4.3 Capability 3: Ethical AI Integration
This is the capability to deploy AI at scale in a manner that is trustworthy, equitable, and aligned with societal values, a cornerstone of sustainable leadership and long term viability (Deloitte, 2025).
Supporting Processes: The development of a robust AI Ethics Framework is a crucial supporting process. This includes clear guidelines for data provenance, model transparency, and algorithmic bias detection, moving beyond a tick box exercise to an embedded governance practice.
Inhibiting Processes: A culture and incentive system that prioritises speed to market and cost cutting as a priority can systematically erode ethical safeguards. If the incentive system solely rewards technical teams for the deployment speed of AI features, it creates incentive to bypass thorough ethical impact assessments. This demonstrates how narrowly defined, short term financial metrics can inhibit the development of a long-term, trust based capability.
5. Recommendations for Enabling a Future Ready Telstra
The following recommendations are highly actionable to directly address the capabilities and leadership behaviours required for Telstra to thrive.
Recommendation 1: Embed War Gaming Polycrisis Simulation into Strategy
Directly enables responses to Polycrisis risks and critically improves organisational processes for Anticipatory Resilience by moving from static planning to dynamic learning.
Actionable Steps:
Initiate: The Chief Strategy Officer, in partnership with the CRO (Chief Risk Officer), will establish a quarterly Strategic Stress Test. This is a mandatory, C-suite led simulation based on the most probable and severe scenarios from the WEF Global Risks Report (2025), such as a simultaneous critical infrastructure failure and a generative AI powered misinformation attack on Telstra’s brand.
Execute: Use a red teaming approach, where a dedicated cross functional team role plays adversaries or disruptive competitors, actively seeking to exploit Telstra’s process weaknesses and organisational silos as identified in the State of Organizations report (Guggenberger et al., 2023).
Learn & Integrate: The primary output is not a report, but a mandated Lessons Learned Action Plan to be reviewed by the Executive Committee within two weeks, with clear accountability for process changes (e.g., revising a communication protocol, integrating a new data source).
Supporting Evidence: This recommendation operationalises McKinsey’s key organisational shift by forcing collaboration across formal silos, thereby building a core organisational capability.
Recommendation 2: Establish a Human AI Synergy Upskilling Program
Builds the Agentic Workforce Orchestration capability by fundamentally improving the process of skill development, directly addressing the future of work imperative.
Actionable Steps:
Skill Mapping: Map current roles against the WEF Future of Jobs (2025) skill taxonomy, identifying roles at high risk of disruption and those with high potential for AI augmentation. Additionally, identify anticipated skills and roles required in the near and distant future, with developmental pathways for each.
Develop & Deliver: Create a modular, mandatory curriculum co-delivered by Telstra’s top AI engineers and internal or external ethics specialists. Modules must be role specific, focusing on practical agentic skills. For example: e.g., AI assisted ethical risk assessments for network engineers, Prompt Engineering for Network Optimisation Agents, or Validating Generative AI Content Outputs for marketers.
Incentivise & Track: Allocate a mandatory 10% capability development time for all employees. Incorporate course completion and demonstrated application of new skills into the performance scorecard for both individuals and their managers, creating an internal system for capability development.
Supporting Evidence: This directly responds to the shift from human as doer to human as orchestrator outlined by McKinsey (2025) in the agentic future of work. It addresses the threat to human agency by making the company an active partner in employee growth, transforming a risk into an engagement and competitive advantage (Pew Research, 2023).
Recommendation 3: Integrate Indigenous Leadership Principles into the Telstra Leadership Code
Directly shapes the interplay between formal and informal leadership by providing a behavioural framework that supports a more adaptive and humble culture, crucial for polycrisis navigation.
Actionable Steps:
Codify: Revise the Telstra Leadership Code to explicitly include the principles of Dadirri (deep, respectful listening) and long term stewardship, as argued by Dr. Goreng Goreng (2022) and evidenced in Māori leadership studies (Harr et al., 2019).
Embed in Development: Redesign the leadership program to include immersive sessions co-facilitated by Indigenous elders, focusing on practical application such as conducting a meeting with Dadirri, or making a strategic decision with a focus on intergenerational stewardship.
Reinforce through Systems: Incorporate 360 degree feedback metrics that specifically measure these behaviours (e.g., My leader creates space for all voices to be heard). Promotion to Executive level and above must be contingent on demonstrating proficiency in this updated leadership code.
Supporting Evidence: This recommendation moves beyond generic leadership advice by leveraging the culturally grounded models to foster the virtues based leadership (Crossan et al., 2021) necessary to harness the power of both formal and informal networks.
Recommendation 4: Re-engineer the Performance & Reward System for Ecosystem Contribution
This is the foundational enabler, critically appraising and improving the core process of performance management to support the desired culture and enable all other capabilities.
Actionable Steps:
Pilot a New Scorecard: In the Technology function, pilot a new performance scorecard for leaders that weights metrics equally across three areas: Financial/Output (the traditional metric), Team Capability Growth (measured by skill surveys), and Ecosystem Contribution (measured by 360-feedback and contributions to cross functional projects).
Dismantle Perverse Incentives: Explicitly decouple rewards from activities that inhibit long term capabilities. For example, stop rewarding cost cutting in isolation; instead, reward cost saving initiatives that are achieved while improving employee skill sets or cross system resilience.
Scale and Refine: After two review cycles, use the pilot data to refine the model and develop a phased rollout plan for the entire organisation, managed by the Chief People Officer, and linked to organisational remuneration packages.
Supporting Evidence: This directly addresses the inhibiting processes, which are often rooted in industrial era, WEIRD incentive structures (Henrich et al., 2020). It operationalises the workforce ecosystem by incentivising orchestration over siloed execution, supporting boundary spanning collaboration and capability building (MIT Sloan, 2025).
6. Conclusion
The confluence of the polycrisis and the future of work represents the most significant strategic leadership challenge Telstra has faced. Navigating it successfully requires more than technological investment or structural reorganisation, but demands a profound cultural and behavioural shift at the leadership level. By embracing humble, virtues based leadership, Telstra’s executives can foster a culture where formal and informal networks collaborate to build the vital capabilities of Anticipatory Resilience, Agentic Orchestration, and Ethical AI Integration. The recommendations provided, of war gaming, strategic upskilling, cultural renewal, and incentive reform, offer a concrete pathway forward. The decision to act decisively on this agenda will define Telstra’s role as a resilient national champion or a vulnerable legacy operator in the decades to come.
7. References Polycrisis & The Future of Work at Testra
• Ben-Ghiat, R. (2022). Return of the Strongmen [Audio podcast episode]. In The Ethics Centre. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4J6RqPEAUjIvwdImuLLQxC
• Crossan, M., Furlong, F., Giammarco, M., Kantor, L., & White, D. (2021). We don't need more leaders - We need more good leaders. Advancing a virtues-based approach to leader(ship) development. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(5), 101480.
• Deloitte. (2025). EU2025 Sustainability Regulation Outlook: Unlocking competitiveness and growth. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/environmental-social-governance/eu-2025-sustainability-regulation-outlook.html
• De Smet, A., Gast, A., Lavoie, J., & Lurie, M. (2023). New leadership for a new era of thriving organizations. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/new-leadership-for-a-new-era-of-thriving-organizations
• Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23–43.
• Goreng Goreng, T. (2022). What if our leaders were humble? [Video]. TEDxCanberra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9ykpsQzTs
• Guggenberger, T., Hill, D., Kilmann, J., & Stamp, D. (2023). The state of organizations 2023: Ten shifts transforming organizations. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023
• Harr, J., Roche, M., & Brougham, D. (2019). Indigenous Insights into Ethical Leadership: A Study of Māori Leaders. Journal of Business Ethics, 160, 621-640. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3869-3
• Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• McKinsey & Company. (2025). The future of work is agentic. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-future-of-work-is-agentic
• McLaughlin, L. (2025). 10 essential leadership tips for 2025. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/10-essential-leadership-tips-for-2025/
• Pew Research Center. (2023). The future of human agency. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/24/the-future-of-human-agency/
• The Australian Financial Review. (2023). Telstra the most complained about telco: ombudsman. https://www.afr.com/companies/telecommunications/telstra-the-most-complained-about-telco-ombudsman-20230509-p5d6wl
• The Economist. (2022). The tricky restructuring of global supply chains. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/06/16/the-tricky-restructuring-of-global-supply-chains
• Tooze, A. (2023). What is the Polycrisis? [Video]. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/videos/experts-explain-adam-tooze-what-is-the-polycrisis/
• World Economic Forum. (2025). Global Risks Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
• World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/future-of-jobs-report-2025-jobs-of-the-future-and-the-skills-you-need-to-get-them/Originally written and submitted 16 October 2025
Polycrisis & The Future of Work
If you would like to discuss further the polycrisis and the future of work at Testra or another organisation, please post a comment below or connect. There is also a recent post with podcast with myself and Hamid Ghodsi about leading through the polycrisis at a Digital Agency in Hobart Tasmania.
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