WESFARMERS – AI Adaptive

Wesfarmers businesses are continuing to accelerate investment in data and digital capabilities. Expectations regarding the collection, use and protection of data continue to evolve at pace. Therefore it’s never been a more important time to harness the collective knowledge, experience and expertise across the WES group to manage risks and uplift cyber security capabilities.

As a recently created team within WES Corporate Office, Group Cyber Security (GCS) plays an integral role providing offensive and defensive cyber security and risk management capabilities. Daniella Traino (Group Cyber Information Security Officer) has built a team of technically astute cyber and risk specialists who are proficient at innovation and operational delivery. Whilst being the only team in Wesfarmers corporate office needing to influence (without a mandate), the GCS team needed to uplift their capability and approach for engaging. By moving their working relationships from competitive to working in allyship, they were able to understand what was required to deliver mutually beneficial outcomes. The shift required a fit for purpose engagement model, that facilitated connecting the right people at the right time for a clear purpose and expected outcome in order to deliver value quickly.

"We engaged with Leisa and Debra on several initiatives. Concepts like change, stakeholder engagement and the way in which we understand our stakeholders was super important to the team. This was an area where we engaged Leisa and Deborah to help us build a bit more of a language toolbox, thinking to help us succeed as we start to work through our day-to-day capabilities and responsibilities, but also to better engage our stakeholders at all levels. It was something that we practiced as well, which was really helpful.In the couple of months since, we've actually seen particularly some of the team members who've had no exposure to these concepts or skills actually start applying those and start to see the results of their labour, which has been really good for us."

We focussed efforts across 3 main areas;

1.

Simplify the complexity to enable the focus on biggest impact for effort when it came to engaging the Divisions. This resulted in defining and building a new engagement model which elevated understanding each teams needs. It was specifically designed to facilitate more efficient ways of delivering maturity of both strategic partnerships and operational delivery that resulted in creating value together. We supported the GCS to roll out the Integrated planning workshops (the first of the touchpoints). These created opportunities to learn about each team, build depth in understanding and create a shared roadmap for delivery.

2.

Create the definition and language for Allyship (leadership's strategic direction) and Fellowship (operational delivery level) as the foundations for how to create alignment and build trusted relationships. These terms and definitions were supported by expectations of practical actions and behaviours. Firstly shared with GCS to co-create Ways the Working then owned by the GCS. Proposed to each Division in the Integrated Planning workshops and adopted. It created the shared understanding for delivering on enterprise wide approach to delivering value for WES Group collectively through alignment of ‘how we work together to deliver.

3.

Work with Daniella to create a high performing team by supercharge the GCS. Alongside the Ways of Working (WoW) we completed a Governance Diagnostic and uplift. This supported delivery of the engagement model and included processes, tools and templates for change leadership, ideation, decision making and escalation processes. These were all targeted to support the GCS team to deliver quality and consistency as the pathway for building trusted relationships with the Divisions.

The governance review included a roadmap for uplift over 12 mths to support building sustainable habits.

Daniella has reported seeing a positive impact of Allyship at the leadership level with the Divisions. Daniella also shared the Allyship and Fellowship concept and materials with Anthony Gianotti (Chief Financial Officer Wesfarmers Group) who was supportive and continues to sponsor this approach with all the Divisions.

The GCS team more broadly have shared that when the notion of Fellowship was introduced, they saw an immediate positive impact on interactions.

Daniella and the team have also reported that the new approach to the Division Engagement Model has enabled the opportunity to create alignment, shared understanding, clarity of strategic and operation goals and mechanisms to maintain momentum.

The process of optimisation has begun and now the foundations are in place with the inclusive language to describe the relationships and agreed ways of working to support the behaviours required for success. The governance uplift, playbooks, frameworks and tools are with the team who are continuing to iterate and refine as their experience grows and the overall change maturity evolves.

“It's actually about stakeholder value in the long term. So we can't be making short-term decisions that affect our long-term sustainability. But if we're going to direct our businesses in a certain way, there needs to be quite a pragmatic approach to that. And I've always said to the team, and this is why the work we did with you (AI Adpative) is so important, is that it's not what we do, because that can morph and it can change as the maturity of our organisation does. It's the how and the how is actually quite consistent.”

"I think the context and the methods were great, but it's not until you put them into practice that people start to go, aha. So we understood the difference between fixed mindsets anda few other concepts, but for my team who are highly technical, these capabilities were really helpful for us to anchor some of our thinking. And there were other models where they were presented so that my team could understand if we're dealing with someone who feels or behaves in this particular way, what might be driving that behavior? So rather than just responding to the behavior, actually thinking about what the root cause might be of the behavior, it's taken us a bit of time because it's not a natural skill set."

"As a regular activity, one of the things for me to do more about is just bringing the language into the team. I think the concepts are understood, but we need to be using the language to be able to better understand what we're trying to achieve and then get the team to support the other as they go through these techniques. So that's been great. I think the other areas which I probably talked to are we had playbooks, we had ways of working and those sort of key team design elements that were very helpful for us to develop with Debra and Leisa. So that's actually stood the test of time."

"So we're in a structure that isn't highly operational, but we work very closely with lots of operational divisions and businesses. So for us, we had to come up with ways of working that was respectful of that corporate governance structure.And so we came up with the concepts of Allyship and Fellowship. And to this day, that's actually been quite helpful because it helps us understand where the autonomy needs to be preserved and respected, but not at the risk of the greater good or the business benefit. So we came up with these terms, which were, really working well since both in the team and it's given them a language to talk to their counterparts, to management. To say, actually, we need your Fellowship here, or we need your Allyship on this. And it's a very respectful discussion."

Wesfarmers Group Cyber Security:

The Opportunity

THE SOLUTION

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The Impact

Acknowledgementof Country

Adaptive Change Mindset Pty Ltd