This conference’s major topics including transformational change, response to future challenges, creating public value, dealing with large scale disasters and risk management are all underpinned by effective leadership. For many years the AIPM has supported leadership development in emergency services organisations through AFAC. Just as emergency services grapple with their own future directions, the practice of leadership development has been realigning to more complex and turbulent environments. In this regard the AIPM recognises the programs and services provided in the past, may not be sufficient to support emergency service organisations in transition.

The AIPM is developing a new philosophy to leadership development, one that moves away from stand alone programs, and moves towards closer collaboration with our partner agencies to align learning in the workplace with the value of collaborative learning in Manly.

We are calling it Pioneer Leadership. In our thoughts we are thinking about the early white settlers to Australia, what they learnt, how they adapted, how they recovered from setbacks, how they built their vision, the mistakes they made, how their vision was limited by the lens of their culture, their time and their biases. Pioneer Leadership is not always about being right, but it is about continual growth and movement, of pushing the frontiers of our experience, our competency and our capacity. It is about leadership encompassing learning and teaching as foundation strategies to align and adapt to rapidly changing complex environments. Pioneer Leadership is not our journey alone, but one we take in collaboration with our partners. This year we launched the Australia New Zealand Police Leadership Strategy which is underpinned by our thoughts about Pioneer Leadership. We believe Pioneer Leadership has the potential to better support leadership development within AFAC organisations and their quest to address the major challenges discussed at this conference.