In May, Arcadia’s Senior Leadership team gathered for a three-day Summit in Sydney, focused on designing Arcadia’s future.
Bringing together the Studio Leads, Principals and business leaders from around Australia and New Zealand, together with the Advisory Board, the Summit gave everyone the opportunity to step back, reflect, and look ahead to shape the next three years.
At the centre of the Summit’s agenda was Arcadia’s Strategy, with sessions and workshops designed to interrogate the future direction of the business, identify opportunities and define next steps. Facilitated by James Chapman of Maximus, a thought-provoking line up of industry leaders and Knowledge Holders joined the group throughout the Summit, selected because their experience and insights were closely aligned with Arcadia’s direction Arcadia and helped challenge and inspire our thinking.
Karl Mayoh, Co Founder and Director of Erilyan spoke to “Scaling a Business Through Operational Excellence”. Having founded Erilyan at the same time as Arcadia, Karl revealed personal experiences of how he and his co-founder maintained the company’s core values – transparency, open communication and a client-first mindset – through the company’s stages of growth. The people in the room appreciated Karl’s frank and honest sharing of the lessons he has learned along the way as they grew the company, while holding onto the culture they valued so highly.
It’s impossible to describe the impact of the session with Wiradjuri Elder, artist and storyteller Peter Swain. Titled “Country, Responsibility and Interconnection”, we all took our shoes off, sat on the floor and worked on a culture of connection. Using the power of story telling, Peter taught us so much about his culture, while encouraging us all to share our many personal stories to create one meaningful artwork.
Arcadia is very lucky to have Peter Mattick, Emma Shipley and Julie Savet Ward contribute their knowledge to the Advisory Board. In particular, Peter Mattick, with nearly 50 years of corporate experience, was perfectly placed to share his insights on “Developing Leadership”, not just for those in the room, but from within the company as it grows and adapts. His advice aligned with that of Karl’s – allow your leaders to make mistakes, but to have the culture to own those mistakes, fix them and learn from them. This advice fits with Arcadia’s core values.
Ninotschka Titchkosky, formerly co-CEO of BVN, and founder of Systems Reef addressed the final pillar of the strategy: “Elevating Design Excellence Through Collaboration”. As a fellow architect, her anecdotes resonated with most of the room and for the rest of us, she just made sense, with the advice and stories she shared from her time leading one of Arcadia’s collaborators, BVN. It was inspiring to hear how they focused on creating a future-focused strategy with emotion and purpose, and the results this had with growing a successful practice.
Returning to daily operations, our leaders have continued to make time, not only to present the company-wide Arcadia Strategy to our broader group, but to work with their teams to build studio and business unit strategies working together Under One Umbrella to create future success.
We look forward to carrying these conversations forward to inform the next phase of Arcadia’s Strategy:
