Dr Scott Krebs is an Executive psychologist with 25 years’ experience in leadership, culture and transformation. He’s Founder and Director of Instinctability, an advisory firm helping executives, boards and leadership teams build the judgement and capability to act well under pressure, across governance, technology and culture. His work spans AI strategy, digital transformation and cyber risk, always through a leadership and behavioural lens rather than a technical one. Scott has been a senior corporate leader and CEO, co-founded three businesses (one acquired by a major US company), and is a published researcher in leadership, trust and workplace wellbeing. He built and ran a SaaS psychometric assessment platform before founding Instinctability. Scott has worked directly inside aged care and community services, including Lutheran Services, Anglicare and UnitingCare Queensland, on organisational design and restructure, leadership development, talent assessment, and workplace wellbeing, the people-facing work that determines whether change actually sticks.
Leading Through the Unknown: Steady Leadership for Aged Care Boards Through Sustained Reform
Aged care leaders are being asked to hold more than most sectors ever have to: reform, workforce shortages, funding that isn’t keeping pace with rising costs, growing community expectation, and now AI and technology decisions layered on top. The old playbook, work harder, push through, wait for stability, doesn’t work when the instability is permanent, and it works even less when there’s less money to do it with.
Delegates will leave with a practical model for values-led decision-making under pressure, a clear distinction between the discomfort that’s normal in reform and the warning signs that need attention, and language they can use with their own teams to name what’s happening without pretending it isn’t hard.
This session draws on an evidence-based approach to leading under pressure, developed in clinical and organisational psychology, and 25 years of leadership research and practical experience, to give leaders a different way through: not eliminating uncertainty, but building the capacity to act well within it. We’ll cover what actually separates leaders who stay clear-headed and decisive under sustained pressure from those who burn out or freeze.
We’ve spent the past few years working alongside boards and leadership teams in both large and small aged care and faith-based organisations navigating exactly this kind of sustained reform, under real financial strain. The same pattern shows up every time: the teams that name the pressure openly, rather than pushing through in silence, make better decisions faster and hold their people longer.