Narelle Kennedy AM

Graduation is a celebration of achievement. This is a milestone of knowledge and learning for which you and your families can be rightly proud, but your continuing challenge is to use this qualification to make a difference – to have an impact in the world. Yes, it can shape how you make a living and advance your career, but you can also use it to change businesses and the community for the better. From here, you can even aspire to make a difference in the world at large to make it a better place.

You are graduating at a pivotal time of turbulence and disruption globally, for both good and ill. We’ve got transformative technologies, environmental shocks and natural disasters, new insidious forms of warfare and terrorism, social dislocations, but we also have millions of people rising out of poverty. We have progress in fights against disease, and the success of self-help community development initiatives like microfinancing and social enterprises that are empowering some of the most marginalised in the world. This is a time for you to shift from being a student and a scholar to becoming an explorer and a pathfinder. In other words, a custodian of change to make an impact on the big social, economic and environmental issues that really matter in our world.

You face significant hurdles in that task. Firstly, solutions to these wicked societal problems are not straightforward. These issues are complex, contentious and often resistant to deep-seated change, so you need to be imaginative and adept at harnessing evidence and know-how from a broad range of thinkers and practitioners. Moreover, you need to distil and pioneer novel solutions that work. The learning and the doing that the presiding Chancellor spoke of. However, you are contending with growing pressure to displace evidence with assertion – to back populist, easy answers. Often based on a simple view of nationalism versus globalism, this approach presents a binary choice between being a winner and being a loser, and playing on fear and uncertainty cements the borders between them and us. That approach serves to build a wall that isolates the community from critical thinking, from cross-disciplinary insights and from crafting fresh, innovative solutions that meet the needs of different interests. You need to be the antidote to that approach. Answers are more likely to come from diversity, not from homogeneity, so it’s paradoxical that when we are experiencing unprecedented global connectedness and diffusion of information from social media, our exposure to news and commentary is restricted to ever-narrowing silos.

Algorithms act as walls to serve up only likeminded sources based on past history – little chance of discovering new ideas by serendipity, or collisions with the unfamiliar. We can create our own wall too, by lack of curiosity and poor general knowledge. I ask you to beware of one of the most sentences in the English language, and that is, ‘I don’t know; it was before my time.’ You are now armed with your hard-won UTS qualification. To use it to make a difference in the world, you need to dismantle walls, to blur borderlines, and embrace new frontiers, to go to the edges where the soft signals of change can be detected and worked on.

When issues are complex and intractable, conventional measures are unlikely to work. It is time for fresh and unusual perspectives, and combining new and diverse sources of knowledge and ideas in different ways. This leads to action that resists straight line thinking. You are equipped to do that, but my proposition to you today is that you must look to the edge, not the mainstream, for impact. This means hearing new voices, entertaining unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas, spanning and making sense of opposing approaches, and shaping innovative solutions from previous adversarial positions. The US innovations authors and researchers John Sealy Brown and John Hagel III have marshalled the evidence of the importance of learning from what they call the edge. They advance the view that in a rapidly changing world, the edge increasingly reshapes the centre. The centre, or the mainstream, represents business as usual, the traditional and the static. At the centre, confusion or inertia can block dynamism and experimentation. IF you don’t go to the edge, you won’t see what’s coming, neither the opportunities nor the threats.

Let me illustrate how the edge is valuable for breakthrough action on those important society and business challenges that are yours to address as custodians of change. Four points: firstly, new ideas can be introduced at peripheries, either from necessity or out of lack of locking to the status quo – peripheries are fruitful places. Similarly, boundaries and borderlines are fertile grounds for innovation, as they are where different people, experiences, beliefs and needs encounter each other and sometimes collide, opening up previously unimagined answers. Thirdly, performance limits are stretched and new heights of achievement are reached by being leading edge, or as the saying goes, pushing the edge of the envelope. And finally, being edgy typically means embracing the unknown – a bit unorthodox and ahead of the game, not being content or complacent. But being edgy is also quite discomfiting. Most of us have a natural tendency to avoid edges. From an early age, we are warned to stay away from edges – you can fall over them, or they cut you. To counteract the danger of edges means creating safety nets of people and connections that multiply knowledge flows and insights, share learning and result in actions that do make a difference in the world.

So, to conclude, my key message to you is that your qualification today is a knowledge asset for impact. Knowledge is a use it or lose it asset. As change accelerates, knowledge depreciates at a faster rate, but knowledge is one of the very few resources also that grows with use. You must invest not only in your stock of knowledge, like today’s qualification, but in refreshing the flows of knowledge in which you immerse yourselves. Knowledge is not to be hoarded but to be shared, channelled and grown into fresh insights and innovative solutions to our compelling social and economic challenges. For you, as smart custodians of change, using knowledge means pushing the boundaries, questioning conventional wisdom, and learning from the edge. My last word on the subject today comes from popular culture. In the words of the comedy Seinfield: ‘If you’re not living on the edge then you’re taking up too much room.’ Thank you.