People and Culture: The Transformation Engine

Every leader we interview on Where Value Gets Delivered finishes with the same question: Where do you believe value is actually delivered in transformation?

When I asked Deanne Stewart, CEO of Aware Super, her answer was immediate. "That's easy. People and culture."

It was a compelling soundbite, but what became clear as I reflected on our conversation was that this wasn't simply her closing remark, it was the central theme of one of Australia's most significant enterprise transformations. Across an eight-year journey that transformed First State Super into the modern, value-stream-led organisation now known as Aware Super, I asked about strategy, operating models, technology, governance, sequencing and execution. Time and again, Deanne brought the conversation back to one thing: people.

After more than two decades helping organisations navigate complex transformation, I've come to believe the same thing. Technology enables change. Strategy sets the direction. But sustained value is realised, or lost, through people. It's the pattern we see repeatedly across the organisations we work with, regardless of industry or the size of the investment.

This conversation reinforced that belief more than any other we've recorded. Here are my biggest takeaways from a CEO who has led transformation at scale and understands where value is truly created.

Whole-of-organisation from day one, not technology first

When Deanne stepped into the CEO role in 2018, the fund was already serving close to a million Australians well. But member experience, benchmarked against banking or travel, was lagging. Her first real insight wasn’t about a system or a platform, it was that “there is no one business unit in charge of member experience. It is a whole of organisation responsibility.” That reframing, made explicit before a single line of scope was written, is why nothing in Aware Super’s founding strategy documents describes this as a technology or digital transformation. It was a member experience transformation, with people, process and technology considered together from the outset, deliberately, because as Deanne put it, a tech-only transformation leaves you either running old processes on new systems, or with people who never adapted their ways of working. Either way, the value doesn’t show up.

Scope discipline is a leadership act, not a planning exercise

Aware Super’s original scope tried to cover process, workforce, technology, advice, data, external channels, insurance and new product design all at once. About six months in, Deanne and her team faced two hard truths: it was too much to take on together, and they were trying to run transformation and business-as-usual with the same people. The fix was as much about people as it was about sequencing. They pulled their best and brightest fully onto the transformation, backfilled BAU with strong operators, and broke the work into deliberate phases. Just as importantly, they said no to things they genuinely wanted, a new advisor and employer portal among them, and made a public promise to their own executive team that those initiatives would be “next cabs off the rank” once the foundational work was done. They kept that promise, and it paid off: the deferred initiatives landed faster and with more momentum once the foundations were in place than they would have if bundled in from the start.

An assumption that didn't survive contact with reality

Deanne walked in assuming the people building the transformation should be the same people who’d eventually run it, a DevOps instinct, so they’d stay mindful of what they were building. The logic held, but the scale didn’t: it was, in her words, “not humanly possible to do your day job and do the transformation at the same time.” The real work was creating the right talent structure so people could go all-in on the transformation without losing their sense of a home to return to. It’s a small but important admission from a CEO eight years into a successful transformation, the org design questions are as hard to get right as the technology ones, and you often only get them right in hindsight.

Protecting the members while rebuilding the engine

Every transformation leader eventually has to answer the same question: how do you keep serving customers while you rebuild the machinery underneath them? Aware Super’s answer was relentless preparation; clear, transparent member communications about what was changing and when, tightly managed “blackout” windows kept as short as possible, extensive dress rehearsals before anything customer-facing went live, and deliberately higher staffing through the periods of greatest member impact. None of this is glamorous. All of it is why the transformation didn’t cost Aware Super its member trust along the way.

Culture as the actual strategy

Ask Deanne what gives Aware Super its edge and she doesn’t point to the tech stack. She points to a culture she describes as a duality: deep care for members and for each other, paired with genuine ambition and boldness. That duality is now codified into what the organisation calls the Aware Way, underpinned by a leadership code with four elements, absolute clarity on the problem and the value being pursued, courage to be bold rather than incremental, curiosity in human-centred design without pre-judged answers, and a commitment to coaching teams through the work rather than directing them through it.

The other piece of culture Deanne named directly, and which I think is under-discussed in most transformation conversations, is psychological safety. When things went wrong, and in an eight-year transformation, they did, the discipline was to avoid the blame game entirely and ask instead: what are we learning, and what are our options? Fear compounds fast in a stressed organisation, and once it takes hold, nobody performs at their best. Keeping that fear low, deliberately and continuously, was as much a part of the transformation plan as any milestone on a Gantt chart.

Transformation doesn't end and neither should the investment in leaders

Deanne’s analogy for this stuck with me: transformation is like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. By the time you reach one end, it’s time to start again. Rather than declaring victory after the core transformation landed, Aware Super spent the last eighteen months on leadership transformation, not generic leadership training, but deep, deliberate work on leaders’ own mindsets and behaviours, their teams’, and the enterprise’s. They backed it structurally, rewriting performance and reward frameworks so leaders are measured not just on delivery, but on how they and their teams are growing. Looking back, Deanne wonders whether investing in this earlier would have made the original transformation faster and better, a useful reflection for any executive team tempted to leave the leadership work until after the “real” transformation is done.

What doesn't change, even as AI accelerates everything else

Deanne is unambiguous that AI will change how transformation gets delivered, particularly in tech-heavy workstreams like coding, requirements and testing. But she’s equally clear about what doesn’t change: every transformation still needs its data and processes properly mapped, and workforce transformation is still the harder, slower work underneath the technology. AI changes the speed and the cost. It doesn’t change the discipline required to get an organisation’s people genuinely ready for what comes next.

The takeaway for every transformation leader

Here's a version that is more authoritative, commercially minded and aligned with the voice of an MD at a leading transformation consultancy.

After interviewing leaders across industries and some of Australia's largest transformation programs, one thing has become increasingly clear: transformation fails when they underestimate the organisational effort required to realise value.

Deanne spoke with real clarity about strategy, operating models, governance, sequencing and execution. Yet every conversation ultimately led back to the same truth. Scope is a leadership decision. Customer outcomes are driven by people. Adoption is earned, not mandated. And long after the program has gone live, sustained value is determined by culture, capability and leadership, not by whether the project delivered on time.

At Org, we believe value is delivered at three levels: across the organisation, within every initiative, and through the capability to sustain outcomes long after implementation. Deanne's transformation of Aware Super is a powerful example of that philosophy in practice. It demonstrates what we've seen time and again: technology may enable transformation, but people determine whether it delivers value.

If you're leading a major transformation, or about to embark on one, I encourage you to listen to the full conversation with Deanne Stewart below.

Written By

Louise Langridge

APAC Managing Director, Org Advisory and Technology Services

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