Bellbird Park, 11 December

 

Hi Marlis,

I hope you are getting to enjoy being outside a bit more now that Summer is on the way. We’ve already had our first few heat waves and it’s looking like another hot week coming our way. It looks like I didn’t take many interesting pictures this time, so this letter has no pictures and just words, sorry!

Like with most letters a lot has happened over the past few months, so let’s get right into it, shall we?

 

New job

I’ve been in the new job at McNab Construction for about 2 months now and it’s surely been a whirlwind! My official title is Change and Business Improvement Team Lead, which is ridiculously long, so I just say Change Lead.

I’ve been to the Toowoomba office (100km to the west), The Gold Coast office (100km to the South), visited two of our other businesses and six building sites, attended a ground breaking/sod turn (lots of shovels and pictures) and met at least 200 people of whom I remember maybe 50 names...

I have a team of three to look after, Jess (39), Marty (64) and Greg (53). We’re all coming at change and business improvement from different angles, but we’ll figure it out. It’s a bit of an adjustment to lead a team again, but fortunately they are all grown-ups and experienced so it’s more a matter of getting comfortable with each other, building trust and collaboration.

Our job is to support the business with the strategic plans and projects they want to run to do things better or differently. The challenge is that when I started there were a number of empty positions that needed to be hired, like the Chief Operations Officer (my manager), the Chief Technology Officer, a Legal person, a Robotics person and about 12 others, so all these new people and me are hitting the business at the same time. Everyone is genuinely friendly and helpful, but I can easily imagine them getting a bit tired of all the new faces and big ideas they want to get started on.

I just do what I always do, create more clarity through structure, models, frameworks and templates, always good to have for when things kick off in the new year. Our CEO was very clear to the whole organisation about not starting new initiatives until the new year. This was right after I started, but he did explain the first few months would be ‘rocky’ and so far it’s indeed been an adjustment, which is management speak for: “Not sure that I want to do this, but let’s see what happens”. For me it’s mostly that I am not sure I like leading a team, perhaps I am better as an individual contributor. In the previous role with Lactalis I had prepared and helped run a complete system introduction, so that’s what I am comparing it too, which isn’t quite the same of course, this will be a job for the long run.

I thought I would have to toughen up a lot of the change management language I normally use, thinking that these builders and tradies are all rough and tough, but the exact opposite is true! They want us to really focus on the peoples’ experience and consider the organisation 5 years from now, which is very rare and a welcome change from how these things usually go. Let’s see how it all works out, when we get back in the new year.

I might have mentioned it before, but the new office is just 200 meters away from the Lactalis office where I was until August this year. I know the neighbourhood really well, have my favourite routes for when I take a break and go for a walk and I get to walk from the city across the river most days. That’s always a nice start to the day, even when the weather isn’t great. There’s always something to see and it keeps me fitter than just walking from the train station, which is only 5 minutes away from the office.

 

Yumi’s work and dancing

Yumi has been busy at work as always. They keep coming up with good ideas and getting funding for them, so her team is pretty busy and is always on the verge of expanding with new team members. At some point she’ll have half the organisation reporting to her! She went to Melbourne on a short two-day trip a few weeks ago and even if she grumbles about being away from home (mostly being away from Dash😊), she’s really good at networking and always comes back with new ideas and things to experiment with.

Her next dance performance with the Choo La La ladies is on 20 December, so I get to sit through that awkwardness once again, but she has some much fun with the whole thing I am always happy to go and see what they’ve come up with this time. I like her other dance group better because it’s so over the top and outrageous to watch. And everyone keeps their clothes on (mostly) which is always a plus, haha.

 

The Yard Project

Last time I wrote you, the soil and grass had just gone in and since then we’ve run about 30,000 litres of water through it all and I don’t know how much weedkiller. Despite the extremely dry weather since, all that water kept 85% of the grass alive, so there’s only a few dead patches that need to be scooped out when the weather cools down.

It’s very much a first world problem, but oh man do I hate mowing the lawn, every.single.week. Aaaaargh. But…I bought four additional batteries for the electric mower and now I can do it all in one go and be done with it, which makes it slightly better, but still two hours of my life I don’t get back every week. I could of course pay someone to do it, but that thought annoys me even more, so I grumble my way through it every week and get a bit faster every time. It’s just so much grass, and it keeps growing!!

All grumbling aside, it is a massive improvement to what the yard used to be and we think everyone in the neighbourhood is quietly following along how we’re going with it all. When they walk past some just nod in appreciation and others want to know how much it cost, if we’re happy with the gardener we worked with and what weedkiller I use to keep it so neat. It’s not quite where I want it to be just yet, but it’s really hard to kill nutgrass and because we watered the grass so much, the weeds also get all the nutrients. Sometimes I step back and wonder about how I’ve become this person, someone who thinks about weeds, garden hoses and fertiliser too much. I am sure I am being punished for something I did in a previous life! 😊

This week we’re getting the very rickety garden stairs replaced with properly made timber stairs from the same materials as the front fence (Merbau timber) and I hope it’ll look really good. Surely that’s it then for the yard for a while, right?! Wrong! Now I finally get to paint the whole fence (all 60 meters of it, twice and half of it on two sides, yay! Strangely enough it’s something I actually look forward to. I bought a battery powered paint spray gun, and Yumi and I decided on a specific colour of grey we both liked. Now I just need to wait for the Christmas break and three days of dry weather to get the job done. After all that, it’s time for the plants to go in, but that will be in  Autumn to give them a fair chance to settle in. Yumi has big plans, but somehow I feel I will be the one who ends up digging a lot of holes. I hope the end result will be worth it.

Greyhound things

Late Spring and Summer is when the big flies come out here, and Dash is terrified of them. Then there’s the late-night thunderstorms which scare him equally bad. Whenever that happens he just doesn’t want to go outside the next morning. It’s so sad and we feel really bad for him. He just turns into a 35kg puppy who wants to hide in his bed and there I am, making him come outside to go for a walk.

He’s usually fine once he’s outside and better when it’s Yumi and me walking him, but when there’s a big fly buzzing around or trying to land on him, he goes into a panic and starts snapping at the air to try and eat it. Even after he gets it, he just wants to go home right away. I try to calm him down and keep on walking because he's never actually been stung since he joined our family, so I hope at some point he realises that it’s not as scary as he thinks, but it might never happen. Poor guy, I wish there was a way to explain it to him ☹.

 We had Evie the 9-year old greyhound come and visit for a few days and she was right at home once again. Dash didn’t mind her too much, she’s stayed with us before for a few days and he’s always such a good host. She steals all his toys, sleeps on his beds and gets in his way, but he takes it all in stride and mostly just ignores her. Her foster parents had to visit family in NSW and when they came to pick her up you could hear Dash breathe a sigh of contentment and relief from the comfort of his own bed, haha.

Yumi had to deal with lots of mini-dog dramas too. Dogs getting bitten, a dog losing her tail getting caught in a car window, dogs not working out with families, one ate rat poison (twice!), one having to be rehomed because of family issues, all that stuff. But there have also been a lot of adoptions and new fosters, so the dog business is keeping on keeping on! A few weeks ago, we must have had a record 14 greyhounds join on the greyhound walks one of her friends organises every two weeks, that sure was a lot of tails and happy doggo grins!

 

The new book

I might have mentioned it before, but I’ve written a second book and after many, many, many rounds of changes it’s now out in the world. 10 Years Writing About Change is very different from Bad Change, and mostly a gift to myself for being in business for myself for the past 10 years. The hardest part is always the promotion and continuously having to remind people that the book is for sale, I am not particularly good at it, so it costs double the energy to get it done every week. You’d think I’d be more excited about it and I am, but it’s also just another book on Change and I wrote and shared all the content over the past 10 years already, so it’s not as new to me as it might be to others  So far, I’ve sold 50 copies for charity, which doesn’t seem like a lot, compared to the 1,100 copies Bad Change has sold, but any self-published book that sells more than 100 copies is considered to be doing really well, So I am on the right track.

I joined in on a book fair a few weeks ago, as a combined event between the International Association of Business Communicators and the Change Management Institute. No wonder we go by the acronyms IABC and CMI, haha, those names are so long! It was a panel of 4 other writers and me, answering questions about what it’s like to write books and what tips we had for aspiring writers and of course people could buy some books at the end. I even sold a few copies of both books and made some new friends, so that’s a good night in my book.

 Funny thing was, I had ordered a bunch of the more affordable and slightly less glossy US version of the book (somehow you can’t print standard quality in Australia, don’t ask…) and they were supposed to arrive well on time before 27 November, the night of the event. Then I got a message they would arrive on 1 December and I was like “Okay, it is what it is”. So I sold out at the book fair, come home late that night and what’s there waiting for me? Exactly! The books had arrived that afternoon… Oh well, I’ll have enough copies to give away to friends like you! I don’t expect you to read it, but wanted you to have one as we’ve been friends for 10 years too this year. I think I started visiting in June 2015, so it’s about six months overdue, sorry!

 

Change Management Institute

It’s been a busy few months events-wise. We had a morning event, networking drinks, a weekend event, the book fair and the mentoring program was also wrapping up. 2025 has certainly been the busiest year for the Queensland community. Oh, and I got a very heavy glass Change Leader award for being one of the three Australian Change Leaders for 2025. Always nice to get some love from the community, but still feel weird getting awards, so I just say thank you and get on with my day.

We have even bigger plans for 2026, getting out to Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba, maybe even Rockhampton if we can make it work. I think that is important because the CMI team and I are CMI Queensland, not just CMI Brisbane and we hope to inspire some people to join our team as the regional connections. It’s very simple on paper, but in practice it takes a lot of organising and chasing people.

I’ve decided to finally get my CMI Change Master accreditation (it’s 50% discounted for CMI volunteers, so that’s nice!). After filling out some forms and getting two references to support me, I now have an interview on Sunday 22 December and I think there’s one more step after that, but I’ll see what happens. I think I’ll be fine and once I have this one, I’ll do the other big one, which is from a similar professional body in the United States, called ACMP (the name is too long to spell out, trust me). After that I can finally say I’ve done all the major ones and have an informed opinion. I can already tell the process is very different. The CMI one is all about evidence and interaction, the ACMP one is essentially a multiple-choice test based on their body of knowledge (a book). I expect that by the time I write you again, I’ll have one and perhaps have started on the other. Not sure if I’ll be much smarter when it comes to change but I’ll have a shiny certificate to prove that I know what I am doing.

 

Rural Fire Service

It’s been quiet with fires in our area after a very busy period in October and a wet end to November but this weekend we got to go out in force to a mid-sized fire that had kicked off on Thursday, got put down quickly, but flared right up across 150 metres of bush away from most people on Saturday. We had good fun with water, blowers and rakes for about 5 hours, putting it out and then making sure it wouldn’t get back up again. Learned a few things, stood around and chatted for most of it, which was nice, because 32 degrees is too hot for wearing all our gear and getting in front of flames.

We had a great response time too, because we were at the station with about 10 firefighters doing some mowing, grounds maintenance, cleaning and organising before we go to reduced capacity for the next 5 weeks over Christmas. It’s likely we’ll come in any way, because school holidays mean higher fire danger and the temperatures will go up as well. We’re trying a roster to keep our vehicles ready to go, but it’s a bit hard on the people who have been there for 10 plus years and have seen that being tried and not work. Me and a few newer members (all been there 2+ years too) are willing to give it a crack, otherwise everything will always stay the way it was. Sometimes we talk too much and do too little, but not while I am there, ha!

Early November we got to visit the Airforce base nearby (two of our members are professional firefighters there) for a demonstration of their equipment. They have some pretty awesome tools and vehicles. Their fire trucks are specifically built for airplane fires and are like our trucks on steroids. We carry 2,000 litres of water, they carry 11,000. We can empty a tank in 13 minutes, they can do it in 2 minutes. Our truck has 4 wheels that come to my thigh, theirs have 8 which are nearly 2 metres tall. The coolest part is their water cannon that can reach over 100 meters far and 50 meters high. We’d be lucky to get 20-25 on a good day. Everything is just superpowered and extra big, which is just the best. We all turned into little girls and boys 😊 They were super nice too, taking us through their procedures and equipment. I thought it was going to be a bit boring, but it was great fun and I learned a lot about other ways to fight different kinds of fire. Not that we’re likely to ever do that, but still good to know.

 

Short things

·      I just finished another round of grading student papers for the Change tools course and there might be some changes coming for that collaboration with Deakin University. It’s been running for 5 years now and I always expect it to end, but it keeps getting renewed each year. Just this week I was talking to them about delivering some online work with a group in Cambodia, which sounded interesting. More about that in the next letter.

·      Karate is going okay. I am not making as much progress as I would like and I get so frustrated being told I need to go faster, but when I do, I get told to do it better. On good days I just laugh and keep going, on not so good days I wonder why I show up for this twice a week. I am about to hit 30 lessons with my yellow belt which means I am technically ready for the next orange belt, but I feel like I might as well wear yellow the rest of 2026. I said I’d give it a year and we’re only 7 months in, but at this rate I don’t know if I’ll continue beyond that.

·      For the Christmas break we’re going to Rockhampton and spend some time on the coast and in the bush, without any actual camping. It’ll be good to get on the road again and see some different scenery. We’ll also stop by Yumi’s greyhound charity boss who lives up there with her 5 greyhounds, husband and however many greyhounds happen to be in the kennels, so that’ll be fun for Dash too. Yumi also somehow managed to make a work appointment… We don’t get up there very often so it’s all good, I know a few change people there so might take the opportunity to see them too.

·      We went to a concert by a country/folk/rock band called the Dead South from the US in the Brisbane Riverstage Musci Bowl. It was very, very good and they sounded almost exactly like the cd, haha. They are my kind of music, but Yumi went along anyway. It had been 28 years that we went to an actual concert as we both don’t like big crowds, so it was a real night out and good fun with great music. The average age was probably 40-45, so no dramas or lots of drunk people, just solid music one song after the other, we should really do this more often!

·      We’re thinking of getting a solar battery installed in the new year. With the Queensland sun being out most days, it means we’ll be fully independent for electricity and can even sell back power to the grid. My friend Michael had one installed a while back at apparently it only takes a day to get it all sorted and set up. We might also pre-install a battery charger for an electric vehicle. Not that we’re planning to buy one soon, but we might in the future and then it’ll be a hassle to get it added. I’ll know more the next time I write.

·      Family and friends are all doing well, getting ready for a new year and rushing to the end of the new one. Nothing to exciting, which is exactly how we like it 😊.

·      Okay, I think that’s it for now, not such a long letter as last time, but work has been busy with me being all over the place and getting up to speed with things. Next time I’ll be more settled in and we’ll see what has happened by then.

Have a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year, I will call you to say just that on Christmas Day when taking a break from painting my fence!

 

Be well,

Gilbert