Travels From New South Wales
Speaker Topics
Problem Hunter
The most valuable and engaged employees don’t just do their jobs—they hunt for meaningful problems and solve them. The most effective leaders don’t just manage—they build teams that feel safe enough to take risks and innovate.
When these two forces combine, research shows, they create organisations that don’t just succeed—they become unstoppable.
Yet, most teams never reach this level. Hidden barriers kill initiative, stifle creativity, and prevent employees from taking ownership of how to make their work (and the business) better.
Leaders expect employees to show initiative, while employees expect leaders to make it safe to take initiative. This Initiative Paradox is the invisible barrier that holds most teams back from becoming high-performing.
This keynote breaks down how to remove this barrier by embedding problem-solving into a team’s culture—so making things better becomes second nature. Building a Problem Hunting Culture fuels innovation, growth, and productivity at levels your competitors can’t match. And it accelerates the careers of people who adopt this approach to work.
FROM CRAIG’S KEYNOTE YOU WILL:
- Discover how a problem-solving culture delivers 6x better results – by accelerating innovation, growth, and productivity faster than organisations that lack it.
- Learn the real reasons holding employees back from showing initiative – It’s the #1 factor leaders value and influences promotion decisions and career acceleration, but hidden barriers prevent it from taking hold in a culture.
- Understand how problems create the jobs people want the most – what people want is to grow and develop and feel safe doing it. Learn the ratio of challenge to familiar that creates the perfect tension to boost engagement and performance.
- Learn to how to sidestep the culture killing behaviour no one talks about – Turd Observing What it is, how to spot it, and how to banish it from your team for good.
- Be positioned to shift a team from defensive and disengaged to proactive and thriving – by following the four steps to creating a Problem Hunting Culture.
Craig Calder
Problem Hunter, Author, and Artist Helping Leaders Unlock Bold Solutions and Build High-Performing Cultures
Craig is the founder of ThinkClear Group, a Sydney based leadership development practice that builds expert problem-solving capabilities and cultures. He is the author of Problem Hunter, a roadmap for leaders and teams to become the most valuable people in any organisation. He is also a professional artist, who creates bold abstract paintings and sculptures for commercial and residential collectors.
His journey from junior accountant and management consultant to entrepreneur, author, and artist taught him a simple truth: the most satisfying and rewarding work comes from hunting down the problems that scare you—and having the courage to solve them. To become what he calls a Problem Hunter.
Through his 25 years’ experience and extensive research, he’s discovered becoming a Problem Hunter is the key to accelerating your career, building high-performing teams, and giving organisations a competitive edge. It’s also the best work we can do.
Craig is a former EY partner with a global outlook, having lived and worked in North America and Europe as well as from his adopted hometown of Sydney.
Craig will inspire leaders to break through hidden barriers and unlock the problem-solving potential within their teams to accelerate innovation, inspire engagement, improve productivity and achieve lasting results.