The Chief Resilience Officer of Sydney on gaining consensus across 33 local government councils, leveraging community insights to create a shared language and developing a sponsorship
model for the resilience office.
The more you learn about Beck Dawson’s career path, the more you marvel at how this “unusual course,” as she calls it, uniquely equipped her for the complexity of being the Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) of Sydney. A scientist by training, Beck started her career traveling in a large truck across various small towns in Australia, performing science shows and theatre in schools as part of The Questacon Science Circus—an equivalent of a mobile science museum.
A few years later, Beck landed a job as an exhibitions researcher at the Science Museum London, UK. She then became one of the founding members of the Sustainable Development Unit for the National Museums of Science and Industry, where she played a pivotal role in establishing the museum’s first sustainability strategy at a time when the national government was beginning to prioritize environmental change. Eight years later, Beck returned to Sydney to work as a sustainability manager for a large property company. She worked her way up to General Manager of Corporate Sustainability.
During her tenure in the private sector, Beck was involved in a cross-sector program called the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities, which brought together the property company with a bank, an insurer, a reinsurer, a telecommunications company, and the Australian Red Cross.
“We created a working group that developed multiple papers addressing questions like: ‘What risks does Australia face?’ And ‘How can we contextualize them?’” she recalls. Because these papers were developed across sectors, they served as an advocacy tool to help the government better understand natural hazard risks to communities and business and to define what resilience should look like.
After this program, Beck became completely fascinated with resilience, as it provided a more practical approach to making decisions, allowing for more effective and realistic planning, especially in handling uncertainties and challenges in business and government. “It really sparked my passion—instead of it being just an ‘environmental greenie’ thing, it was a core business mission with a core deliverable—a public benefit as well as a business benefit that you can describe both in terms of a risk profile and also in a community context,” she added.
Then, her contacts told her about a new position that “described her”—it was the CRO position. Beck understood systems change, the core of risk profiling and how to collaborate with different sectors. Working for the local government, however, was something Beck had never done. “It was a bit of a risk because I didn’t really understand how politics worked—I had never been that close to it,” Beck admitted.
Unlike a city like New York, which is managed by a single, large organization overseeing its operations, Sydney presents a more complex scenario. Here, 33 local municipal governments cover an area comparable to that of New York. The regional state government adds another layer of complexity as it still handles critical services such as transport and education.
For the city, what made her an ideal candidate was her knowledge of organizational change. “This was essentially a massive global change program when it started as 100 Resilient Cities—it was a change movement that was beginning to understand how to support and protect communities in all parts of the world, and the city government here was really keen to do it,” she recalls.
Beck got the position and was faced with a challenging ask: “You’re going to have to do it with all the councils—you need to pull people together,” Beck adds, laughing.
Being part of a global movement gave her convening power, but Beck knew that was not enough. “Who was I to stand up and say, ‘You’re all going to do this!‘ I just had a Chief Resilience Officer title, and having a big title doesn’t help in Australia. It’s called ‘tall poppy syndrome,’ where anyone who sticks their head out tends to get cut down,” she says.
Knowing that they did not have the authority to make or direct decisions, Beck and her team added a step to the process. So instead of just conducting a technical risk assessment and moving on to stakeholder management, they developed community engagement activities like targeted focus groups with representative samples from all districts of Metropolitan Sydney.
“What that gave us was polling-type data detailing what people perceived as the core risks to their community, where and why these risks existed, and what they thought should be done about them. This information helped us create a place-based public mandate to engage all the decision-makers,” Beck explains.
This data-driven, community-focused process legitimized the resilience strategy, gaining them recognition and trust and fostering collaboration. “We created a single common problem and language for our city challenges,” she adds.
Before putting the strategy together, Sydney ran out of money from the Rockefeller grant. The city funded the completion of the strategy and Beck’s salary for the third year, and then all the Councils were asked to contribute. The resilience office has been self-funding since then.
“It was almost like running a start-up alongside the city government. We created a sponsorship program from scratch—we turned it into a small business with a partnership model that delivers value to all member organizations,” she says.
They now function as a network of networks. ”We offer a big data platform, sharing spaces, and deliver advocacy, helping members ‘steal each other’s homework’ so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can learn from each other,” Beck jokes. The Resilient Sydney platform now has 350 users from the different councils.
“I feel like a grandma CRO,” Beck says with a smile while reflecting on her journey. She has mentored many other CROs in the Resilient Cities Network and has played a key role on the Global Steering Committee. Her focus in Sydney now is on capacity building and advocating for policy changes—efforts that have enabled the 33 councils to create local resilience plans. “We’ve got 17 in place now, halfway through,” Beck mentions casually, still smiling.
