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Still Curious
Curiosity is a gift we start with but often lose. So what about those people who are still curious? Grokkist founder Danu Poyner meets people who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care and talks to them about the red thread that runs through their life story and which ultimately empowers them to flourish as their unrepeatable selves. Find out more at https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast
Still Curious
Planning for a Positive Future: Natural Hazards, Risk, and Climate Change Adaptation - Lara Clarke | S3E2
Lara is a New Zealand-based planner with over 10 years of experience in the field, working on projects across the public and private sectors. With a background in both government processes and business realities, Lara has a unique perspective on the intersection of policy, science, and community engagement. We discuss breaking down institutional knowledge barriers and public participation in planning.
Key topics
- Understanding the challenges of managing climate risk and adaptation in New Zealand
- Lara's squiggly career and personal growth through exploring different opportunities within the planning profession
- How being a grokkist helps Lara break down the barriers between different planning agencies and institutions
- The importance of communication, empathy and public engagement in planning
Episode Digest
Visit the Grokkist podcast hub for a full digest of this episode including highlights and links to stuff we discussed: https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast/s3e2-lara-clarke
Recorded 13 January 2023
Website: grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast | Email: podcast@grokk.ist | Socials: @grokkist
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon
New Zealand is basically a red zone. We sit along two tectonic plates. We've got lots of geological activity going on that results in earthquakes and volcanoes And we also have a lot of coastline and we also get quite a bit of rain. We accept quite a lot of natural hazard risk just by being in New Zealand so we have to think of it in the frame of risk tolerance That's a really interesting conversation to start having with communities you get such a diverse range of values and that's fundamentally planning right That's placemaking How do we aspire to live in the place that we live in. There's lots of different tools that we can use in the policy toolbox to force People and to use scientific metrics around how risky something is and why they can't be there and what the consequences are But if we want to positive process that's repeatable we have to really recognize the values and encourage people to see change in a positive thing.
Danu Poyner:You're listening to the Still Curious Podcast with me, Danu Poyner. My guest today is Lara Clark, a planner with over 10 years of experience in the field, working on projects across the public and private sectors. With a background in both government processes and business realities, Lara has a unique perspective on the intersection of policy science and community engagement. Today's conversation is all about planning, placemaking, policy, and people. Being a professional planner wasn't plan A for Lara, but once she stumbled into the field, there was no looking back. And she's since moved from opportunity to opportunity in an effort to explore the profession from every angle.
Lara Clarke:I was really interested and happy doing what I was doing. I had a huge amount of diversity, fantastic colleagues and clients, but once that seed was planted, it was all over. I, I had to pursue that area of interest and I had to follow it through
Danu Poyner:Planning is a complex and multidisciplinary profession. And especially in Lara's area of natural hazard risk and climate change adaptation, it involves bringing together a mix of deeply specialized scientific expertise. Planning is also all about people and how they live, their aspirations and how future generations might experience the world. So for Lara, planning especially involves communication, empathy, and an ability to include and engage the public in conversations about what they value. Through exploring these issues from positions in local government, private practice and academic research institutions, Lara has been driven to understand the nature of the barriers that prevent us as a society from practicing and achieving a better approach to managing climate risk and adaptation.
Lara Clarke:I think fundamentally to me, the barriers are around political bravery and leadership and having the right evidence to support the right choices.
Danu Poyner:Lara's path has been different to most in the profession. Weed brings its own challenges, but also means she has an integrated and more holistic perspective than many others, too.
Lara Clarke:It's really lovely to engage with the concept of a grokkist and feel that there's other people out there that think in a slightly abstract and different way, and it's really encouraging to look at all the positive applications rather than just thinking that you are a tangential thinker who's a bit of a nuisance,
Danu Poyner:Enjoy. It's my conversation with Lara Clarke coming up after the music on today's episode of the Still Curious Podcast. hi Lara. Welcome to the podcast. Such a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing today?
Lara Clarke:I am really well. Thank you. It's great to be here.
Danu Poyner:So You are a planner based in Auckland, New Zealand with over 10 years experience in policy and statutory planning processes, you've had a variety of roles in projects spanning government, private sector, and academia. And your particularly specialized in the area of natural hazard risk reduction, in the context of mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change. For anyone who knows what all of those words mean, that's of course very impressive. But for anyone who doesn't know what all those words mean, I wonder if you would mind saying, you know, what you think is the most important thing for someone to understand about what you do.
Lara Clarke:I think in essence, planning and what I do in planning, is all about how people live, how they like to live now, what their aspirations are and how they hope that future generations might experience the world. Climate change and natural hazard risk are just a couple of lenses or inputs or considerations, but there's a whole range of different things that we need to consider with planning. And ultimately we wouldn't be doing planning if we were not people. It really is around people and how we interact with our world.
Danu Poyner:I really like the way that you've framed that. I wanna talk about all those things in a little bit. But first, I guess I just have a simple question. Was being a planner always your plan A.
Lara Clarke:No, I don't think so. I don't think I ever really had a plan A or a plan B or a plan C for that matter. Very early on I wanted to be a marine biologist, and I think it was from watching things like Flipper and various other sort of water-based things as a child. And I always enjoyed science and I always enjoyed interacting with people. But other than that, I don't think I'd really thought about crafting a career. I sort of stumbled into planning, without even really realizing that it was a profession per se, or something that you could at least study to becoming. I started with a health science degree with a view to doing physiotherapy and eventually equine physiotherapy but I think I discovered that perhaps my love of science, doesn't necessarily equal expertise in science. And so I ended up switching courses, finding planning at the last minute, not really understanding what I'd signed up to, and never looking back. I found the degree itself really interesting. I think the diversity of different disciplines and different opportunities that there are through planning. You say you're a planner, but that's a huge umbrella term for policy and planning and urban design and all of the different a spects to it. And to start with as well, I did think about health planning and stepping back towards that science or that health sector lens and thinking how could you apply those skills in that sort of policy context too.
Danu Poyner:I can really tell that the science angle is really important to you, but I'm also struck by the way that you framed planning in a very humanistic kind of way. So I'm quite curious about the intersection of those two things as we go along. I do have to ask about equine physio, though. That was just a little thing you dropped into the conversation. What does an equine physio do actually?
Lara Clarke:Well, an equine physio is really very similar to a human physio. They just have four-legged patients. So it's really around thinking of equine as athletes, and ensuring that they are well-balanced and in their best zone to provide their best performance. One of the unique things about working with horses as well, and because you need to have a foundation in human physiotherapy to be an equine physiotherapist, and that you can work with the team so you can work with the horse and the rider. So if you're looking at movement and performance, or just comfort and enjoyment, it's quite an interesting relationship to be working with both the horse and the rider. I also love horses. I have my own horse and have always enjoyed horse riding as a hobby. It was thinking of a way to combine what you love with your work. I'm not sure in the equine industry that that always works out very well. It's an awful lot of hard work in my experience. I don't look back and wish I had done that Now.
Danu Poyner:I think it would be really great to flesh out some of the examples of things that you've been involved in and what it actually looks like to be a planner in practice, and how some of those different expertises that are involved come together. Maybe you can begin at the beginning and walk me through your journey.
Lara Clarke:I started out we had a bit of a financial downturn. Jobs weren't actually very easy to come by for my cohort. So I started out as an architects assistant. That was launching into a level of detail and built design that I had really no concept of. That was a really interesting grounding in the reality of how architects and how I think the building industry perceives and interfaces with planning. That really helped me to understand the s and the perceptions around planning. From there I went to Auckland Council, and that was and still is a great learning environment for young planners. I started out on the planning help desk, so that was really talking to the general public. I don't always like to follow the common path. And there's a lot of expectation around what you do in serving your time and just doing things which are process based. So an opportunity came up in the monitoring and compliance team, which is quite a different part of the policy sphere. And I was really interested to explore that and come back to why we do things. And if you are approving developments or considering different land uses, how do you make sure that all of the potential effects that you're identifying are actually managed well and what works, what is not feasible? From there, I did take a more traditional path to then being a planner, and I joined a private consultancy who did a lot of land development, what we call greenfield development, so developing new areas of land, changing the land use from rural to urbanizing or suburban land uses. That is the private sector and understanding the financial realities, the drivers, the motivators, the demotivators, I think is essential. From there I moved to policy planning, so that's creating the plans which we then implement in those regulatory settings. It was the development of the Auckland unitary plan at the time, and that scale of plan making is not something that you see every day. and it was an amazing opportunity to be involved in that sort of a process and also play a role in that process that quite a junior planner wouldn't normally have had the opportunity to play. That's where I first came across natural hazards and climate change in depth, and worked with some absolutely incredible planners who had been lifelong planners in the policy sector and had a really amazing depth of understanding, but also got to work alongside and in opposition to a lot of very, very well respected planners across a whole range of different areas and sectors and consultancies.
Danu Poyner:I might just pause there to ask you to explain a little about what the Auckland unitary plan is and why it's significant. Auckland is a little unusual in that it's a really big uh, local government area with unitary council, and that's not so common in itself. But maybe you can explain what the unitary plan is and why it's such a big deal.
Lara Clarke:So, um, Auckland was made up of a regional council, and seven district councils. In the New Zealand context, regional and district councils have different responsibilities and, for the Auckland region, that was posing quite an issue for a lot of infrastructure providers and delivering large projects. So through amendment to the local government act, there was basically the amalgamation of the Auckland region. So that brought together multiple district councils and the regional council into a unitary authority. It's probably one of the largest amalgamations that was ever attempted. This meant that we had to bring together a stack of planning documents which was actually taller than a person. So it was bringing together multiple different sets of rules and agreeing on one regional set of rules for all of our management of our resources, so land, air, and water, and the way that we deal with effects based development. Lots of different subject areas and an absolutely huge number of people involved from lawyers to experts, to community.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, I can see why there's a lot at stake in a process like that and why it would be an exciting opportunity. You mentioned that that's where you became aware of the natural hazard angle. Maybe you can, explain just to a 10 year old, what are natural hazards and what does it mean to reduce the risk of them?
Lara Clarke:Natural hazards are things like floods or storms or wind, really process in our natural world that can be hazardous or can harm something that we care about. So it It's a natural process or a natural event until it harms something or until it affects something that we care about, and then it becomes a hazard. So a river flowing down a valley is just a river and a flood, but if we build our house there, then that flood becomes a hazard. Risk is probably one of the most difficult terms to explain. Succinctly, is about how often something might happen or when it might happen. That's called likelihood. If something could happen, like a meteor could hit the earth, we might say that it's not very likely, but it could happen. If we're saying it's going to rain at some point in the next day in Auckland, we could say that that quite likely and probably going to happen. The other component that we need to think about is consequences. Is it a big issue if that? Or is it actually fine? And you've got your umbrella. So that's looking at whether it might happen, what happens when it does, and that gives us an overall equation of what is the risks to us
Danu Poyner:So If I wanna build my dreamhouse, uh, somewhere and someone tells me it's on a floodplain, but uh, the floods only happen every once in a hundred years or something, then that's a low likelihood risk, but a high consequence in what I understood. Just say that. And then do I get to decide, okay, I want to have my house there, or does a planner decide, well, you might want your house there, but you can't have it. How does that work,
Lara Clarke:Well, in a simple sense, if you want to do something and you are wanting to take a risk, there is a likelihood that it could happen and it's going to result in some form of effect on you. In some situations that's up to you and you decide that, and you are going to be the main person that has to deal with those consequences. But in other situations, if you make that choice, the consequences aren't just to you. So your house might get broken apart by the flood and it might wash down the river and smash somebody else's house. Or you might have something in your house that gets into the water and results in issues for the natural environment. Or you might need someone from the fire service or from LANZA to come and rescue you from your house, and they're putting themselves in danger to do that. So when you are wanting to do something that might affect other people as well, or might affect the environment or might affect other things that people value, then other people start to have the ability to, to kind of, I guess, have a, a social bearing on whether you should do that or not. If you wanted to build your health in a flood plain You might be allowed to do that if you just change your design a little bit so that you are perhaps not going to end up with your house washing away or you might not need rescuing.
Danu Poyner:I guess then there's a, another version of this where maybe not talking about a new area where we're building things that we're talking about an existing area where people are already living and we need to do things to that area to prepare for climate change or try and stop it or deal with it when it happens. But then maybe the people who live there don't want some of those things to happen cuz that's their place and they're having a lovely time. That's what happens then.
Lara Clarke:We've got loads of areas like this, but let's just step back for a moment and consider where New Zealand sit in a global sense. New Zealand is basically a red zone. If you look at it on a global scale. We sit along two tectonic plates We've got lots of geological and all sorts of activity going on that results in earthquakes and volcanoes. And we also have a lot of coastline and we also get quite a bit of rain, which is quite difficult to, uh, understand in the climate context. We accept quite a lot of natural hazard risk just by being in New Zealand, so we have to think of it in the frame of risk acceptability, or risk tolerance. Mm-hmm. and different communities have different tolerances. One of the first things we need to do to start talking about risk and exposure and consequence is to actually understand our hazards. And then there's a whole field around how we communicate that to people. It's not just in having a conversation about whether someone's allowed to keep living somewhere. It, it's got to do with visitors to places. It's got to do with all sorts of decisions we make in our lives. What is it that we value? and what do we have to lose? That's a really interesting conversation to start having with communities because let alone the difficulties in engaging a whole range of different people in the community, but you get such a diverse range of different values and the ways that people like to use the area and that's fundamentally planning, right? That's placemaking. How do we aspire to live in the place that we live in? Do you ask people to move and frame it in a negative way or do you start planning for change and you frame it in a positive way? How do you get people to want to relocate? What are the values that they have for their community and how could they have that same quality of life, sense of place, community? How can they tickle those boxes if they to choose a less risky location and what are the s that prevent them from making that? There's lots of different tools that we can use in the policy toolbox to force people to do that and to use scientific metrics around how risky something is and why they can't be there and what the consequences are. But if we want to positive process that's repeatable, we have to really recognize the values and what we manage and how we encourage people to know and encourage people to see change in a positive thing.
Danu Poyner:I like that framing positive process that's repeatable. But back to your story
Lara Clarke:sure. So, I picked up In the natural environment team. So we looked at the portfolio, if you like, of natural hazards. I was also involved in supporting some of the region-wide policy direction or what's called the regional policy statement, looking at climate change. These were areas that I'd always thought were interesting. But I'd never really taken a deep dive into what did they mean. One of my transferable skills, which relates back to my interest in science is that I'm quite happy to pick up quite technical areas, and get into the detail and the depth in the science that sits behind the technical stuff, which the policy needs to interface with. In Auckland at that time, there had just been, probably some of the first regional studies and regional mapping undertaken for coastal inundation. Coastal inundation is a storm event, so it's a storm tide. With those coastal inundation models, there'd also been a climate change, sea level rise consideration. So clearly, this had been identified in a planning document. To have a a region-wide study of the scale, was quite a significant step forward in many ways. And then sitting alongside that was the need to also consider geological hazards like land stability, how does Auckland sit in terms of our other hazard scapes? We've got lots of different maunga and volcanoes across the region. We've also got other challenges and issues around wildfire, catchment flooding, and then, coastal erosion in that suite of coastal hazards. It's around not only the hazards, but the risk, what we put where, and ultimately who should tell you, or should you be told, at what point in time where to live or where to put something? How do we perceive risk? How do we communicate risk? And what's fair in an intergenerational sense as well? It was really at a time when the whole climate change topic was starting to grow, which it has exponentially over the last 10 years.
Danu Poyner:I'm struck by range of experience that you've had with working in the, the building industry. You started out with, talking to the general public is of course, always a good foundation for any, anything that you're involved in and a bit of an eye-opening experience, and then the local government experience and then the private sector. You've framed planning as about how they wanna live now, and how they wanna live in the future. And there are of course questions about who decides that and how is it decided, and why is it decided? And so all of these processes are bearing on that. And you've seen some of those processes from lots of different angles.
Lara Clarke:It kind of comes back to planning as a profession or as a process as well, that we determine that we need to find some way of capturing what the majority of people might be interested in and capturing some rational concepts of what we should be doing in terms of environmental stewardship or thinking about future generations and future generational equity. And we wrap around that this policy development lens. There's so many competing values. I think In New Zealand, the process of planning has really just been around developing a process to identify those and to clarify them and to weight them and to implement them. Planning in New Zealand is an incredibly litigious process. It's very rooted in legislation and legislative process. It doesn't have the same mana, in a way as I see planning, having in some other countries and other jurisdictions where there's a little bit more respect for a balanced opinion or an overall consideration or a planning opinion. We are far more particular about these things and we like to have particular evidence bases and we are very interested in exact policy wording and things like that rather than maybe the intention. It can be positive in some ways, but I think it really narrows our view. We lose some of the bigger picture context. That sounds surprising in that I think perhaps New Zealand has a reputation, at least among the general public of, of being a bit of a forerunner in some of these kinds of areas, like with holistic legislation, like the Resource Management Act, and other environmental protections. I think we do have an amazingly interesting legislative setting, and very progressive in many ways. And I wouldn't disagree that the Resource Management Act was really cutting edge and potentially continues to be very cutting edge. And that the way that we should be balancing our treaty obligations and the way that we should be thinking about the management of our natural resources and our consultative processes are really strong. But maybe because they're so strong, in some cases people rally against them. One example would be something like the way that we look after trees in our urban areas. We used to have provisions under the Resource Management Act, which enabled councils to protect a lot of urban trees. That became such a hurdle and a difficult process for property owners and for infrastructure providers to do anything with trees in our urban areas, that what actually ended up happening was a lot of those blanket protections were removed at a national legislative level. And that was a very blunt instrument to resolve attention at the local level. Was there anything wrong with the policy and the legislation, or was it the way it was being implemented, which leads to these head on challenges and ultimately maybe a bit of a loss for both sides, that you're losing the trees, but you are also losing an asset in the future too. I think It ends up playing out in national politics what should be quite a straightforward thing in some ways.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. The intergenerational part of it that you've mentioned, must really exacerbate that, because there so many ways of thinking about the future and in many ways politics is how do we wanna live now and in the future? And no one can agree on what that even means and how we would do it. So I can see how that would play out in the sphere of planning. When you think about intergenerational equity, which is a nice phrase you mentioned, how do planners think about that? Is there a, a standard? Is there a protocol? Is it more contested than that? What can you tell us about that?
Lara Clarke:Sure. I think that's a really good question and something that is at the forefront of planner's minds a lot of the time. Obviously, if you're working for a client, you have your client's proposal and what they're trying to achieve in mind. When you are working for local government or central government, you perhaps have a slightly broader view around the things that you should be considering. That's not to say that consultant planners representing a client's interest shouldn't also be thinking of those things. It's just that they've usually done that at the start. The Resource Management Act does refer to future generations. I can't say that I've ever gone looking per se for what that actually means. From a natural hazard perspective, through a subsidiary policy statement, the national coastal policy statement, there is talk of at least a hundred years. That's one of the few mentions of timeframes that might get you to cast your mind 10, 20, 30, 50, a hundred years into the future. What we think of generally is around preservation, restoration, and how we look after our natural resources. It's much more difficult to think about future generations and future values if you are thinking about areas which are very subject to culture and subject to changing society. I often now come back to one of the newly coined terms around decision making under uncertainty, is that frame for what do future generations want? is it really around just keeping options open as much as possible, and in a climate change frame, talking about path dependencies and things like that. Preserving as much as we can that future generations have choice and aren't left with the mistakes of the past.
Danu Poyner:I feel like there's a couple of concrete examples sitting in your mind when you're talking about this. I wonder if we can, You mentioned sea level rises as one example before, maybe that's one. Is there something specific that we can talk about to see how this plays out?
Lara Clarke:I guess a medium scale would be, if we think about Auckland's C B D or the central business district, there are areas that are are low lying and close to the coast, we might continue for many years to defend these areas and to decide to keep using them. Our approach towards adaptation in these areas might be more of what we call accommodation practices. How do we live with our increasing exposure to, or the impact from some of the hazards we are experiencing. How much we invest in that, not only in a, a physical sense with our infrastructure and the amount of money that can go into those sort of protection schemes. There's also the sense of place that you establish and the heritage of tomorrow that you establish by doing that too. Will it even be possible for generations in the future to decide that actually enough is enough and we need to completely reconsider the location of our city or how we use these areas.
Danu Poyner:There's so much that goes into it. I'm curious how you do in practice draw a ring around what you are going to consider and, what set of considerations are prioritized and at what level of abstraction? How does that actually work?
Lara Clarke:Well, I guess cue policy framework, really. Yes, there's infinite number of possibilities and scenarios that you could be thinking of that your policies at a national level and at a regional and a local level start to form that scope or those boundary conditions within which you operate. So if you're thinking of timeframes or you're thinking of whether you should be considering effects on a species of insect that hasn't yet been discovered, you then refer to your policy construct or your best practice approaches or the frameworks that direct and scope and shape and stop. With planning, you can be playing with the box within which you operate, and that's the policy planning and the central government legislative framing, or you can be playing with the processes in the box and the information that you use to reach those decisions.
Danu Poyner:And which do you prefer? The box or the processes in the box?
Lara Clarke:I think I probably enjoy them equally because they're equally important. If the box doesn't enable good process, and if you can't look at the box and decide that you've got a good outcome and what's in the box looks good, then you need to change the size of the box or the shape of the box. of In the planning policy development sphere, that's where you need good monitoring and evaluation. That's where you need good research. That's where you need that feedback loop so that you can look in the box and say, does this look good? What are the criteria by which I assess whether this looks good and if it doesn't look good, how do I change it? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? What are those boundary conditions?
Danu Poyner:Thank you. You mentioned earlier that you don't always follow the common path. I'm wondering if you can explain a bit more about what you mean by that and what has been dragging you through all of the experiences that you've had so far.
Lara Clarke:Sure. I have never left a job because I didn't enjoy it. in fact, I've found leaving some of my more recent roles incredibly difficult because I have been enjoying what I've done so much. But I think I'm always interested in what are the s that stop this working? How do we do a deep dive into this part of the process to figure out what works well and what doesn't? I've tended to follow those opportunities and challenges as they've organically presented themselves to me. It's usually been something I've been interested in and in opportunities of risen, which has resulted in me moving between roles and moving between jobs. It's maybe as much a curiosity about, a technical area or a subject matter as it is about the process, and understanding, yeah, what, could we do better? How could you change a process process? How could you make it more conducive to the outcome or even interrogating, is that the problem? And actually start to drill down into, well, if you could change something, what would you change? To result in a different outcome? I think that's probably driven my changes and my interest in things.
Danu Poyner:I'm curious about that process, how it arises for you, when you're experiencing it. Is it something that kind of hits you in a flash of inspiration, or does it creep up on you over time? Do you have the realization first and then an opportunity comes up? Or does the opportunity make you have the realization? How does it work?
Lara Clarke:Yeah, I've actually never thought of that before. So, that's a fantastic question. I'm always curious and I always am interested in what if you took a different path, those pick a path, books you read as a child or imagining different futures or, what if you had made a different choice on a different day? I also catastrophize as well in that setting. So it's probably not always the most healthy approach to things. I'm always thinking about what would I do next? What would I find interesting? What is a contemporary issue that I'd be interested in? And then usually something will arise. So you could say that I'm already looking for it, or you could say that it's coincidence. Then something usually comes up and there'll be some connection or some link that I already have to that area. It might be a person, it might be something I've heard about. It might be a topic I'm interested in. Or it might be an opportunity to get in and explore a different part of a process and expand my knowledge and skills that then leads me to tip over the edge. And as soon as I've done that I just become more and more and more interested in that opportunity. As a bit of an aside, you know, when you do those personality or working style tests, I remember reading one recently and it said, as soon as you find something new, you've left behind the stuff you are doing. You'll leave things unfinished because your focus shifts. That really resonated with me and in a work setting, it's something that I have to work hard to combat as well. Otherwise, I'm an 80 20 person. And it's that last push to get something finished that's often the hardest.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. Once you get to 80% and then you kind of like, well, I feel like I've solved this now, or it's finished in some ways, really hard to get it done. This is definitely a grokkist trait, I think, and we haven't really talked about this yet, but I'm curious, does the term grokkist resonate for you at all or how so?
Lara Clarke:Admittedly, I had never heard of the term until I met you. And then when I started reading about it, I thought, wow, that certainly resonates with me. And I was really interested to hear more about what you do and and listen to some of the other interviews that you've had as well. I can't help thinking, doesn't everyone think like this? And then realizing that perhaps, no, not everybody does think like this. And then starting to wonder more, well, everyone want to think like this if they could? And is it just circumstance and everyday life that maybe stops some people from letting their mind wander? I'm just quite good at indulging a wandering mind.
Danu Poyner:Well, I think that's an excellent point and I might just throw back your question to you, given what you've told me already about, how you said you had to kind check yourself a bit with work so that that way of being doesn't cause problems at work. But you also said that your path was an uncommon approach. So maybe not everyone does think like that. What kind of issues does it throw up for you?
Lara Clarke:I've probably become more cognizant of it in the last couple of roles that I've had, in the planning context, because we work within a regulatory setting where you're trying to get results for clients within a certain timeframe. People become quite happy with the box and happy with the process, and if people start questions or raising matters, which could conceivably be within the realms of something that people should be considering, but they don't normally think about those things, it makes people quite uncomfortable. And combine me being quite extroverted with asking those questions, it has served to, a few people over time that I'm raising things that aren't issues, but actually I've resolved them just as quickly as I raised them. But other people don't necessarily know that that's going to be so easily resolved. I'm just putting it out there and thinking across tangents.
Danu Poyner:So you're a nuisance then, is what you're telling me,
Lara Clarke:basically, yes. yeah, I'm a nuisance. But then if I'm working for a client and I'm doing this, it usually means I'm very well prepared for any questions that come back to me because I'd be surprised if I hadn't thought of it. But in a interpersonal working relationships with people as well, I have had to be more cognizant of it, to make sure I'm following through tasks. When you are looking after a team of people, being engaged with what people are doing and making sure that you are not constantly identifying new things and more challenges, but actually learning that a lot of people work in a different way and that you really do need to have clear parameters and celebrate those milestones rather than always looking for something new. I think that that's something as a team leader and as a manager, I had to be far more cognizant of, yeah.
Danu Poyner:The way that this is often characterized, like once you find the new thing, you of drop the old thing, makes it sound a bit skittish or fragmented or even like a short attention span. But I guess the point is connections, right? Grokkists really are people who enjoy finding the connections between things and especially the kinds of connections like you're saying, that other people are not normally thinking about. And so I often say that the grokkiist's signature gift is synthesis. It's about putting different, sometimes contradictory things together in original ways to create a higher level of meaning. And what that means is when you pick up the new thing, you don't put down the old thing, you keep it with you and you carry with you all of the things and you're kind of constantly making connections between them. It seems like you have done very much, uh, to accumulating a whole range of different things. And I wonder how you manage to carry them all. There's so many.
Lara Clarke:Um, that's a really lovely description. I think that that's very true and I think it can appear to people as short attention span or changing your mind and your focus. But in fact, I wouldn't be where I am today without every part of what I've built. It's like, um, opening doors. You've got more doors open and more things that you know, and that informs the opinion that you give or the advice that you provide. So in a setting working with a stakeholder, I might think back to a private client that I had and go, actually, you should be talking to this person because they might have some funding for the thing that you're trying to achieve. Or they had a similar challenge or from the research setting saying, this is a research methodology that I'd apply to dealing with this problem. Or there might be lots of transferable things or connections or people or themes that I, cobbled together in my head. And I've always found that if I've been trying to write a justification for something or some sort of a spiel, or in a more cynical way, some BS about something, I find it quite effortless to build a story and to form that narrative, whereas other people seem to struggle more to put those things together. In terms of how do you carry all that with you and how do you accommodate all of that? I think I reached capacity in one of my previous roles with how many things I was trying to juggle at any one time. I think back to back meetings online, with a huge variety of people across a huge different range of technical areas, was very challenging. I enjoyed it, but it's not something I could sustain for a really long time.
Danu Poyner:So, we had the architect's assistant to the help desk at the council, to the regulatory process planner to monitoring and compliance. And then you said something particularly interesting to me, which is, after that, when you were in private practice is when you became a real planner. What was everything before? Was that not planning?
Lara Clarke:No, it definitely was planning. But in terms of having the job title planner, I was always planner of the help desk. I didn't actually do planning. And I think doing planning, is really, in a New Zealand context, being a policy planner or a regulatory planner, those are kind of the traditional planning roles. You're actually can call yourself a planner once you've done that regulatory planning.
Danu Poyner:So that's kind of what makes you a, a capital P planner in other people's eyes. When did you become a planner in your eyes?
Lara Clarke:Yeah, that's a really good question. Ultimately when I look back, I was a planner at the end of my degree. It had the academic framing, it had the concepts, it had the history of planning, as a concept, as a profession. Then when we graduated, everyone went, oh God, they didn't teach us anything about what we actually need to do on a daily basis to be a planner with a capital P. And so I think there's a lot of people out there who would probably think, I don't really know what I learned at university. I And depending on what your role is in planning over your career, you may never know, may never necessarily appreciate the academic foundation and some of the conceptual thinking that you develop there. But because I've had such a diversity of roles and one of those being back in academia as I now really do appreciate that understanding planning as a process, as a profession, as an approach to how we manage urban development and urban form and placemaking. What we do in New Zealand with our focus on legislation and policy, those are tools and that's one way of doing planning, but it's not the be all and end all. I meet a lot of planners who have practiced overseas and they have, I think more of that philosophical academic understanding of what being a planner is than is supported by our more regulatory focused approach.
Danu Poyner:That would seem to leave open the tantalizing possibility that what some capital P planners do is not planning.
Lara Clarke:Yes, but I guess it is because it is a process that's been constructed over time through lots of legislative framing that should give you a good process. Right. I often have interesting discussions with my husband, that that kind of regulatory role could be automated. don't really need a planner to do some of those process-based things. But I guess that's a challenge to many professions, right? What is that added extra X factor that a computer couldn't add to that?
Danu Poyner:You spent some time in academia. And I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that this is because you saw that maybe there were s that you wanted to question about the nature of the profession.
Lara Clarke:yeah, I think my interest was actually probably born quite a lot through my involvement with the unitary plan process where we were in such a tight regulatory timeframe. It was like, wow, gosh, it would be so great if there was some research out there that addressed this question or helped to support what seems to be quite a logical assumption. And what's wrong with the research sector that that's so difficult for us to actually access that research. Then I actually went off and worked in another private consultancy for several years before I circled back around to the research setting. That was probably one of the most difficult years that I spent, was the first year in the research sector because my expectations versus the reality were so different. I thought that scientists and researchers just sat in an office and followed whatever they wanted to and tried to make it useful and talked to people about it. Yet the whole science system is so complex and the methods and the approaches and egos, the constructs, it's an incredibly political and difficult world to navigate. But at the same time, when I joined the research institute that I joined, I thought, setting aside what I'm interested in and setting aside the research topics that I'd like to explore, what value can I bring to this organization and to science system research and planning research in New Zealand. And went off on a bit of a tangential journey to becoming a team leader and to wanting to understand research funding and getting involved in trying to build more links to stakeholders and making sure research was actually useful. It was a really interesting side step from planning.
Danu Poyner:I wanna spend a bit of time in that sidestep, if that's okay. I'm curious, just first of all, Given the trajectory that you've been on and up until that point, how you did move into that research space, that's not always easy to do, and they are quite different worlds. How did that opportunity come about and how did you approach it?
Lara Clarke:Uh, okay. Well, it was one of those things where considered something in the past and then an opportunity crops up in the future. I'd seen a job advertisement at GS science is where I was working, to work as an actual hazards planner. And some of the research that I'd relied on and found really useful and really accessible during my time in the unitary plan was that of Dr. Wendy Saunders. And she was a natural hazard researcher at GNS. So I had um, several years earlier, applied for a role at GNS, and been unsuccessful because I didn't have a background in research. I was coming entirely from practice and there was a more suitable person. So it came about several years later, when the manager from that department contacted me to let me know that there were new vacancies available and was I still interested? I was really interested and happy doing what I was doing. I had a huge amount of diversity, fantastic colleagues and clients. But once that seed was planted, it was all over. Um, I, I had to pursue that area of interest and I had to follow it through. It was a big learning curve, because what I thought I'd be doing versus the processes that you have to navigate to achieve that was quite different. But I was always up for a challenge and wanted to achieve what I set out to achieve, and maybe in a slightly different way to what I originally intended, but I hope I still took some steps towards that.
Danu Poyner:Maybe we can just explain uh, what GNS science do, and what that means.
Lara Clarke:So GNS Science or Geological and Nuclear Sciences Science, are Crown Institute. We've got several Crown Institutes in New Zealand. Other ones which people may have heard of more frequently in niwa who look after water and atmosphere. There's land care research who look after plants and bugs and dirt. And then we've got several others that are more industry based. Crown Research Institutes operate as part of New Zealand science system alongside the universities. Crown Research Institutes have their own legislation and they really are mission led research. It's meant to be research that is tied to where New Zealand's heading, the challenges that we have, the opportunities that we need to address. Whereas the universities provide a slightly more blue skies approach to research. It's more the questions that we may have in 20 years time or the things that we don't yet know that we need to know. So GNS look basically at Earth system research, so it's all geological processes, anything that's under the ground or the ground itself. And they also look therefore at natural hazards. So primarily geological hazards. Um, and they also look at that things like groundwater and geothermal resources cuz that's of course in the ground, and do a lot of climate research and paleontology. One of the main things that I went into GNS with was looking at the social harm or the social impacts of natural hazards. Because we found during the unitary plan process that it was far more tangible to quantify and to convey the impacts that could be had on property and actual property loss and damage, and risk to life in terms of actually being in a risky area. It was much, much more difficult to articulate and to find evidence to support the social impact of being exposed to hazards. The kind of the mental and wellbeing impacts that are associated with living with risk. And to articulate, quantify, qualify what that means and use that to inform policy.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. Well, that sounds like a really fascinating opportunity and also a kind coming together of some of the threads that had been going on for you. Is kind of like a return to the science that you had started off with and then coming together with the social side. How did that go? Um,
Lara Clarke:I didn't really get very far to be honest. I was very lucky with some of the connections that I'd built in before I went into the research sector and that gave me some opportunities to look in a sort of related field, which was around climate change and adaptation. What are the barriers, from a practicing planning and implementation sense to actually achieving a better approach to managing risk and adaptation. But I think probably. barriers that I found, and something that I always would've liked to have done had I stayed in the research field was understanding a little bit more about research design and method. Because coming from practice, it's not something that you'd apply in an everyday sense to a planning problem or to scoping an issue, but the structure and the way that you go about it in an academic setting is like that on steroids. It's just so much more detailed and it's so much more structured and there's a theory that underpins everything.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. Research in an academic context is not what people would recognize as what we would normally think of as just doing research. It's like systematic investigation, and the emphasis is very much on the systematic part and being able to give a good reason why you're doing it this way and not one of 300 other ways. What are the barriers in the way of implementing the things you've been talking about?
Lara Clarke:I think fundamentally to me, the barriers are around political bravery and leadership, and having the right evidence to support the right choices. Up until now there's been a little bit of a gap, which we are now in a really good position to address. We've got a much better concept of what that looks like. But I think that that sort of litigious framing and the need to have a really evidence-based decision was let down by not having the level of information that we probably needed to have. I think the other big hurdle there is general understanding and education around risk and hazards in climate change. That there are so many and issues that everyone has to contend with it an everyday basis. Climate change, it's a real buzzword now, but it's just one of many things. perhaps quite a long way down the list for a lot of people on an everyday basis. But also around that, that decision making doesn't always have to be a negative. It can be a positive and we are not perhaps very good at a proactive approach to managing risk.
Danu Poyner:what did you then go on and do after the GNS experience? What was the next opportunity that popped up that you had to chase?
Lara Clarke:From GNS, I ended up speaking with some former colleagues at Auckland Council and understood that they were needing a new project or program leader for a series of adaptation plans which are being developed for the Auckland region for Shoreline adaptation. And really with the research that I'd just been working on, identifying the challenges to implementing some of this stuff, I started to feel in the research setting, like a little bit of an imposter. It had been probably three, four years since I'd been practicing in this area. And I wanted to be able to speak more knowledgeably about the barriers and the challenges, and so I thought, what better opportunity to actually go back and orientate myself in the real world than to be leading and involved with one of several programs across New Zealand, Aotearoa, which is trying to achieve this. It was like the perfect opportunity to learn by doing, which I think I probably enjoy and do better at than learning academically.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. Again, do you find that you are able to consciously bring together those different threads of experience in a in a practical way? How is that working for you now?
Lara Clarke:At the moment there's quite a good opportunity to bring those streams together because practices are just starting and academia has been looking at these issues for a number of years, but not really had much of a chance to try and implement them. In many respects we're actually working more closely together, the research academic world and the practice world, because we are saying, well, how do we do it? And they're saying, well, what are your challenges and how are you trying to do it? And we are starting to actually work together a lot more, which is really pleasing to see. But it's also perhaps reflective of the challenge and the wicked nature of the problem that's got that segue coming together,
Danu Poyner:I understand you recently spent some time teaching, undergraduate planning students at the University of Auckland, which is of course how we know each other. So I'm curious, as someone who spent all of this time exploring the profession from these different vantage points in practical detail from all angles, what was it like teaching a young crop of aspiring planners?
Lara Clarke:I really enjoyed it. I think it was particularly challenging because we were building the course as we went, and so it would it would be really interesting to reflect on exactly that question this time next year, having had the opportunity to see how it goes second time round. I really like being asked questions by the students that I struggle to answer or really have to think about answering. Because I think you don't put yourself in those positions professionally very often because you wouldn't want to be you know, you, you want to be well prepared for things, but students will come up with really left field things and they have a very fresh and new understanding of the profession and the bounds or the box within which it might sit. One of the other things that surprised me actually was how well they responded to looking at wicked problems and urban planning and actually some of the processes that they implemented, the things that they considered, their reflections on the process and what they came up with are really just as good, if not better than a lot of practicing, professionals in that field. So that was really refreshing in some ways and inspirational because they will be the ones that take us for the next step.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, I think so. And particularly, you know, When I talk to people of that age group, they're really savvy about complexity and how everything fits together. And they're really impatient with, what you would describe as path dependency earlier. Why we can't get out of these kind of ruts that were in it being really narrowly focused on particular things. you know, when you were younger, you used to rail against the older generations and the mess that they'd made. And, why couldn't they do better? And now I feel like I'm moving into the age group where I might be part of the problems.
Lara Clarke:Well, I was just thinking as you were speaking then, it's a case of saying, when you are young, you're like, you've got to do better. This is ridiculous. Why are we are subject to these cultural societal norms. Why can't these old people see these issues and just resolve them? And then I think you enter that realm of saying, oh, but it's too hard for this reason and I guess that's coming back to your description of a grokkist and saying, well, why is that a barrier? How can you change it? And what journey do you go on to try and find a solution to that and say, yes, there's this reason why culture or society precludes this being a viable option. So do we want to change that? Why do we want to change it? How do we change it? How long does it take to change it? What do we need to change it? Rather than just being the hopeful, optimistic thinker, it's, well then put that into practice.
Danu Poyner:Absolutely. And so that leads me to my next question then, which is something off the back of something you said earlier. One of the experiences you had gave you the opportunity to think about if you could change one thing about this, what would you change? I guess I wanna ask you that question now, from your current vantage point about the planning system and where we're at with risk and climate change. If you could change one thing where we're at, and why it is the way it is, what would it be?
Lara Clarke:Oh, gosh, what a fantastic question. I think I would change, whatever it is. And I don't think there's just one thing. I think there's probably lots of things, that lead to the silos that we have. If I'm looking at it in terms of the planning profession. If everyone could have a diversity of experience and actually enjoy that across lots of different aspects of planning appreciate and have insights into how different processes work and the reasons why, I think that that would just make a huge amount of difference. In the climate change and natural hazard sphere, I would say it's breaking down the silos between different agencies and institutions, why do we draw a line between planning and emergency management? We assume things of each other, but we hardly ever go and talk to one another. It's breaking down some of those silos or finding a better way of addressing that. That will probably be the thing that I reckon could have a really big difference.
Danu Poyner:Oh, that's very much a grokkist answer. I think. Let's break down the silos and make more connections between them for sure. I guess That kind of comes to the nature of professions in general, maybe not just planning. You end up with this, what I like to call politics of expertise, where, you know, if you professionalize something and create a class of experts and a body of knowledge around, That's great because now you can have this set of standards and shared language and policy layers to actually do things through the mechanisms, but it also brings into play a whole bunch of new power dynamics that can ignore or exclude or override the interests of everyday people who presumably who the profession was supposed to benefit in the first place. Is that something that you have a perspective on?
Lara Clarke:definitely. Um, The first thing that comes to mind is this is something that I've always been interested in and maybe was inspired by some of my early interactions growing up on Waiheke Island, and my father was a bit of a, I guess you'd term as sort of environmental activist, and was quite involved in lots of planning processes, seeking to protect environmental values, but also a lot of amenity values around, you know, what is Waiheke what are the elements of it that we appreciate as people? Natural character and landscapes and things like that. I really saw how the system and how expert opinion could be used in a really negative way. And it becomes a battle of professionals and you lose sight of who you're doing it for and why you're doing it. And when I graduated, I was a founding member of a group that actually started a bit of a movement towards planning aid. So we were looking at the Scottish examples and lots of overseas examples where, basically like legal aid, there's planning aid to help people engage with planning processes and to to advocate for public participation in planning. And it not being something that you necessarily need to go and get a planner to help you understand how a policy might apply to you. That policy should be written so that you can understand it. And those processes should be accessible to people. Your question also leads me to think of both my father and my husband, but they kind of think, sure I can do that. And they have the determination or the need to decide that they are going to learn that skill or achieve that thing or interface with that process themselves. Because surely they have the requisite skills and surely it shouldn't be so hard. But that's not something that many people have either the determination or the confidence to do or the time.
Danu Poyner:Well, that's right. And I think, you know, it's been commented that the ability to participate in civic life in that way is a kind of privilege of its own that comes with time and economic security. So there's layers to how that works as well. coming back to what you were saying about the, the general understanding in the community of risk and natural hazard seems to be uh, a natural place for your focus to be now, given everything you've said about planning, and, and, it's how people, live and so I'm curious how you're thinking about this barrier of public participation, and education and understanding and just what's on your mind and what's holding your interest in that at the moment?
Lara Clarke:Okay. Um, it's a, an everyday issue or opportunity if you like, for my role, because we have quite a large component of community engagement, but also engagement with partners, and with stakeholders, how do we go about doing that? What is effective? How do we evaluate it? One of the things I'd say is that providing information that's clear and concise, and accessible, and it's not in a high pressure or a negative setting is a really good first step. So basically being there to talk to people about things, not at the point of a crisis or not when they're facing losing their house or not when they've just been inundated by water. But One of the other key challenges that's been on my mind has been how we interface with people and how we engage. We've seen a huge shift towards online and social media. Our ability to keep up with that as local government or central government, is how do you interface with people on those platforms? What's the best way? There's so much out there that's presented as fact or science or evidence or information. And so much of that is really touched by opinion. And by the way that people want to present that to you. How do we provide information that seems fair and objective, and let people access it in their own time? But when there's so many other pressures on people's time, do you make it their priority? How do you grab people's interest? there was a presentation I saw recently at the New Zealand Coastal Conference where a practitioner, she told a story and that had such a profound impact on the audience rather than just trying to convey facts and information. She told a story about climate change and about what had happened. And through that story conveyed an awful lot of information. And it came back to me that we need to be thinking less about what we want to share and thinking more about how we want to share it.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, it's very much the zeitgeist, isn't it? But there's this book um, called Democracy and Expertise by a guy called Frank Fisher, and he's looking at public participation in processes like planning. What stuck out to me from that was his finding that it's actually the public and ordinary people who make change. More so than it is policy makers ultimately and governments, it's actually ordinary people who drive the change. But that only happens successfully when there is an expert facilitator is the term he uses, which is someone who's got an insider outsider role who knows the profession and can speak the language and has the social capital to move within the insider track of the world, but who takes a position of interpreting and translating and communicating, facilitating with the public and the ordinary people so that they can navigate that world through the expert. And it's important that the expert is not taking the position of authority or power or controlling that. They are facilitating. And his point is most of the successful changes that have come about from ordinary people have had that expert facilitator role operating when you look at them. And I just thought that was a really interesting observation from a grokkist standpoint, because that is the grokkist skillset and probably the grokkist orientation to the profession that you are involved in as well.
Lara Clarke:Your description of that book, I'd be really interested to read it. Is something that a consultant that I worked with while I was at g said, that culture eats policy for breakfast. We really need to be focused more on social license and culture and behavioral science and understanding how we view things like science and how we view things like risk. And how does that interface with people's values. I think the response to Covid has been really interesting from that social science perspective. How have people responded to that? How have we gone with making decisions under uncertainty? How do we reflect on that? And has that changed our culture or has it resulted in a different culture? I think that that's just so important to understand culture and influence and making sure that we communicate with the people that we are trying to ultimately plan for.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. That's the other thing that I've been chasing lately is this interest in co-design as a paradigm for dealing with these kind of difficult problems that involve institutions and public participation. There's this nice, uh, you know, There's another book, it's called, beyond Sticky Notes, doing Co-Design for Real And I was really, really struck by that. If you go as a professional or as an organization into a room of people who have lived experience or who are just trying to live their lives and you try and hassle them with these design thinking workshops and thing. It's very off-putting and alienating. I'm really inspired by the whole set of practices and language and techniques that are coming out around doing co-design in this kind of respectful and inclusive way.
Lara Clarke:That's something that's also holding my interest, the hugely complex but incredibly interesting history of Tamaki of Auckland, from the geology and how it's physically formed but most prominently at the moment for me, the cultural landscape. You mentioned co-design and how you want to approach a project and how you want to meaningfully partner with Mana whenua or with other partners. I think so much of it is actually parking what you want to tell them and developing a relationship and understanding from your partner or your stakeholder's perspective why they're interested and what grinds their gear, what grind the stake is, what is their pain point? What gets them excited? What are they passionate or aspirational about? And starting from that point, rather than just starting from what you want, which is such a traditional western policy construct in the way that central and local government tend to approach things. It's a paradigm shift, isn't it? It's actually changing the culture of the way that we do things.
Danu Poyner:You mentioned right back at the start, about a desire to combine what you love with what you do for work. And, that didn't necessarily work out in the example that you gave at the time, but how do you think about that now? Is that, Is that what you're currently doing? Or, or not?
Lara Clarke:Um, well, I think my work enables me to enjoy a hobby that I love, so it enables me to still have horses, although I probably don't have as much time to spend with them. But that's as a result of having two small children as well, as I would like. I think the day-to-day job of being an equine physio, I probably would've become bored with quite quickly. So I have never looked back as I was saying earlier on that one. I do really love what I do. So I think even though it wasn't part of any particular plan, I genuinely enjoy going to work. I enjoy the challenges, I enjoy the people that I'm working with, and I find the topic area really interesting.
Danu Poyner:It comes off you, that, that feeling, I'm really struck by the energy and the optimism that you communicate about what you do, which is interesting considering so much of it is about climate change, and that's not always a hopeful kind of discourse. You said that planning is about how people live and how we want to live in the future. Given your perspective on everything to do with planning and natural hazard risk reduction and climate change, what you think about how we want to live in the future?
Lara Clarke:Um, I think one of the biggest challenges will be, how we have good representative decision making, because that's gonna be a big challenge, is who makes the decisions, and who benefits and who really bears the brunt of some of the effects that we might see unfold in the future. And whether you consider that to be climate change or just environmental change or just the continued pressure that we put on the natural systems on our planet, we continue to increase and consume. So I think it's really just communicating the best we can, what that risk looks like, what that consequence looks like, who it attributes to, so that yes, there'll be difficult decisions and there'll be decisions that not everyone will agree with, but if they can just be the best informed they can be and undertaken transparently, I hope we will look back and say, oh, well we did the best we could It might not have been perfect and we might wish we made a different choice, but we can understand why we made the choice we made.
Danu Poyner:A lot of the hopelessness uh, that comes from talking about climate change seems to come from the sense that we're not doing anything and we're making terrible decisions in the face of overwhelming evidence and facts. So the idea that we could look back and see some to the decision making is at least something to be hopeful about, isn't it?
Lara Clarke:Yeah. And look, I had a similar conversation with a colleague not so long ago, and I was thinking we doing any better? cynically you could say, no. We continue to put things in silly places and we continue to increase our risk and exacerbate a whole lot of issues that we currently have. But we are better informed. We are talking about it. There's general acceptance that there are physical processes occurring on the planet, which are going to change the way that we need to live on the planet. Whether or not you believe that that's entirely a result of anthropocentric activities or not, I don't really care. We all seem to be generally acknowledging that there's environmental change that we are going to have to live with, and I think that's a big step forward because accepting that means that we'll actually start doing something about it.
Danu Poyner:When you were talking before about not having the conversation with people about risk at the point of need or the point of disaster, but earlier on, is that a conversation that people actually want to have, when they're having a good day and they're not troubled by disaster? Can we get people to have, uh, be interested in that conversation when it's not immediately impacting them?
Lara Clarke:It's definitely more difficult, but I think it is a case of trying to identify something that they're passionate about or something that they do care about and working backwards from that point. So if it's talking about a beach that they're sitting on, are you enjoying your day at the beach? Are you enjoying sitting on dry clean sand here? Have you thought about whether your kids will be able to do this? It doesn't have to be a negative situation that they're experiencing. It can equally be a positive one.
Danu Poyner:I've got one more, which is the question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, which is, if you could gift someone a life changing learning experience, what would it be and why?
Lara Clarke:Okay. I think it would be a gift to everyone, or to the people that don't experience this already themselves, as the opportunity to find yourself in a situation where you truly are in somebody else's shoes. So really properly having an insight into a different perspective, a different viewpoint. Properly engaging in that, because I think we talk at each other a lot and we listen to opinions, but we don't really absorb them. But to really understand, to walk a mile, or a kilometer, in another person's shoes and really truly understand all of the challenges, the barriers, the issues that they face. If it's a gift to everyone, it might be the person that's most opposite to them. Like, having that opportunity to experience that other worldview, I think would just be really eye-opening for a lot of people.
Danu Poyner:Thank you for that. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you are itching to talk about?
Lara Clarke:No, I don't think so. The one thing that I would add, when we talked about my experience at the university, and it's maybe a bit of a shout out to all the university lecturers out there, and to the high school teachers and the primary school teachers and the early childhood educators. It's an incredibly difficult thing to maintain your enthusiasm and passion and repeat learnings year after year or day after day, a week after week. That's really hard to do. It's hard to do one time round, let alone year after year. And so thank you to everyone that has done that and does that, it's a unique role to be in.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. Well said. A big shout out to the toiling teachers who managed to turn the same turf again and again with patience and grace. Absolutely. It's been a great pleasure speaking with you today. And I'm very excited to keep following your journey and see where you get to next and how you're able to bring all of the things that you've been accumulating into fruition. I think it's a really important area that matters to all of us. And thank you for sharing your insights and tolerating my naive outsider questions about a very complex area as well. I appreciate it very much.
Lara Clarke:Oh, no, thank you. It's been fantastic. You asked some fantastic questions and it's really lovely to engage with the concept of a grokkist and feel that there's other people out there that think in a slightly abstract and different way. And it's really encouraging to look at all the positive applications, rather than just thinking that you are a tangential thinker who's a bit of a nuisance. Thank you.
Danu Poyner:Wonderful. Thank you so much, Lara. I appreciate it. See you next time.
