When Old Assumptions Meet a Changing World

Behaviour change expert Dom Thurbon opened Curious Thinkers 2026 with a challenge to question what we think we know. Experience can sharpen judgement, he argued, but it can also become baggage. The assumptions most worth examining are often those we have become most comfortable accepting as true. Learning something new is difficult; unlearning what no longer serves us can be harder.

It proved to be a useful starting point for the day-long conference discussing demographic change, leadership, financial crime, artificial intelligence, customer behaviour, tokenised money and human resilience.

The subjects were different, but together they explored a much larger question: How do leaders and organisations respond to a world that is changing around them?

The future will not be a bigger version of today

Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher set the broader context for what that changing world looks like. Australia’s population is projected to grow from 28 million people in 2026 to 31.5 million by 2036, but population growth was only part of the story. The bigger shift is generational.

Gen Z’s share of the workforce is projected to more than double, from 18 per cent in 2026 to 39 per cent in 2036. Millennials will still account for 39 per cent of the workforce, while Gen X’s share is projected to fall from 31 per cent to 17 per cent and Baby Boomers from 8 per cent to just 1 per cent. Gen Alpha, meanwhile, will represent one-fifth of Australia’s population by 2036 and begin entering employment.

The numbers tell us the scale of the shift. The experiences behind them help explain what it means.

Kuestenmacher characterised Baby Boomers as the richest generation Australia has seen, beneficiaries of a profound economic shift as households moved from one income to two. Greater household spending power flowed into homes, convenience, cars and the expansion of Australian cities. Now that generation is rapidly leaving the workforce.

Gen X finds itself squeezed from both directions, raising children while increasingly taking responsibility for ageing parents.

Millennials face a different set of pressures. Housing and everyday life are more expensive, commutes are longer, and many feel the pathway to wealth enjoyed by previous generations has become harder to follow. Their relationship with work is different too. Where previous generations often found meaning and identity outside work, Kuestenmacher argued that Millennials increasingly expect their careers to provide some of that purpose.

Then comes Gen Z. Their formative years have been shaped by smartphones and constant global connectivity, alongside a pandemic, war and economic instability. They have grown up with events from around the world arriving immediately in their hands, creating a generation equipped to think about issues through a much more global lens.

Change is not an interruption to their experience of the world. It has been a constant feature of it.

The transition underway is more complex than simply older employees leaving and younger employees replacing them. Organisations are bringing together people shaped by profoundly different economic conditions, technologies, expectations and experiences.

There are practical pressures too. An ageing population will increase demand for services such as aged care, just as experienced Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce.

Responding to that change will require organisations to transfer knowledge between generations, reconcile different expectations and create workplaces in which every cohort can contribute.

Change depends on the culture around it

A changing workforce does not automatically produce an adaptable organisation.

Rachael Robertson brought the argument inside the organisation, drawing on her experience leading the Australian expedition to Davis Station in Antarctica to examine what happens to teams under sustained pressure.

Her message that “respect trumps harmony, every time” challenged the assumption that a healthy team is one without disagreement. Harmony may keep interactions comfortable, but it can also leave important issues unspoken. Respect creates room for people to challenge decisions, raise concerns and disagree without damaging trust.

Her “No Triangles” principle made that practical. If an issue exists between two people, address it directly rather than redirecting it through gossip, politics or “answer shopping”.

Her “bacon wars” story carried another deceptively simple lesson: look after the little things. Minor frustrations rarely remain minor when leaders allow them to accumulate.

Kuestenmacher showed why organisations will need to adapt. Robertson showed why that adaptation is not purely a strategic exercise.

People need to feel safe enough to question established thinking, speak directly and disagree constructively. Without that culture, curiosity remains an aspiration rather than a behaviour.

When confidence is not enough

The Counterpilot immersive experience tested another assumption: that experienced, intelligent people will reliably recognise deception when they encounter it.

Participants were placed inside a deliberately deceptive environment, turning fraud, AI and misjudgement from abstract concepts into something they had to navigate themselves. The experience exposed how confidence and incomplete information can combine to produce the wrong conclusion.

Tools matter, but tools alone are insufficient. Strong judgement matters, but judgement is vulnerable when the system itself has been designed to mislead.

If an individual can be deceived while acting in good faith, what happens when the warning signs are also scattered across multiple organisations?

The biggest risks sit in the gaps

Financial crime provided one of the clearest examples of what fragmentation costs.

Cuscal Managing Director Craig Kennedy argued that banks, payment providers, telecommunications companies, digital platforms, regulators and government are already investing heavily in prevention. The challenge is that criminal networks operate across the ecosystem while individual organisations usually see only one part of the chain.

A scam may begin with a fake advertisement, text message or phone call, enter the payments system, move through mule accounts and cross several institutions before connecting to a broader criminal network. By the time those pieces are joined together, the money may already have been lost and the criminals may have moved on.

As Kennedy put it:

“Australia doesn’t lack data, it doesn’t lack expertise, and it certainly doesn’t lack investment. It lacks connectivity.”

Cuscal’s proposed National Financial Crime Utility responds directly to that gap. Rather than creating another standalone platform, the proposition is to connect existing signals, intelligence and intervention points so trusted participants can identify risks earlier and act sooner.

The panel that followed brought that argument to life from different parts of the ecosystem.

Claire McKay, Assistant Secretary for Payments, Scams and Innovation at Treasury, emphasised that meaningful progress requires genuine industry involvement and buy-in. Government imposing solutions without the support of those expected to make them work is unlikely to deliver the same result.

Toby Evans, Head of Economic Crime at AusPayNet, provided a striking example of what becomes visible when intelligence is brought together across different sources. Analysis of scam reports uncovered a single Gold Coast address associated with 40 scam reports and $13 million in losses, ultimately linked to a scam syndicate operating from Thailand. His argument challenged another assumption: financial crime cannot simply be treated as a compliance problem.

Jack Morgan, Head of Policy at FinTech Australia, reinforced the importance of ensuring smaller organisations can also benefit from stronger intelligence sharing across the ecosystem.

The information and capability already existed. The value came from bringing them together.

Complex problems rarely fit neatly within the boundaries organisations use to divide responsibility. If the threat operates across an ecosystem, the response must be capable of doing the same.

From AI experimentation to action

The challenges facing organisations are not limited to threats. New technologies are also changing how customers may interact with institutions in the first place.

AI entrepreneur Dawid Naude explored one of the most immediate examples: agentic commerce.

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond answering questions and towards acting on behalf of customers. Personal agents are emerging that can assist with finding products, comparing choices and taking actions, changing the way people may discover and interact with financial services.

As AI agents become more involved in discovery, comparison and transactions, financial institutions will need to rethink how their products are found and understood, while maintaining clarity around customer permissions and accountability. The challenge is no longer simply whether an organisation can use AI, but whether it is ready to interact with customers who increasingly use AI themselves.

Technical capability is only one part of the equation. Agentic commerce brings together product information, customer intent, permissions and accountability. Organisations therefore need to consider whether their governance, data and operating models are ready for this changing relationship between customer and institution.

Faster is not the same as better

Consumer psychologist and Thinkerbell co-founder Adam Ferrier examined the same shift through human psychology and decision-making.

People already use phones, data and algorithms as extensions of their own thinking. In that sense, he argued, we are already becoming “cyborgs”, combining human judgement with machine-assisted decisions. But greater processing power does not guarantee a better choice.

“Just because something’s easy or faster to process doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

As AI becomes more influential in what people discover, compare and choose, preserving human judgement becomes more important, not less.

Ferrier argued that brands increasingly need to work for two audiences. Humans respond to feelings, fluency and fame. Machines need fuel in the form of information, fluency in how that information is structured and the third-party recognition that helps establish credibility.

Naude showed what AI-enabled commerce could make possible. Ferrier added an essential qualification: greater convenience and processing power do not remove the need to judge whether the resulting decision is sound.

Tokenisation moves beyond the hypothetical

The same tension between capability and purpose carried into the discussion on tokenised money.

Moderated by Freya Smith, Chief Client Officer at Cuscal, the panel brought together Nathan Churchward, Head of Product Solutions and Innovation at Cuscal; Dr Mark Staples, Chief Technology Officer at the Digital Finance CRC; Rob Allen, Executive Director at Icon Future Technologies; and Hannah Glass, Special Counsel at Ashurst Perkins Coie. Together, they explored a market moving decisively beyond experimentation and towards practical implementation.

Dr Mark Staples pointed to growing momentum internationally and in Australia. Project Acacia, he explained, demonstrated both the industry’s capability to move towards tokenised finance and its potential to reduce cost and risk. The question is increasingly shifting from whether the technology works to how organisations move towards production.

Rob Allen reinforced that shift, describing tokenisation as no longer a fringe technology but something increasingly embraced by the regulated financial services industry. He also highlighted interoperability as a significant challenge, with assets and liquidity currently fragmented across different networks.

For Nathan Churchward, the implications are already strategic. Tokenised money can no longer sit off to the side as an innovation exercise. Decisions being made today about architecture, data, controls and partnerships will affect how easily organisations can participate in the future.

Many of the most promising applications may sit behind the customer experience. Nathan Churchward pointed to settlement delays, reconciliation challenges, pre-funding, exception handling and manual controls as areas of friction. The opportunity is not simply greater speed, but greater certainty and the ability to bring money, information and conditions closer together.

Hannah Glass brought the legal and regulatory perspective. Her advice was to look beyond the technology itself and understand what is being provided, who is providing it, how value is transferred and where responsibility sits. Organisations, she argued, should avoid being either “dazzled by the technology or fearful of it”.

Programmability, interoperability, controls and settlement certainty all create new possibilities, but the panel repeatedly returned to a practical starting point: identify the problem first. Organisations should consider where material payment pain points exist and then determine the best technology to solve them. That technology may, or may not, be tokenisation.

For institutions considering what comes next, the most useful test will be whether tokenisation can solve genuine problems without compromising trust, controls or interoperability.

The human capacity to respond

Resilience and leadership speaker Kath Koschel brought a day of systems, technology and transformation back to the people navigating that change.

Drawing on extraordinary experiences of injury, recovery and loss, she argued that leadership begins with hope. Not blind optimism, but:

“The belief that the future can be better, along with the belief that I or we have the power to make it so.”

Hope, in this sense, is not about waiting for circumstances to improve. It carries a sense of agency: the belief that our actions can contribute to a different outcome.

Koschel also challenged the assumption that kindness and high performance are opposing forces. Drawing on work with organisations applying her framework, she pointed to increases of 66 per cent in wellbeing, 18 per cent in productivity and 23 per cent in profitability.

Her distinction between being nice and being kind was particularly relevant to the leadership themes running through the day. Niceness can avoid uncomfortable truths. Kindness, in her framing, is a disciplined act grounded in truth, honesty, integrity and courage.

It echoed Robertson’s earlier argument that respect matters more than harmony.

Different experiences, but a similar leadership truth: strong cultures are not built by avoiding difficulty. They are built by creating the trust to confront it together.

Koschel distilled that idea even further:

“We are strong alone, but we’re unstoppable when we work together.”

What happens next matters most

Closing Day One, Thurbon drew two themes from the breadth of ideas explored across the program. First, many of the challenges facing organisations ultimately remain people challenges as there is no change without behaviour change. Second, few of those challenges can be solved in isolation. Whether discussing Kennedy’s call for greater connectivity in financial crime prevention or the tokenisation panel’s focus on interoperability, progress increasingly depends on finding ways to move as one.

He illustrated the point through the story of paediatric heart surgeons who turned to Formula One mechanics for help improving the dangerous handover from surgery to intensive care. The collaboration led to changes across 42 elements of the process, a 70 per cent reduction in transition errors and zero deaths in the following 12 months. Expertise had never been the problem. The breakthrough came from bringing different expertise together.

Thurbon closed Day One with a challenge: “The magic of an event is on the day. The power of a day is what happens next.”

Day Two put that principle into practice. Rather than another full program of presentations, attendees moved into interactive workshops across AI, Tokenisation & Stablecoins, and Customer Growth, applying the questions and ideas from Day One to specific business challenges. Each workshop approached the task from a different direction, but the objective was shared: test familiar assumptions, combine perspectives and turn insight into something useful.

Across the two days, an answer to the question posed at the beginning began to take shape: How do leaders and organisations respond to a world that is changing around them?

Not by abandoning experience, but by remaining willing to test the assumptions built from it. By understanding change through evidence, building cultures capable of honest challenge, recognising the limits of individual judgement and collaborating when problems cross organisational boundaries. By preparing not simply for new technologies, but for the new customer behaviours and ways of working they create. And by judging innovation on the value it delivers, while preserving the human qualities technology cannot replace.

The world is changing. Evidence helps us understand it. Trust allows us to confront it. Curiosity enables us to challenge what no longer works. Ultimately, what matters is what leaders and organisations choose to do with what they learn.