Leadership and Ambiguity might strike you as on odd theme for a coaching conference. Popular notions of leadership emphasise decisiveness, boldness, a willingness to act - ambiguity sounds such a wussy word, doesn't it - lacking clarity, definition - it's scarcely an aspirational word.

And yet, the coaches in this room have many decades of business leadership behind us (and ahead of us, too, I hope), so we know that managing, sometimes even creating, ambiguity is an important leadership tool.

I’ve been reflecting for some time now on what it means to deliver this address to you today, and in doing so to honour Jessie Street, and the National Women’s Library that bears her name.

And for me, the significance lies in the opportunity to reflect on the shared experiences of the women in my immediate family, and to value the contribution of the wider family of women who have been my friends and familiars for the last 30 years. I’m conscious there are many young women here today, and it was in thinking about them that I arrived at the title of this address “If at first…”.

With another hat on, I’m the Chair of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, and in 2002 our star overseas writer was the Canadian, John Ralston Saul.

A recent book by John is called “On Equilibrium”, and in it he hypotheses that because in recent times we have elevated reason as the pre-imminent human characteristic, we have lost our equilibrium – and that if we were to value all our human characteristics equally – intuition, creativity, imagination, memory, ethics, and common-sense then we might regain our balance, and operate more effectively as individuals, as citizens, and in corporations and governments.

Tonight I want to throw out a number of leadership challenges for us to toss around at the end of this presentation. All of them could be described as “soft” issues, but all of them I would argue have bottom line consequences for organizations. It’s weird, isn’t it, that we’ve come to use the word soft to describe issues that centre around people. In my experience, these issues are anything but soft – they are tough, knotty problems that require long term, strategic thinking, and considerable courage in stepping up to the challenges they represent.

When Jack Welsh, the widely admired CEO of General Electric was in Australia recently, he was repeatedly quoted as saying that ideas are the currency of the future - that the winners in the new economy will be old economy companies who have captured the best and brightest ideas people and used their skills to transform the traditional bricks and mortar blue-chips into highly creative, ideas-driven organisations.

Saatchi & Saatchi’s mission is to be revered as a hothouse of world-changing ideas that transform our client’s businesses, brands, and reputation.

I was invited to speak to you on Business Communication, but as I've reflected on these issues, it seems to me that the key thought is not Business Communication – which is just a meaningless piece of jargon really, but rather, reinventing conversation in a business context.