Notes from Captain, Set Sail — meetup and launch event

· business-agility, meetup, leadership

Also published: canonical / original

On 4 September 2025 we welcomed Dave Chauhan to the Melbourne Business Agility Meetup to discuss the nautical leadership model in his book Captain, Set Sail. A week later we had the pleasure of attending the book launch event “Captains in Conversation” with Jon Yeo, Jac Phillips, Jamie Nicholson, and Kat Francis.

Dave Chauhan at the Melbourne Business Agility Meetup

Leading well is hard. It takes practice, support, and a good deal of awareness of actions and impacts. Dave’s work is anchored to three memorable concepts:

  1. Your Beacon — what you and your organisation’s core values are.
  2. Your Wayfinder — how you sense and respond to change, including gathering input from others and data from your systems to test assumptions and signal when to adapt.
  3. Your Seafarer — how to make and communicate decisions in a timely manner.

Together these help you avoid leadership anti-patterns: drifting from your values when the going gets tough or a crisis hits and there is limited time to think; collating and considering a broad variety of inputs and avoiding too many “gut” decisions — particularly for choices that are hard or expensive to undo; and being decisive to avoid decision paralysis.

Captains in Conversation — panel takeaways

At the launch event we picked up a few powerful pointers:

Jac Phillips

Every time you speak you’re auditioning for leadership.

Leadership is continuous improvement.

Jon Yeo

Encourage leaders to communicate and over-communicate their decisions and the reasoning behind them. Find and develop your voice.

Be willing to act, make mistakes, and learn from them. That counters the instinct to only act when conditions and information are perfect — which is never, or too late.

Jamie Nicholson

Leads a purpose-driven construction company. Important to anchor teams’ daily work to purpose; purpose is a motivator woven into what we do.

Know what outcome is achieved when the job is “done”. In their case, the community is served with new or updated facilities.

Focus on behaviours and examples of what good looks like, supported with a simple set of dos and don’ts.

A closing thought: Consider how my leadership makes others feel; lead with conviction because true leadership outlives the leader.

Thanks

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