Brian Dorricott – the Tech Engineer / CTO

As a leader and engineer, I learn quickly. Very quickly – the technology, the product, the customer’s needs and the organisation.  These are the easy things – what matters is culture. I love Peter Drucker wise statement “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Using a servant leadership style I have created teams that decide the strategy and set the culture that is inclusive and benefits from the knowledge of all individuals in the team rather than just the team leader.

You’ll have read how, in the first stage of my career as a founder and managing director, I developed my style and empowered those I worked with. Indeed, after I sold Gordano to the management team, it took me a long time to say: “I founded Gordano” rather than “We founded Gordano”. I like to work “with people” rather than “for people”. “With” implies that we all bring something to the table, “for” implies that someone tells me what and how to deliver something. It’s a subtle distinction and I know that I don’t perform well in the “for” environment… so if that’s how you or your company approaches delivering what customers want, I’ll not be joining you.

I have another hidden secret: I’m dyslexic. Dyslexic’s brains are different – as I discovered when I researched the dyslexic advantage. This advantage means I can combine different, disparate thoughts and technologies from a wide variety of sources to solve an apparently intractable problem. When working with a team, I listen to everyone’s ideas on how to solve a problem and facilitate a solution that is better than the whole. I have a “kit bag” of different techniques to facilitate and drive the unblocking of teams that are stuck (e.g. Mastermind Groups, Magic Wand, 20 in 2, etc.) whether they are a board of directors or a coding team fixing an intractable bug. The key is clarity of thinking and allowing everyone to contribute without the dead hand of politics.

In this stage of my career, I’ve worked in of the biggest eHealth companies in Australia: Telstra Health and Alcidion. From knowing nothing about healthcare I quickly became the Subject Matter Expert (SME) not just on statistics and analytics engineering but also data in the healthcare environment. There is a lot of jargon in health care – consider FHIR, AR-DRG, LOS, AN-ACC, SNOMED-CT, and LOINC as a starting point – in fact, it only took me two years to become qualified with prestigious “Certified Health Informatician Australasia” (CHIA) at the same time as completing the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Company Director qualification.

What’s next?

I may continue in Health, become a CTO / CEO in another sector or even start my own company… if you know someone who would benefit from a technology engineer with dyslexic advantage, you know where I am.