In this episode of Building Doors, host Lauren Karan sits down with Stuart Cook, a multi-award-winning engineering leader who stepped into major leadership roles early, including managing a 400 million infrastructure program in his late 30s. Stuart opens up about career-defining opportunities, overcoming imposter syndrome, mentoring future engineers, and why the human element matters just as much as technical excellence.

Stuart also shares his personal journey from following his grandfather on construction sites to raising three boys and rediscovering fishing. His honesty about insecurity, leadership missteps, and the pressure to be everything to everyone offers rare insight into what real growth looks like in the engineering and construction sectors.

Whether you are an emerging engineer, an experienced leader, or someone fascinated by the future of infrastructure, this conversation will encourage you to rethink how you lead, collaborate, adapt, and build a meaningful career.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Leadership and Career Growth:

• How Stuart landed a design manager role decades ahead of the norm.
• Why building core technical skills is essential before chasing leadership titles.
• The truth about imposter syndrome and why even top leaders still feel it.
• Why the best leaders stop doing everything and start empowering others.

Mentoring the Next Generation:

• Why mentoring only works when the mentee wants it.
• How organic, intentional mentorship shaped Stuart’s entire career.
• Why knowledge transfer matters now more than ever as senior engineers retire.

Sustainability and Industry Challenges:

• Why red tape, not people, is strangling productivity in infrastructure.
• Stuart’s frustration with sustainability points that waste resources.
• The gap between practical sustainability and bureaucratic sustainability.
• How industry expectations must evolve to truly support net zero goals.

Collaboration and Team Culture

• Why collaborative outcomes depend on people, not contract structures.
• How simple rituals like weekly coffees and birthday celebrations build trust.
• The surprising importance of emotional intelligence for engineers.
• What it takes to unify SMEs, contractors, clients, and stakeholders.

Personal Growth and Legacy

• Why becoming a father shifted Stuart’s definition of legacy.
• How family, surfing, and fishing keep him grounded.
• Why being a good dad matters more than being a well-known engineer.

Key Quotes from Stuart Cook:

• “I still feel deeply inadequate and insecure in my position, but you have just got to work to your strengths.”
• “You cannot mentor someone into success unless they want to be mentored.”
• “Some of the most collaborative projects I have seen were not collaborative contracts. They were collaborative people.”
• “We spend so much time chasing sustainability points instead of investing in real sustainable outcomes.”
• “Legacy does not matter to me as much now. Being a good dad and a good mate matters more.”

About Our Guest:

Stuart Cook is an award-winning engineering leader known for delivering major infrastructure programs, mentoring emerging engineers, and championing emotionally intelligent leadership in a traditionally technical field. From the Ipswich Motorway upgrade to the Coomera Connector South project, Stuart has built a career grounded in curiosity, humility, and passion for developing people.

About Your Host:

Lauren Karan, founder of Karan & Co. and host of Building Doors, is dedicated to helping professionals unlock their potential. Through insightful interviews and real-life stories, Lauren empowers listeners to create opportunities and thrive in their careers.

How You Can Support the Podcast:

• Subscribe and leave a 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Share this episode with anyone interested in sustainability and leadership.
• Connect with Stuart on LinkedIn to follow his work and insights.

Stay Connected:

• Follow Lauren and the Building Doors podcast on LinkedIn.
• Subscribe to the Building Doors newsletter for exclusive content.

Let’s Connect:

• Want to be a guest or share feedback? Email us at reachout@buildingdoors.com.au.

Thank you for listening! It’s time to stop waiting and start building.

In this episode of Building Doors, host Lauren Karan sits down with Dr. Sean Brady, a forensic engineer, safety expert, and founder of Brady Heywood Consulting. Known for leading the landmark Brady Review into fatal mining accidents, Sean breaks down why our current approach to safety is fundamentally flawed and how the way we design systems, reward behavior, and report incidents can quietly create the very risks we think we are preventing.

Sean shares what he discovered while investigating major failures across mining, aviation, health, and engineering, and why so many organizations unknowingly encourage silence, hide near misses, and measure the wrong things entirely. From normalization of deviance to the dangers of chasing zero-harm metrics, this episode challenges leaders to rethink how they view systems, human behavior, and organizational learning.

Whether you lead teams, manage major projects, or simply want to understand what true safety looks like, Sean's insights will shift how you think about risk, leadership, and culture.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Rethinking Safety and System Design:

• Why most companies mistake the absence of incidents for the presence of safety.
• The real reason safety statistics often hide, not reveal, fatal risks.
• How normalization of deviance creeps into everyday work and leads to catastrophic failures.
• Why high-reliability organizations like aviation do not rely on compliance alone.

Leadership, Reporting, and Culture:

• Why bad news rarely flows upward and how leaders can change that.
• How to create a culture where people report near misses instead of hiding them.
• Why learning beats blaming and how organizations unintentionally punish honesty.
• What senior leaders must do to build genuine psychological safety.

Building Systems That Actually Keep People Alive:

• Why effective controls, not hazards, determine whether people survive high-risk work.
• How to design critical controls and verify their effectiveness continuously.
• The powerful difference between set-and-forget systems versus systems that learn.
• How dropped object reports and near misses can reveal deep system weaknesses.

Key Quotes from Dr. Sean Brady:

• "It is not hazards that kill people, it is ineffective controls."
• "Zero harm sounds good, but what your people hear is: do not report anything."
• "When you cannot measure what is important, you make what you can measure important."
• "High-reliability organizations do not expect perfection. They expect things to go wrong."
• "Our companies are built for good news to flow up, not bad news."

About Our Guest:

Dr. Sean Brady is a forensic engineer, consultant, and internationally recognized expert in safety and organizational failure. Through his company, Brady Heywood Consulting, Sean investigates complex failures across high-risk industries and helps leaders understand how systems break and how to design organizations that learn, adapt, and prevent catastrophic events. His work on the Brady Review reshaped how Australia views mining fatalities and organizational risk.

About Your Host:

Lauren Karan, founder of Karan & Co. and host of Building Doors, is dedicated to helping professionals unlock their potential. Through insightful interviews and real-life stories, Lauren empowers listeners to create opportunities and thrive in their careers.

How You Can Support the Podcast:

• Subscribe and leave a 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Share this episode with anyone interested in sustainability and leadership.
• Connect with Dr. Sean Brady on LinkedIn to learn more about his work.

Stay Connected:

• Follow Lauren and the Building Doors podcast on LinkedIn.
• Subscribe to the Building Doors newsletter for exclusive content.

Let’s Connect:

• Want to be a guest or share feedback? Email us at reachout@buildingdoors.com.au.

Thank you for listening! It’s time to stop waiting and start building.