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Bianca Havas is a Director of Serendis Leadership, a talent development and leadership consultancy. She started her career working on Hollywood films like The Matrix and Mission Impossible 2 before transitioning to the not for profit space working as a campaigner for environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, the Australian Conversation Foundation and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Bianca’s three major career pivots clearly demonstrate how to successfully tap into happendipity.
Here are the key takeouts from the interview about her career change. Read the interview below.
Key Takeouts:
- Trust your intuition when choosing work environments: “I have a really strong intuition about people. So I’ve extraordinarily always had great people leaders or learned from great people. Whatever told me to leave this high paying, glamorous (not really glamorous) job in the film industry that was my people radar going, this is not an environment where I can thrive. But I seem to have this ability to pick great people to learn and grow with.”
- Recognise that you don’t need to know everything: “You don’t have to know it all. You just need to know where to find the information you need, and not to be afraid of not knowing.”
- Be open to serendipitous opportunities: “Steve Jobs says he joined the dots looking back, but I realise now that everything that I’d done was about that serendipity. That meeting people, knowing intuitively it was a good move for where I was at that point in time.”
- Value supportive relationships in your career: “I had some brilliant managers or bosses, and interestingly they were mostly women who saw my potential and protected me from the judgment of others because it’s quite a political environment.”
- Follow insights and leverage your network: “Once I have an insight and it’s quite an intuitive response to that insight, I move into action quite quickly, but it’s through people and my network that seems to allow those insights to move into action.”
- Happendipity often comes through conversations: “At the end of that coffee chat, this is the serendipity again. She said, ‘Look, I’ve just won this big contract for a company, and I need some help to deliver it. Would you like to come and work with me part time as a project manager…?’ And I went, sure.”
- Tapping into happendipity is a mix of logic and feeling: “My advice when someone has a happendipity event – it sounds conceptual – but build a super highway between your rational mind and your intuitive heart or your intuitive instinct, because I think happendipity is that beautiful mix of art and science.”
- Value leadership and diverse intelligence, not just metrics: “We’re missing the potential of so many people by focusing so much on the fixed, tangible metric, measurable qualifications and technical capabilities. For the future of humanity, we really need great leaders. I don’t think people effectively measure leadership or attitude and intelligence of a different kind in the professional world, and I think that there’s an opportunity for that.”
- Happendipity happens when there is intention: “When you put an intention or a voice, a desire or a goal into the world, suddenly you become more alert to the connection of that destination and happendipity happens in terms of the way you see the world.”
- Be alert and open to opportunities: “I think every day in my life there are lots of chance encounters, but I’m not always open to it, because I’m head down, heading in a direction. But in those inflection points where I’ve been open to change, it’s incredible what comes and what comes of it. And for me, it’s always linked to people.”
- Growth mindset is key to changing careers: “You don’t realise how much you can bring from your past experiences if they don’t immediately seem relevant to your new change… just really trust that if it’s not obvious immediately, there’s still value in everything you’ve done in the past in your new career. And also, to be okay in the ambiguity for a while. the first year or two of the new role.”
Bianca’s career story involves three distinct parts: a pursuit of filmmaking that led to disillusionment, a transformative experience in the environmental movement, and a serendipitous shift into leadership consulting. Her journey emphasises the importance of happendipity, intuition and networking culminating in her finding purpose in helping others develop their potential.
In her own words: “looking back at my career path, my first career, was in the film industry, I saw culture that I did not think was enabling people to thrive, and I left, but I could see what was bad about that culture and the leaders in it. The second one, I really understood my purpose and value proposition and how I could make a contribution. And the third one, I’m really getting to do it. I feel empowered to do my work in a way that really makes an impact.”
Read the full interview below.
Q: What is your career story and what have you done previously?
B: Well, I think of my career in three distinct parts: from what I chose to study and where it led me in my first career, then transitioning to my second and now my third.
Essentially, as a teenager and as a child, I became very enamoured of film and storytelling, and I really wanted to be part of the process of creating stories through cinema, and so I studied film, and communications more broadly, at university and with very little experience, started being a runner on ads and commercials, just to get any experience, and then got a job as a production assistant.
But I found that making 30 second commercials for products I wasn’t passionate about, wasn’t really aligned to my interests or values, but it was a really good way to see how the process of film production worked.
From there, I got this opportunity through twist of fate, where I actually got a job as a production assistant on a large Hollywood, big budget film in Sydney called The Matrix, way back in the late 90s. And I was like, fantastic. I finally get to experience what I wanted to experience all along. I worked in visual effects there. And then from that film, I got employed on the next film that came to Sydney, which was Mission Impossible 2 where I was the personal assistant to the director, John Woo, which was such an insight and incredible way to really see the inner workings of the film industry. I sort of skipped the Australian film industry and went straight to the Hollywood films, but there were a lot of Australian crew employed, and through that experience in my 20s, it helped me connect to my core values of who I am as a person, because I was tested so much in that environment. And after two years, I decided that even having fulfilled my dream, the dream was different. The reality was different to the dream I had. So at the ripe old age of 25 I did a massive career pivot into my second career.
I learned a lot. I was quite young and naïve in my early 20s, and I was hoping that it would be an environment where I could learn in a really positive way, where people would invest in my growth and development. But actually, what I discovered was this was quite mercenary. It was survival of fittest. You could be blamed for things. And I realised it wasn’t really an environment where I could grow at that stage of my life. So I left halfway through the film, actually, which is a bit controversial because so many of my peers had said: “Wow, you’re so lucky. You’ve got this big break. Don’t throw it away.” But there was something inside of me that just knew that the environment wasn’t aligned to my humanistic values. It was a big deal to throw away great pay and a potential pathway. I did have a little bit of an existential crisis in my mid 20s.
And what was interesting was that a friend of mine who, at the time, she’d originally grown up in Byron Bay, and it was around the June, July winter break, long weekend, and she said: “Hey, I’m heading up to Byron to visit my family, do you want to come?” and I said, “Well, I’ve just finished this film. I’ve got nothing else better to do.” So I went up with her. And it’s funny, because Byron Bay has this reputation now as being whatever it is, you know, Byron babes, the people, flashy. But it really, actually, traditionally, was a place of healing and coming together for Indigenous people. When I went there in the 90s, it still was quite a spiritual place.
Anyway, my friend took me up there and introduced me to the people she grew up with, and one of them said: “Oh, I’m going off to this nine-day Goenka meditation and deep ecology workshop, on an intentional community. Do you want to come?” And I went: “Sure, I’ve got nothing else to do.”
So I spent eight or nine days on a silent retreat, and we couldn’t speak for that long. And then in the evenings, we would listen to lectures and information about deep ecology, which is really recognising that humans are connected to the environment, not separate from it. I guess that, combined with the meditation, I just sort of had a bit of an epiphany at that moment to say, “Wow, everything that I’ve been doing is not really making an impactful contribution to society.” I mean, I love film and storytelling, but it felt like it was about vacuous entertainment. Filling time. They were all action films. And I know The Matrix went on to be a cult film and all of that, and I do think it is a great film. But for me personally, I just realised that I wanted to do something that was going to make a positive impact in society in some way. And doing that course, that was where the light bulb moment went off.
So that was the U-turn in my career where I decided I was interested in the environment movement and helping the planet. And it just so happened that the person I went away with, her two flatmates worked at Greenpeace, and I spoke to them when we came back, and they said, come in and volunteer. So I went into Greenpeace and met with a campaigner who spoke to me for about half an hour, and I think I understood about a third of what she was saying. There were a lot of acronyms and she then said, “Oh, look, I think you can do it. Do you want to start on Monday?” And it wasn’t a volunteer position, it was actually a paid position. And I remember leaving that interview, calling my then boyfriend, going, I just agreed to do a job that I don’t actually know what I need to do, but I’m just going to do it because it’s aligned to something I believe in, and I guess I’ll figure it out and call on my network for support.
And that’s pretty much what happened. I was asked to launch an Australian wide petition for a South Pacific whale sanctuary, because Australia was about to host the International Whaling Commission, and the Australian Environment Minister had asked Greenpeace for support in running a campaign. So there I was figuring out how to run an event, how to do an online petition. Anyway, I didn’t know how to do it, so I started calling on all my friends from university, one who was a web developer, one who ran big PR events. And I said, “What do I need to know?” And I realised at that point, just by survival, I figured it out, pulling in the knowledge of the people around me, which has sort of become a theme for my career, which is you don’t have to know it all. You just need to know where to find the information you need, and not to be afraid of not knowing.
So anyway, it ended up being quite a big success. And my university friend who did the website ended up being employed by Greenpeace International because they hadn’t seen that level of web design and Flash animation at that point. So in pulling in my friend from university, she ended up getting herself a job in Amsterdam. I brought it in under budget, and it was a real lesson in just, figuring it out and following your passion and drawing on the strengths of others.
Anyway, having pulled off that project successfully, it led to me getting a full time job at Greenpeace, and I stayed there for five years, and I can honestly say that my career there is where I was invested in and grown. And I had some brilliant managers or bosses, and interestingly they were mostly women who saw my potential and protected me from the judgment of others because it’s quite a political environment. I really just learned the ropes and grew and it was brilliant. A lot of the friends I made in that period of my career, my 20s, working at Greenpeace for five years, are still my friends, because it was such a coming of age experience where you’re on the edge, pushing yourself, doing media interviews. I worked in Papua New Guinea, I had to learn to drive a manual car in the mean streets of Port Moresby, constantly afraid to stall because someone, a gang, might attack me if I stalled. So it was a period of enormous growth and challenge. I got to travel and go to international conventions, and it was a big, wide world, but I was really up to the challenge, and it was quite an extraordinary time.
But what happened was I got married at the end of that five years, and had a baby, and I still wanted to work at Greenpeace, but I realised that it was hard for me to pull back from my big role, because I knew so much and knew how to do everything, and I found it was really hard to do work life balance. I remember going to Canberra and lobbying trips and taking my six month old baby with me, and my mom would look after him while I go to the Parliament House and lobby. Which was fun, but it wasn’t sustainable. So I actually decided I needed to leave just to get some balance back, because I couldn’t find that balance in a place where I’d already been working for five years and they knew what I could do and was expecting that.
I then just did lots of part time gigs, which is when my superannuation fund declined because I wasn’t making any contributions contracting. So I spent 10 years contracting when my superannuation fund just flatlined, which I didn’t think about at the time, but only now, when my husband’s is three times the size of mine, and I go, “Wow. I missed those big years there”, but I was just sort of hand to mouth, trying to have a second kid in quick succession. I really wanted to stay in the workforce. When both my kids were seven months, I hit the wall and said, I’m I can’t stay home anymore. I’m dying. I need to use my brain. I need to be in the world. So thankfully, I had the support of my parents, my sister and they all chipped in to look after the kids before they were 18 months, because we didn’t really want to send them to daycare. So I had a lot of support from family, and I pretty much worked part time for 10 years, as a contractor. I had consistent work at different organisations, but really the theme at those jobs was my network. People who I’d worked with kept sponsoring me or nominating me to work on projects.
I had some fantastic experiences working at the Australian Conservation Foundation during the ‘07 election. That was the period of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. There was a lot of movement around climate action and WorkChoices. A colleague and I were running two community campaigns in the electorates of Bennelong and Parramatta. And there was so much mobilisation. I think GetUp had just started, so they were being active. It was extraordinary. Spending time in Bennelong, I was seeing retired people, actively campaigning in the elections for the first time because they were so concerned about the future for their children. That was the famous election when John Howard lost his seat to Maxine McKew because of the massive community push towards climate action and against WorkChoices.
I had all these incredible experiences of community organising and campaigning. Then at the end, I worked for the World Wildlife Fund, WWF, and that was the point after 10 years in the environment movement, I felt I needed something different. I had felt a little bit burnt out. For so long, I was driven by passion and purpose. But what then happened after 10 years, I felt that I wasn’t seeing any shift or reward or any actual tangible changes from the efforts I was putting in, and it felt that I wasn’t just doing it to serve myself. I really needed to see something change. So I started getting a bit disillusioned and a bit burnt out, and I wasn’t sure what to do next, but I knew I wasn’t as energised as I had been.
Then I was in a session with, I can’t remember which organisation, and we had an external facilitator come in and do some team building for our team. I remember watching this person, I was in awe, just going, I could do that. I think I was 35 at this point, and I said, I could do what she’s doing. In fact, I want to do what she’s doing. What is it that she does? So in the break, I went up to this facilitator, and I said, I’m really interested to do what you do. It was funny that she said, “Actually, we’re hiring. Do you want to send your CV in?”
So I just got a job as a trainer. They would give me the run sheet, they would give me the materials, they would design the session, and I would just go and facilitate it. And I realised how much I loved it. It was challenging and hard to find my swing, but I loved it, and I went this is my next career. And this is just the serendipity of my career journey, is that once I have an insight and it’s quite an intuitive response to that insight, I move into action quite quickly, but it’s through people and my network that seems to allow those insights to move into to action. Because what happened was, I went, Okay, I have an insight, I think I want to do this. I’m not really sure what it is. I’m going to find out more.
I knew that there was a mum from my kids’ daycare who was doing something similar. I didn’t know exactly what she did, but I knew she facilitated. I knew she was a coach. I knew it’s linked to something. When I saw her at daycare I said, “Can we have a coffee? I’d really love to find out more about what you do, because I’m interested in a career change”. I was still working in the other places at that point and part time, of course. I sat down for a coffee and ended up going for an 1.5 or 2 hours. We just had such a good chat. She told me what she did, and I said, “That sounds amazing. I think I’ve hit on something here.” Anyway, at the end of that coffee chat, this is the serendipity again. She said, “Look, I’ve just won this big contract for a company, and I need some help to deliver it. Would you like to come and work with me part time as a project manager, so you can see what I do and how we do it?” And I went, sure.
This is another theme in my career, is that I have a really strong intuition about people. So I’ve extraordinarily always had great people leaders or learned from great people. Whatever told me to leave this high paying, glamorous (not really glamorous) job in the film industry that was my people radar going, this is not an environment where I can thrive. But I seem to have this ability to pick great people to learn and grow with.
Anyway, that job was the beginning of my third career, which is where I still am. That was nearly 15 years ago, I took on that program management role with the company I’m with now, which, hilariously, the name of that company is Serendis, and that means being aware and alert to the signs on your path that lead you, to help you understand your purpose. Steve Jobs says he joined the dots looking back, but I realise now that everything that I’d done was about that serendipity. That meeting people, knowing intuitively it was a good move for where I was at that point in time. And so I actually have no regrets. Like, I don’t think I had these dreams of ambition and grandeur. I figured out early on in my days at Greenpeace, I had all these incredibly intelligent, passionate people who were just focused on the environment. Their whole life was committed to the environment, and I had realised that I didn’t have that life force about the environment. I just stumbled into the environment movement, and I felt a bit ‘less than’. I was suffering a bit from imposter syndrome, because these people they’re so 100% committed to the cause, and I felt like I wasn’t worthy of being there, because I wasn’t as attached to the cause.
During that period, I discovered actually my purpose was about contributing, like helping others thrive. What I realised when I was working at Greenpeace I had these brilliant minds, these thinkers, who had all these brilliant ideas, and they had deep, deep knowledge of the subject matter, but they just didn’t know how to take action or how to make change, or how to actually do anything about it. And I realised that my role and the value that I brought was I could take these great ideas and synthesize them into something tangible and active, so that it lived in the world and that’s when I started building my confidence. I was like, I’m not the genius of forestry, I’m not the genius of the oceans, and I don’t know the technical elements of climate change, but I can make a contribution by taking this knowledge and really bringing it into the world in whatever form we needed. So that was where I first keyed into what my career purpose would be, and actually, I really draw on that, still to this day in my job now.
I went from being a Program Manager at Serendis to now I’m a Director in the company, so a leader in the business, and I have my own groups of clients, and I really enjoy bringing what we do, which I’ll talk about in a moment, to industry sectors and clients that I believe in their purpose so helping and still helping enable others to have impact through their specialties.
I mostly work now in health and medical research, higher education. I do some retail, some finance, but mostly with health and medical, and academia. What I love is helping these great minds have impact, and doing that through leadership. A lot of academics focus on their area of study or expertise, but don’t always get a lot of opportunity to learn and grow into what a leader is. How do you empower others? How do you build inclusive cultures? And so I really enjoy bringing that capability to great thinkers, and because they are really intelligent, they get the concept quickly it’s just how do they apply it practically. That’s the bit where I try to help them. So now, where I work at Serendis, our purpose is to really enable people to thrive in their sectors, and we do that through working at the crossroads of leadership, culture and strategy. What that looks like is, how do we help leaders to be powerful, effective leaders who can shape a culture of a team or an organisation or a sector or wherever they have their leadership shadow to then deliver the strategic initiatives and imperatives of their business, their team, their organisation. I really love it, because looking back at my career path, my first career, was in the film industry, I saw culture that I did not think was enabling people to thrive, and I left, but I could see what was bad about that culture and the leaders in it. The second one, I really understood my purpose and value proposition and how I could make a contribution. And the third one, I’m really getting to do it. I feel empowered to do my work in a way that really makes an impact.
Q: What role has happendipity played in your career?
B: Happendipity or serendipity has played an enormous role in my career, because at moments when I wasn’t happy or I had a an inkling for change, I was so much more alert to the opportunities and the chance encounters. I think every day in my life there are lots of chance encounters, but I’m not always open to it, because I’m head down, heading in a direction. But in those inflection points where I’ve been open to change, it’s incredible what comes and what comes of it. And for me, it’s always linked to people. I go out into the world, with curiosity to ask people, and it’s often led me to something else. It’s when we switch on a part of ourselves that’s open and we’re in more of an intuitive phase. I think happendipity is incredible what it reveals. For me, I’ve actually never properly applied or for a job in my entire career, it’s all been about happendipity or serendipity, of talking to the right person, having that connection and it leading to the next opportunity.
Q: Are you someone who embraces or rejects happendipity?
B: I wouldn’t say it’s that binary. It’s a bit of both. As I sort of mentioned, I embrace happendipity at moments where I’m in flux or change. I mostly embrace happendipity. But when I’ve really got a destination and a mission, sometimes my blinkers are on and I’m not as open to it or I’m not as receptive to it. I think happendipity is everywhere. It’s there and it really depends on the person to be receptive to it and open to it. And I would say there are times in my life where I’m not as receptive, and there are times when I’m completely receptive.
Q: You said that for you happendipity is about people that you connect with. Do you see happendipity as anything else other than that, or is it really just the connections that you have with people?
B: It’s more than that, but because I am such a people person, it’s been mostly centered on that. Mostly because I do a lot of my creative thinking and ideation in conversation. Often I come up with great ideas while talking to someone else, while bouncing off someone. That’s where the happendipity happens. But I also do think that there’s something about intention. When you put an intention or a voice, a desire or a goal into the world, suddenly you become more alert to the connection of that destination and happendipity happens in terms of the way you see the world. So it doesn’t only have to be about people. You know how when you’re – this is a silly example – but like when you’re about to purchase something, when you’re about to spend a lot of money, let’s say, on a car, or some big purchase, and suddenly everywhere on the road you see it and before you haven’t seen it. You’re not even aware of it, it just passes you by. I think when you put an intention or a goal into the world, it suddenly awakens that awareness and perspective, and you start noticing more things. And that happens if you are more present.
Q: Can you think of a happendipity event or events that changed your career?
B: There are certain moments. Obviously there’s a connection with people and meeting people, and I’m quite a yes person, so if I like the person and they suggest something, I’ll often say yes. So yeah, there are a number of moments where I’ve met people and I said yes, but in terms of significant shifts for moments, I would say they’re mostly when I’ve had the opportunity to go deeper into myself. It was such a significant moment in my life when, by chance, I was on holiday in Byron Bay and someone said to me, “Do you want to go on this eight day silent meditation and deep ecology program?” And what that allowed me to do for the first time was to go to a place of myself that I hadn’t ever allowed myself to go to, or it hadn’t been available to me because I’m always talking or distracting in the world. And that gave me a really big moment of understanding of what I wanted in my life. And I was pretty lucky to do that at such a young age in my mid 20s. But I got a clarity of who I am and what type of life I want to have, what type of contribution I want to make, who I want to be in the world. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t all formed by the end of the eight days, but it was very much the beginning of a new path. And what was fascinating about that was that when I came back from that, I completely changed careers. I got this job at Greenpeace after that, and had a 10 year career in the environment movement, and that was where I started to get clearer and clearer about my purpose. I also met my husband the week after that event. So there’s not a coincidence in that, there was something in that process of silence and meditation and deep ecology that connected me to part of myself that perhaps hadn’t been as available, and it opened me up to a new career and a life partner.
Q: What have you learned about the process of changing careers?
B: As a society we are very caught up with fixed skills and qualifications on paper that don’t always translate to potential. What I have learned is that there are so many transferable or soft – I hate that word – soft skills, but other capabilities that don’t jump off the page that I think we’re missing. We’re missing the potential of so many people by focusing so much on the fixed, tangible metric, measurable qualifications and technical capabilities. For the future of humanity, we really need great leaders. I don’t think people effectively measure leadership or attitude and intelligence of a different kind in the professional world, and I think that there’s an opportunity for that.
What I’ve learned myself is that my ability to reach and influence people has led to me having the opportunity to grow and learn in exceptional ways without having actually done all of the technical qualifications. Finally, who you are, how you show up and your transferable skills and leadership are equally as important as technical skills,
You don’t realise how much you can bring from your past experiences if they don’t immediately seem relevant to your new change. You don’t realise how you’re going to apply the learning from here in this new environment. So just really trust that if it’s not obvious immediately, there’s still value in everything you’ve done in the past in your new career. And also, to be okay in the ambiguity for a while. the first year or two of the new role, it can be so overwhelming when you haven’t come from it, when you don’t know all the technical bits, and that ability to be open to learning, growth and ambiguity is what’s going to help you succeed. I just don’t think we should expect to know everything, and you get bored if you know everything. Growth mindset is key to changing careers.
Q: What advice would you give to someone else, who might be faced with a happendipity event, that could change their career?
B: My advice when someone has a happendipity event – it sounds conceptual – but build a super highway between your rational mind and your intuitive heart or your intuitive instinct, because I think happendipity is that beautiful mix of art and science. It’s about following the happenstance and the opportunity and your intuition that you don’t have all the certainty in the answers, but there’s a bit of trust required, trusting that you have the ability to respond to the unknown and the change, but also not letting go completely of everything practically you’ve learned along the way. So it’s a real push. It’s like a tug of war between the two. And I think if you go too far into one or the other, you miss the opportunity. So if you’re too rational, you miss the opportunity. If you’re too into your intuition and instinct, you might be a bit impulsive and do something you regret later. It’s this lovely inquiry into balancing your intuition and your rational brain to be able to make the most of these incredible happendipity moments that cross your path.
Images: provided
Check out my previous interviews on happendipity with:
- Agathé Kerr: an IT consultant turned pastry chef
- Sonia Singh: science communicator to Tree Change Dolls creator to speech pathologist
- Amit Turkenitz: software developer -> business owner and photographer -> entrepreneur and product creator -> UX consultant -> product manager -> data engineer
- Stephanie Ifrah: architect to founder of the brand The Rose
If you are interested in career storytelling coaching, find out more here.