About Al Hynes
Al Hynes has spent his career delivering across large, highly regulated international institutions across the British Army and UK Ministry of Defence with close work alongside NATO and the United Nations.
Now in Australia, he sees the same challenges recurring across industries coming to terms with a generational shift in geopolitics and the need to keep growing through it. Expertise exists, but it is dispersed, often poorly translated, or never reaches the people who have to decide.
01 · Service and foundations
Learning to lead.
Al's professional foundations were built in the military, setting standards and making decisions when time, information and resources were limited. Later appointments saw him turn civilians into soldiers as an instructor at the UK's School of Infantry, where he contributed to major reforms in training and workforce practice and found a love for teaching that continues to this day.
Most formative were the appointments working directly for two General Officers, which removed formal authority from the equation altogether. Having a senior leader's ear is real influence, and none of it is yours. Al learned to speak only for them, never as them, and how much of a leader's effectiveness rests on the people prepared to tell them the truth.
Operational deployments took him to Afghanistan, working within NATO's crisis machinery, and to Somalia, supporting African Union forces alongside the United Nations. Both were spent at the receiving end of strategy, carrying out decisions taken elsewhere with the time, people and information actually available.
02 · Government, strategy and advice
Unpacking complexity.
Whitehall required the same skills across a far more varied institutional landscape, characterised by silos and cross-departmental misunderstanding. Al worked on strategic programmes including complex weapons and naval capability, alongside regional security policy, diplomacy and multinational politics across the Middle East, North-East Asia, the Pacific and North America.
The audiences were as varied as the subjects. Advice prepared for an Admiral could not simply be repackaged for a Minister, and engagement beyond government, from industry to international partners, meant understanding what those organisations were accountable for before anything useful could be said.
Having spent years carrying out decisions, Al was now helping to shape them. That required thinking in terms of vision and strategic effect while keeping a grounded sense of how a decision would land on those expected to deliver it. Knowing how to find, connect and translate expertise has consistently proved more useful than trying to be the best at any given thing.
03 · Broadening audiences
Making the complicated usable.
Al now works in Sydney, in closer contact with organisations confronting strategic change from outside government.
Having supported the Australian British Chamber of Commerce from inside government for several years, he moved across to establish its strategy function and designed and delivered the National Resilience programme. Its proposition was that international security is a question of resilience rather than risk: not what might go wrong, but whether an organisation can keep moving when it does. What senior industry and government audiences wanted was not more threat briefings. It was a way of reading the international system that connected to decisions they were already making.
04 · The rest of it
More than work.
Al's interest in the Asia-Pacific began before it became his profession, with a visit to China and North Korea as an undergraduate, and continued through military training in Southeast Asia, years spent shaping policy towards the region from London, and eventually a life now in Australia.
Alongside practice he has repeatedly returned to theory, completing two postgraduate degrees while working full-time, and remains a committed and forever-unfinished student of Mandarin.
Travel he considers one of the greatest privileges of his life. From the Falkland Islands to Australia, it has shaped both his curiosity and his sense of perspective. More personally, he is a keen but very lapsed guitarist and drummer, shamelessly enthusiastic about science fiction, and unduly proud of having once skied competitively for the British Army, albeit at the bottom of the field.
In thoroughly clichéd fashion as a Brit in Sydney, he lives with his fiancée in Bondi.
