Who is Andrea?
Andrea T. Edwards CSP is a truth-teller, strategist, and advocate for a liveable future. She decodes the polycrisis for leaders and changemakers, turning complexity into clarity, so we can act with courage, not fear. A Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), trainer, coach, mentor, author, blogger, live streamer, podcaster and community builder, she’s on a mission to mobilize one billion people to fight for what matters – a liveable earth.
A global odyssey
Andrea’s career has spanned nearly four decades, where she’s lived in five countries, worked across many more, and is never afraid to embrace new opportunities:
- From explaining commercial aircraft technology as a communications professional in aerospace PR, working with the teams building, designing, updating, and maintaining aircraft
- Moving from London to Boston, where she navigated the dot-com boom (and bust), working across the US, and gaining national recognition for her work
- To leading Microsoft’s Analyst Relations across Asia, essentially influencing the influencers before influencers became a “thing,” again gaining recognition for her work, this time global
- To building her own Social Leadership and content marketing training consultancy in Singapore working across Asia, while establishing herself as a professional speaker, author and a voice for truth in the age of information chaos
Each pivot taught her the same lesson: the future belongs to those who can adapt without losing their core values.
The awakening
The first was in 2017, while walking the plastic-choked beaches in Phuket, Thailand (where she lived with her family for seven years), seeing firsthand the waste of humanity and its impact on nature. A year later the 2018 IPCC Report was released, and that’s when she had her professional reckoning. It was time to speak up on the planetary crisis with all the courage she had.
Beyond the waste, the brutal reality of climate change hit hard, with rising deadly heat in Asia getting worse every year, while floods, devastating landslides, and storms displaced or killed the most vulnerable, all of which made climate change not just data on a screen but a lived reality.
Until this point, her privilege let her ride the wave of globalization, but the tide was turning. That’s when she stopped just focusing on her career and what she could get from life, and started fighting for the future, especially for those without a voice – the people and living beings impacted by the escalating crisis’.
Understanding the polycrisis
As Andrea extensively researched the risks we face over the last decade, she knew this wasn’t about isolated challenges, instead it was a complex, interconnected “polycrisis,” where multiple systems are failing at the same time.
These issues include:
- Climate breakdown driving extreme weather, biodiversity loss, extinction, and water scarcity
- Social fracturing through inequality, tribalism, and the collapse of trust
- Economic instability from resource constraints and financial system vulnerabilities
- Information chaos through misinformation, disinformation and propaganda
- And technological disruption from AI and automation changing the nature of work and society
While just a few examples, Andrea understood that none of the crises we face exist in isolation, they amplify each other, creating a meta-crisis that demands new thinking.
What Andrea brings to the table
Today, she operates at the intersection of:
- Real-world experience – having advised senior executives behind closed doors in multiple countries, she speaks the language of business fluently
- Systems thinking – a cross-industry journey gives her unique perspectives on interconnected challenges
- Uncommon Courage – also the title of her book, she has the willingness to name uncomfortable truths while maintaining the conviction that a future path is possible
Her work: meeting today's complex challenges
In a world facing unparalleled, interconnected challenges, organizations need strategic guidance and practical wisdom to navigate uncertainty. Andrea brings four decades of global experience to help leaders, and their teams, transform complexity into opportunity. Her comprehensive approach addresses both strategic direction and people empowerment, delivering tangible results across these key service areas:
Strategic guidance and activation
1. Speaking truth as a CSP
As a speaking professional, she challenges audiences to face hard truths and act with courage. This isn’t about inspiration, it’s about imperfect action.
2.Empowering Social Leaders
Through workshops and coaching, she helps professionals step into their voices – on social media and beyond – because silence only cedes the narrative to those we disagree with.
3. Guiding business leaders
Executive roundtables and 1-2-1 coaching helping industries confront the polycrisis head-on, transforming risk into responsibility and profit into purpose.
4. Untangling the polycrisis
Through structured training, she helps participants understand the interconnected challenges we face and identify practical actions across government, business, NGOs, and personal spheres.
5. Executive coaching and mentoring
Andrea works with ripple makers – people who want to drive wider change at the community, business, country, regional or even global level. She guides you to identify your opportunity and helps you see the path to create massive momentum.
Her media arm
6. Educating on the polycrisis
Through The Weekend Reads and her social media commitment, she breaks down the tangled web of climate collapse, inequality, and systemic failure, because understanding is the first step to action.
7. Co-hosting The Sh💩t Show
Every Friday, Andrea, along with Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin dissect the polycrisis live, no jargon, no sugar-coating, just honest talk about the mess we’re in and how to navigate it. They have a laugh too.
8. Writing for change
Books like Uncommon Courage, an invitation, and 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile equip people to claim their voice and fight for a liveable future.
Her service commitment
9. Building community
Stay tuned – because the path forward isn’t solitary. A global business impact community is coming.
10. Acting locally
From environmental cleanups to championing grassroots heroes, she believes change starts where we live.
Why this matters now
Every leader Andrea speaks with wants to feel safe to discuss these challenges and understand how they can be part of the change the world needs to embrace. However, they are also pressurized to deliver results which they know are part of the problem, and honestly, everyone is scared for their future, and for the future of their teams. We all have bills to pay.
But this is Andrea’s mission – to be the bridge between paralysis and progress. To shine a light on the path forward, because collapse isn’t inevitable, it’s a choice.
This is the time to embrace a global rebirth of how our societies operate. This means rewiring how we power our world, rebuilding our economies, rebalancing power as well as recognizing its current colonial heritage, healing ecosystems, and most importantly, reconnecting with each other. This isn’t optimism, it isn’t naïve, it’s the only viable path forward. Let’s choose it.
Let's build what comes next
Andrea believes in a future where business becomes a force for regeneration, and true success is measured in generations rather than quarters. If you’re ready to help build it; she’s here to help.
Andrea isn’t sharing a message of hope, because hope without action is pointless. No, this is about doing. The polycrisis won’t wait, and neither can we. Together, we’ll cut through the noise, own our voices, and build a future worthy of the next generations.
The clock is ticking, but the path forward is clear. Let’s walk it together.
Experience & expertise
Andrea’s critical edge has always been in helping her clients succeed due to her nearly four decades of professional experience, two-decade-long commitment to Social Leadership, AND her intuitive talent to understand how to effectively connect with audiences – employees, customers, prospects, stakeholders, and influencers – in a way that deeply resonates and gets results.
She’s won global awards for her work in B2B communications over her career and has had the privilege of working in every corner of our world.
Because of her extensive background, and devotion to comprehending and piecing together all aspects of the polycrisis (especially in the last decade), she brings all her experience, talents and knowledge together, under the banner of the Complexity Leadership Advisor, operating as a strategic guide for organizations navigating today’s complex business landscape.
Her work covers two pillars:
1. Strategic Advisory: guiding organizations through the polycrisis with clarity and purpose
2. People Empowerment: transforming organizations by activating their greatest asset, their people
For more than two decades, Andrea has lived and worked across Asia Pacific and sees it as a privilege to be based in this region as we enter The Asian Century, however, it’s also a hot spot for navigating the polycrisis as the temperature rises – both physically and metaphorically.
A world-wide journey of experience
Andrea started working fulltime in 1992, kicking off her professional journey as a Musician in the Australian Army, after which she transferred to the PR Unit of the Australian Defence Force. An interesting beginning.
She’s held senior roles in NYC, Boston, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne for organizations as diverse as Aerospace Technologies of Australia (now Boeing), Text 100 International, Guinness Brewing, IDC and Microsoft, to name a few.
Her roles have ranged from Chairman of the Asia Content Marketing Association (ACMA), Analyst Relations Lead for Microsoft Asia, and running SAJE, her own communications, content marketing, and messaging agency, which has now evolved into the role of The Complexity Leadership Advisor to help get leaders ready for the challenges ahead.
Andrea fully embraced the early online world, and she’s still going after nearly two decades – she’s still blogging and sharing content through her social media updates and The Weekend Reads, as well as her weekly livestream The Sh*t Show, and podcast, Uncommon Courage, as well as through her books.
The personal story…
Andrea grew up in rural Australia, playing in the local brass band with her family. As a teenager she enjoyed cycling, bodybuilding, and swimming in the mighty Murray River, whose might has diminished in recent decades. Andrea left country living for Monash University, Melbourne, where she studied music and archaeology, then onto the Australian Army as a professional musician. She played Euphonium, which you can see below.
Since those early days, she’s spent half her life living, working and travelling to countries other than her own. Andrea can never get enough of the beauty and diversity of our natural world, as well as its magnificent archaeology and history.
But even deeper than that, people are her passion, in all their glorious differences. Of course, there are “bad people” (although Andrea thinks of them as broken more than bad), but her life experiences have convinced her that most of humanity is fundamentally awesome!
We all want the same things too – peace, stability, a roof over our heads, and an opportunity to raise and educate healthy children, with a smile on our faces most of the time. In her wanderings she has discovered that people everywhere are not so different.
For decades Andrea has taken up the mantle as a warrior for Mother Earth, a calling that has only gotten stronger as the implications of what we are doing to our planetary home are laid bare. She will do all she can to help in this fight, including using her professional experience to make an impact.
That’s where her work in the executive ranks comes in, because she believes she can make a difference in getting business leaders to listen and step up so we can avoid the worst possible outcomes of the climate catastrophe, as well as to build equal, equitable businesses in alignment with nature.
We cannot continue to build or grow on what we have, that would be foolish. No, the future needs to be very different, but that doesn’t mean worse – unless we don’t do it, which guarantees it will be worse.
But the years and decades ahead will be challenging regardless – we can’t get away from that. We have gone too far, so it’s time to appreciate that, as well as get to work on navigating the road ahead, with honesty, integrity and courage.
She is also driven to make empathy and compassion the critical driving force in today’s world. Backing up our talk in how we present ourselves is critical to being authentic and trustworthy – at a time when those qualities are so lacking, and yet in demand. Mis- and disinformation, societal divisions, trolls and Bott farms, along with AI, only amplifies that challenge.
Finally, Andrea can’t escape being Australian – but there’s a bonus in that. It gives you licence to be bold and cheeky, which she loves. However, these days, she is more than her nationality after living around the world, which has helped her develop deep-rooted cultural intelligence, and an appreciation of nuance in a world that has lost the skill!
On the home front, she’s fortunate to be married to a magnificent Englishman, Steve, and together they have enjoyed raising two compassionate, empathetic, and (mostly) gentlemanly sons (Lex and Jax) who are now emerging into the world as young adults, with their dreams ahead of them. Andrea wants to make sure achieving those dreams is a possibility, not just for them, but for all children. We owe our kids that.
Her boys, from this…
To this!
Many say it happens in the blink of an eye. Andrea believes it was fast, and very VERY slow!
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