How behavioural science helps aged care leaders navigate uncertainty, shape team norms, and protect people under pressure.
14 August 2026 · Ageing Australia NSW/ACT State Conference 2026 · Ageing Australia NSW/ACT State Conference · Approximately 43 minutes
In this Day Two plenary at Ageing Australia's NSW/ACT State Conference 2026, Dr Darren Coppin treats aged care leadership as a behavioural problem set inside constant change. Reform cycles, workforce pressure, and day-to-day acuity mean leaders decide under uncertainty, not in calm textbook conditions. He shows why certainty and authentic purpose matter more than change slogans, how autonomy and cutting process sludge reduce stress, and why emotional contagion means leaders model panic or calm whether they intend to or not. On retention, he argues individual wellbeing apps often fail, while a friend at work, team-level resilience, and higher purpose move outcomes. The close covers Feros Care recruitment findings, Inauthentic Action, and how empathy is both the sector's greatest strength and a burnout pathway if leaders do not support it.
Jump to the moment in the talk.
“Purpose is really the only thing that scales when complexity is getting worse.”
Dr Darren Coppin, Ageing Australia NSW/ACT State Conference 2026 · 11:47
“The single greatest well-being resource it turned out is having a friend at work, having someone you consider your best friend at work.”
Dr Darren Coppin, Ageing Australia NSW/ACT State Conference 2026 · 28:27
“That's why people get into our sector often. They care for other humans, but it's also our greatest weakness... burnout due to empathy.”
Dr Darren Coppin, Ageing Australia NSW/ACT State Conference 2026 · 36:03
It was the Day Two plenary at Ageing Australia's NSW/ACT State Conference 2026, scheduled Friday 14 August from 9.05am to 9.45am. The published recording runs about 43 minutes and is hosted on the ethyx YouTube channel.
Aged care leaders and managers navigating reform, workforce pressure, and day-to-day uncertainty. Coppin translates behavioural science into team practices for engagement, retention, and leading people through complexity without treating burnout as inevitable.
In care teams, stress and mood spread quickly through shifts. Coppin treats that contagion as something leaders can design for: protect the emotional climate, because unmanaged overwhelm quietly damages retention and the quality of care people can sustain.
Individual coping advice alone underestimates how social the work is. Peer support, shared purpose, and team norms determine whether people can keep showing up. Resilience programmes that ignore those conditions ask staff to heroically cope inside a system that keeps draining them.
The talk sits in the same behavioural frame as ethyx's workforce tools: understand why people stay, leave, thrive, or disengage, then change the levers around decision making and team conditions. Leadership under uncertainty starts with understanding people, not only rostering harder.
External references for statistics and claims cited in the talk.
Chapter notes timed from the VEED English captions for the published recording. Jump links open the matching point in the YouTube video.
After the host introduction, Coppin opens with humour and a behavioural-science lens: humans spent most of evolutionary history as foragers in groups of 20 to 200, which left biases, heuristics, and cultural expectations that still shape how people behave in rooms like this one.
He contrasts a decade of US financial-literacy spend with near-zero behavioural variance against simple forager-brain cues such as eyes on litter bins and hand-sanitiser prompts. Subconscious biases often move behaviour more than System 2 information alone.
Aged care is framed as uniquely human, altruistic, and care-centred, yet increasingly pulled into complexity and procedure. Coppin sets up the session around managing pressure and complexity, plus retention and recruitment, in two parts.
The core constraint is not that leaders cannot handle complexity, but that they lack time. Under pressure the amygdala hijacks the prefrontal cortex, uncertainty is treated like danger, cortisol rises, and IQ can drop about 13 points. Illusion of control and omission bias make audited inaction feel safer than action.
People are adaptable to change; what they hate is uncertainty. Anti-ambiguity bias explains why confident certainty attracts followership, and why principle-based reform such as the Aged Care Act can feel like an ambiguity shock to the workforce.
Purpose fuels resilience, creativity, and cohesion, and is one of the few things that scales as complexity worsens. It must be authentic to the real culture of staff, not a consultant slogan. A US aged-care resident study is used to show purpose nearly doubles five-year survival odds between bottom and top purpose groups.
Autonomy is presented as the strongest protective factor against occupational stress, even more than workload. Coppin urges leaders to return decisions people already know the answer to, and to cut accumulated policy friction. An apprenticeship onboarding rewrite that cut document volume by 47% is linked to a 31% drop in early dropout.
Leaders transmit stress, panic, ego, or calm. Stress and anxiety are framed as evolutionarily useful fuel if people are allowed to feel them briefly and then lead. A brewery merger story shows focusing management energy on early adopters moves the ambiguous middle via social norms more than fixing the loudest resistors.
Under day-to-day pressure it is hard to innovate. Coppin recounts George Land’s divergent-thinking findings, that almost all five-year-olds test as creative geniuses while almost no adults do, then runs a short cucumber alternative-use exercise before part two.
Part two turns to recruitment and retention. Individualised wellbeing apps and off-the-shelf resilience training often fail. Four workforce findings stand out: boss and social contagion, practical role-specific resilience, the power of having a friend at work, and higher purpose linked to faster return from injury.
The single greatest wellbeing resource in the work was having someone you consider a best friend at work. Resilience training helps when delivered as a team of 10 to 20 people, specific to the role, and co-designed with staff rather than as an individual off-the-shelf course.
Coppin describes being asked to cut Feros Care dropout rates of 30 to 60 percent. A short commitment assessment flagged about 21% of applicants in Inauthentic Action. Recruiters were well calibrated on values but badly timed, spending weeks to reach answers a short screen could surface earlier, and several hiring biases quietly inflated turnover risk.
About 80% of sector leaders name empathy as why people enter care work, yet exit interviews often reduce to burnout due to empathy. Drawing on Tania Singer’s work, Coppin distinguishes empathic distress from empathic concern, arguing compassion can be trained and that screening should help managers support people, not simply reject them.
The lasting problem is not only pre-hire screening but keeping people after hire. Coppin closes on improved consistency of care for residents, five takeaway learning points, and an offer of free tool access for those who want to try the approach.