Shaping what’s next: the ‘priceless’ culture that gives innovation room to breathe

Ashkan Amiri says the most important lesson of his career has been how to build the kind of culture that gives innovation room to breathe. Across roles in banking, cybersecurity and AI, he keeps coming back to the same idea: people do their best work when they understand the North Star, know they have support around them, and have enough autonomy to make decisions, take calculated risks and learn as they go.

For Amiri that kind of environment comes from helping people understand the vision they are working towards and giving them room to establish their own comfort zone and then step beyond it. Just as important, he says, is making sure people feel psychologically safe enough to do that without worrying that every mistake will be held against them.

Openness and culture around innovation is a big part of what convinced him to make the move from Canada and take up the role of Distinguished AI Scientist at CommBank, he says.

A ‘circle of trust’

The phrase Amiri uses to describe this kind of culture is “circle of trust”. It’s making sure your team feels safe to speak up, to ask questions and make mistakes while they work through difficult problems. “Being safe to speak up, being safe to make a mistake, I think that’s priceless,” he says. “And I see plenty of elements of that at CBA.”

A leader can set direction, but real innovation still depends on people having enough confidence and support to try things, learn, and come back stronger, he says.

“Being safe to speak up, being safe to make a mistake, I think that’s priceless.” 

Giving people the room and time to grow

Amiri says he learned an important lesson earlier in his career. Under pressure to deliver, he used to jump in too quickly and solve problems for the people around him. When team members came to him when they were stuck, he’d give them the answer, point them in the right direction and move on. It helped in the short term, allowing the team to move on quickly, but it wasn’t setting them up for long-term success.

Then he changed his approach. Instead of giving the exact solution, he gave people support, some direction on where to look, and room to work through the problem themselves. Over time, the conversation changed. Amiri says the team stopped coming to him just to say they had a problem. They started coming with ideas. “We need to give people the freedom to make mistakes and learn from it,” he says.

Guidance and guardrails

Amiri is equally clear that none of this means treating innovation as a free-for-all.

In banking, he says, every organisation has to work within what it can afford in terms of risk, cost, customer impact and regulatory obligations. The task is to understand those constraints properly, negotiate around them as a group, and still create an environment where people have enough autonomy to be creative.

“You can’t tie a person to a chair and say, well, innovate,” he says. “You have to give them freedom and the ability to explore in a controlled environment without crashing and burning things.”

That balance between freedom and discipline seems central to how he approaches technical leadership more broadly. Amiri says part of his role is helping teams through work where the path from start to finish is not yet clear, where there are “multipaths”, unknowns and competing priorities. Another part of it is going deep on new AI capabilities that need focused technical expertise. In both cases, the work is about helping people navigate uncertainty without losing traction.

Where that culture shows up

Amiri says the practical impact of innovation culture can be seen in CommBank’s leading work around scams, fraud and security.

He says AI is already helping teams collect and use information in a fraction of the time it once took, enabling faster and better-informed decisions that help protect customers from fraud and scams while improving the overall customer experience.  He also points to work in cybersecurity, where AI is helping teams process telemetry and threat intelligence, identify and mitigate potential risks, and operate at a scale that was not possible before.

That practical thread also helps explain why the move from Toronto to Sydney made sense. Innovation is far more likely to succeed when people are trusted to explore, learn and grow Amiri says, and at CommBank he could see people “looking in the right direction”, investing in AI with ambition, and being open about both the big rocks that still needed to move and the areas where they already had a good grip. That honesty and transparency, he says, made the decision to move to CommBank easy.