The power of Pacific AI – ancestral intelligence – in the boardroom

Governance is often described in terms of duties, strategy, risk and performance. Among Pasifika directors, it can also begin somewhere more personal: family, service, community and the responsibility of carrying others into the room.

That was the heart of a recent IoD Otago Southland branch event at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin, where Dr Sina Cotter Tait CMInstD led a conversation with Venasio-Lorenzo (Vena) Crawley MInstD, Mata’aga Hana Fanene-Taiti QSM, MInstD and Dr Edmond Fehoko MRSNZ, MInstD.

This was not a conversation wrapped in abstract governance language, with little talk of “future-proofing” or “stakeholder alignment”. Instead, the conversation kept returning to the fundamentals of Pasifika governance – family, service, church politics, community pressure and the particular kind of unease that comes from sitting at tables where you have not always felt expected or understood.

Crawley was unequivocal about what he brings to the board table. Alongside technical expertise, commercial experience and governance credentials, he pointed to a lifelong orientation towards service. “I’ve commercialised it,” he said, “so it’s not soft – it has a lot of edge and bite to it. Service is not a soft ideal. It is a strategic discipline.”

Crawley holds every major governance decision to a single unflinching test: who are we actually here to serve? At one particular board, he applied that question by challenging a culture in which successive price increases had quietly become the default response to market pressures – a pattern that made affordability and access harder for some of the communities the organisation existed to serve.

He linked that example to demographic change in New Zealand, noting that communities currently described as minorities will form a much greater share of the population in the decades ahead. Boards that are not thinking about that shift, he said, are already carrying a blind spot.

Crawley also described how cultural influence can operate below the level of formal data. He said his Pacific values influenced decisions about care for parents in the family he had married into. His point was that culture shapes markets, families and decisions in ways that may not appear in conventional board reporting.

Carrying community into the room

Fehoko spoke about the cultural tax many Pasifika directors carry into governance roles – going into board meetings with his five-year-old daughter’s perspective as a deliberate lens. “You have to stay grounded and know for sure the responsibility of the community is on your shoulders,” he said.

Fanene-Taiti knows that weight well. Now in her third term on the Waitaki District Council, she is frequently the only brown face at the table. A lot of governance happens in corridors, over coffee and through the slow accumulation of trust, she said.  

Over two terms, colleagues who once relied on her alone to raise Pacific perspectives began asking those questions themselves – “What about the Pacific community? What will this mean?” – without prompting. “I don’t actually have to be in the room,” she said.

Fanene-Taiti did not arrive through a conventional governance pathway. Her mother had established a community women’s group in Oamaru. When older women could not travel to Pasifika conferences around the South Island, they sent their oldest daughters instead.

“As a 10-year-old, I would be put on an InterCity bus, and we would travel to Christchurch, to Invercargill, to Dunedin,” she said. “We would be expected to stand up at these conferences – 50 to 100 people.” She had been practising public speaking, advocacy and accountability for decades before she entered local government.  

Fehoko described a parallel experience on an Auckland school board of trustees in his mid-twenties, where Pacific students were being expelled every week. His job was to bring context – to make the board understand what sat behind the pattern. “Stay grounded in your culture,” he said.

“Stay grounded in the [Pasifika] systems you come with.” And he added, “If you can navigate church politics, any [Western] governance table is easy.” 

What collectivism means at the board table

Crawley offered a more demanding definition of collectivism – and a warning about how often it is misread. Consensus-seeking, he argued, is not collectivism. True collectivism requires a conviction that no voice in the room outranks another.

“Collective says, actually, I’m no better than you. We are all equal. Yes, you may have 10 years more experience or have a chair title in front of you, but my voice is equal to yours. And so from that stance, I first have to listen to hear.”

At a listed company board, he saw a contradiction between generous board catering and cost reductions across the wider business. He proposed to the chair, a keen baker, that board members contribute and take turns baking for board meetings. The initiative took hold and carried on after he left.

“As leaders we are always being watched, observed and judged by the people we need to deliver high performance – our reputations are being built on our every action and behaviour.”

Fanene-Taiti described a similar instinct at work in Waitaki – knowing when to speak and when not to, running the numbers on where support sits before a key vote, and protecting the mana of colleagues by giving them space to be heard. “You can still have the hard conversations, but you can still be respectful about it,” she said.

Belonging at the table

The audience raised imposter syndrome. Crawley said he had recently received feedback after a board meeting that he had been “throat-clearing”: front-loading his contributions with credentials, as though his right to speak still needed proving.

At 14, a school guidance counsellor told him the most he could expect from life was to put labels on cans, as his parents did. “I believed that for 20 years,” he said.

He said the effect of that moment had not fully left him. His response is to keep choosing to accept that the seat was earned and the contribution is real. “It’s hard to fight that with the cultural norms,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over it. It’s just something you learn every day.”

Fehoko quoted Disraeli: “The greatest good you can do for another is not to share your riches, but to reveal to them their own.” Fanene-Taiti said she would trust instinct more. “Trust in yourself. Know you are meant to be where you’re meant to be, whatever [the] timing.”

Pacific AI

Crawley returned to an image from his mother: a Venn diagram with Samoa in one circle, New Zealand in another and her children in the overlap. “You’re new New Zealand,” she told them. Not assimilation. Not separation, but an expansion of the middle – the new New Zealand.

It was in that spirit that Crawley named what he and his fellow panellists bring to governance: Pacific AI – ancestral intelligence. He described it as the accumulated knowledge of peoples who have navigated extraordinary complexity across generations, without formal institutions, across thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

“We come as individuals,” he said, “but we represent a collective. And it’s always from that position.”

About the panellists

Dr Sina Cotter Tait CMInstD is a civil engineer and construction manager with more than 20 years’ experience. She serves on the boards of Te Waihanga/the Infrastructure Commission, KiwiRail, Whitestone Contracting, Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust and Christchurch City Holdings Ltd.  

Venasio-Lorenzo (Vena) Crawley MInstD is a growth strategist and transformation leader who has delivered more than $4 billion in commercial returns across his last three executive roles. He holds non-executive directorships at Summerset Group Holdings Ltd, Southern Cross Medical Society, Orion Group, Variety Children’s Charity and Auckland University of Technology, and previously served as a Future Director at The Warehouse Group.  

Mata’aga Hana Fanene-Taiti QSM, MInstD is a New Zealand-born Samoan based in Oamaru. She is in her third term as a Waitaki District councillor, served as Deputy Mayor from 2019 to 2022, and is CEO of the Oamaru Pacific Island Trust. 

Dr Edmond Fehoko MRSNZ, MInstD is Senior Lecturer in Human Nutrition and Associate Dean Pacific at the University of Otago. He serves as co-chair for ACE Aotearoa and as a board member of the Centre for Pacific Languages, Ako Mātātupu Teach First NZ and SIAOLA Vahefonua ‘o Tonga Charitable Trust.