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Guest Keynote: Critical Thinking Under Pressure
Tuesday, 17 November, 2026 / 09:00 AM - 09:45 AM AEDT
About the Session
Most people think of critical thinking as an academic skill, something exercised calmly, at a desk, with time to weigh the evidence. Professor Arnold Dix has spent his career proving otherwise. As the engineer called in to lead the world’s highest-profile underground rescues, he has had to make irreversible, life-or-death decisions with incomplete information, conflicting expert opinion, and the eyes of the world watching in real time.This keynote draws on Professor Dix’s own experience at the rock face to teach audiences how to think clearly when the stakes are highest: how to separate signal from noise, resist the pressure to act merely to appear decisive, question assumptions everyone else has stopped questioning, and make sound decisions when no “right” answer exists, only a better one.