There's No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing: Scott Arrol on Trust, Ecosystem Leadership, and What Digital Health Can Teach Us All

I asked Scott Arrol the question I ask every guest on The Cairn podcast: in the age of AI, what's the one trait that defines human leadership?

His answer was immediate. Trust.

Not innovation. Not agility. Not technical literacy. Trust. And coming from someone who has spent more than two decades connecting people across one of the most fragmented sectors in Aotearoa, that answer carries weight.

A career that makes no sense on paper

Scott's path into health leadership didn't start with a degree or a graduate programme. It started with a wooden ladder.

His first job was as a trainee linesman for a power company. "When you're a trainee, you do all the shit work," he told me, laughing. From there he moved through dairy farming in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, kiwi fruit orchard development, deer farming, a wine shop, and then running a BP service station in Te Puke with his wife, growing it into a 24-hour operation.

It was only after selling the service station that Scott enrolled in the Executive MBA programme at Waikato University. He had no prior tertiary qualification, so the university made him complete a diploma year first to prove he could handle the work. He paid for the entire thing himself.

That MBA changed the trajectory. Not because of the theory, but because it coincided with a job he took to pay the bills: medical alarms for aged care. That accidental entry into the health sector became permanent. He partnered with Tom Wilson to found Radius Health Group, and suddenly the MBA concepts weren't academic anymore. They were the tools he needed to build a business in a sector he'd stumbled into and never left.

Why the winding path matters

There's a reason I'm spending time on Scott's background. It would be easy to skip ahead to the leadership titles and the sector transformation. But his story is a reminder that some of the most capable leaders in Aotearoa didn't follow a linear path to get there.

Scott described it simply: "I've never been afraid to say I can do something and then figure out what that something actually is."

That willingness to step into uncertainty, to learn on the move, shaped everything that followed. The kiwi fruit days taught him hard labour and working with people. The service station taught him commerce. The MBA gave him a framework. And Kindercare, where he worked with founder Granny O'born to expand a family-run early childhood education organisation, gave him something else entirely: purpose.

"She was courted by private equity consistently," Scott said. "Some of the money she was offered was eye-watering, and she continued to turn it down because she wasn't in it for the money." That experience grounded something in Scott that he carried through every role after: if you're not focused on adding value for others, then why are you doing what you're doing?

Rebuilding NZHIT from the inside out

When Scott took over as CEO of NZHIT (now the Digital Health Association), the organisation was in trouble. Membership was dropping. Finances were dire. The identity was unclear. Some members saw it as a lobbying body. Others weren't sure it was worth the membership fee at all.

His approach was disarmingly simple. He spent the first two months doing nothing but meeting people. Ex-members, lapsed members, people who'd never joined. He asked three questions: why did you leave, what would bring you back, and what does value actually look like to you?

The insight that emerged is one every membership organisation and every leader trying to build a coalition should hear: one size doesn't fit all.

NZHIT's membership included for-profit software companies, government agencies, PHOs, clinicians, startups, and NGOs. They didn't share the same priorities, the same language, or even the same definition of success. Some incumbents were suspicious of startups. Startups wanted to disrupt the government-contract model. PHOs and ministry staff were wary of being in a room with for-profit vendors.

Scott's job was to create an environment where those groups could actually talk to each other. Not agree with each other. Talk. He described himself as an "interpreting service," translating between parties who were saying things the other side couldn't hear.

He'd tell tech companies: "You're talking in sales speak. It sounds great to you, but clinicians aren't hearing it that way. Get a clinician on your team before you launch. Because if you launch a product and it flops, you never recover. And if you oversell, that's even worse."

He'd tell clinicians and ministry staff: "Drop some of your natural barriers. There's nothing wrong with those barriers, but try to listen to the parts that will make sense for the people you're trying to serve."

Over nearly seven years, he grew membership from 65 to 160 and turned NZHIT into the peak body for digital health in Aotearoa. Not through a rebrand or a strategy document. Through thousands of individual conversations that built something harder to see but far more durable: trust between people who had never trusted each other.

The deeply human work

After NZHIT, Scott made a move that surprised people. He stepped into the chief executive role at Dementia New Zealand, and then MND New Zealand. Organisations where the work is profoundly personal and the outcomes are often heartbreaking.

I didn't get to dig as deep into this chapter as I wanted to (we ran out of time, which tells you how good the conversation was), but what came through clearly is that those roles changed Scott's understanding of what leadership actually means.

In home-based care, in dementia support, in motor neurone disease, leadership isn't about strategy decks or membership growth. It's about the support worker going into someone's home to help them with the dishes. As Scott put it: "Regardless of what that is, it is the most important thing in the world that you are doing for that particular person at that particular time of their life."

That's a definition of leadership that doesn't fit neatly into a framework. And it's one that the technology sector, including AI, would do well to sit with.

What AI is actually testing

Scott's view on AI is refreshingly grounded. He's not dismissive and he's not wide-eyed about it. His observation is that AI is stress-testing every model we operate in, whether that's a business model, a procurement framework, or a funding structure. And it's exposing which of those "models" are actually just bureaucratic habits that nobody has questioned for too long.

He's particularly sharp on collaboration, a word he has mixed feelings about. "Collaboration has been tossed around as a sexy thing to say which really doesn't mean anything," he said. Real collaboration means taking actions together and creating results that actually influence strategy. Not lip service. Not a workshop. Results. “Collabor-action” he calls it.

That's a challenge for the health sector specifically, but it applies everywhere. How many organisations talk about collaboration while their procurement frameworks, funding models, and internal incentives all point in the opposite direction?

The value equation

One of the frameworks Scott shared is elegant in its simplicity: V = B minus C. Value equals benefit minus cost. If the benefit of what you're doing exceeds the cost, you're creating value.

The key is that cost and benefit aren't always measured in dollars. Scott applies this to his parkrun volunteering, his advocacy work, his running. "Quite often people say to me I'm nuts, I do so much. It's because I get benefit from it and the cost to me is far less than the benefit. So I'm getting huge value. Why wouldn't I do it?"

He illustrated it with a story about a bottle of water. Buy one from a service station on a rainy day, it costs a couple of dollars and the value is modest. Buy the same bottle in the middle of a desert when you're about to fade away, and you'd pay a million dollars for it. The benefit hasn't changed. The context has.

It's a useful lens for anyone evaluating AI investments, technology decisions, or even career moves. What's the actual benefit relative to the actual cost, including the costs you can't put on a spreadsheet?

"There's no right way to do the wrong thing"

When I asked Scott about the leadership traits that shaped him, he kept coming back to a line he learned from a boss during his Healthcare of New Zealand days: "There's no right way to do the wrong thing."

It's the kind of phrase that sounds like a cliche until you sit with it for a while. In a sector where procurement shortcuts get justified by urgency, where innovation gets funded without clear outcomes, where collaboration gets claimed without commitment, that line cuts through all of it.

Scott's leadership philosophy is built on four pillars: being yourself, honesty, integrity, and understanding your triggers. Not your drivers, your triggers. The things that pull you off course. He's candid about his own: "I was never a saint. If I've pissed you off then just tell me. Quite often I'll make the situation worse, not better."

That kind of self-awareness is rare. It's also exactly the kind of leadership we need more of as AI changes the way every sector operates.

Trust as the foundation

So why trust? Why, of all the possible answers, did Scott land there without hesitation?

Because trust is the infrastructure that everything else is built on. It's what allowed him to get adversaries in the same room at NZHIT. It's what kept membership growing when the value proposition was still being figured out. It's what families need from the people caring for someone with dementia or motor neurone disease. And it's what we'll need from each other as AI reshapes the systems we work in, the decisions we make, and the relationships we rely on.

Trust isn't a strategy. It's a practice. Scott has been practising it for more than two decades, in boardrooms and in living rooms, with entrepreneurs and with families, across a career that makes no sense on paper and makes perfect sense when you see the whole.

Listen to the full conversation on The Cairn podcast.