Meet Berne Gibbons: Our new expert collaborator

Jan 2026

Snowmelt

We’re excited to welcome Berne Gibbons as an expert collaborator at Snowmelt. Berne joins us bringing over 40 years of experience across the health sector, spanning clinical care, executive leadership, and national policy influence. A registered nurse turned digital health innovation advocate, she brings deep expertise in healthcare system transformation, digital enablement, and cross-sector collaboration. We sat down with Berne to ask a few questions as she joins us.

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It would be wonderful for you to tell us a bit about yourself, your journey and what brought you to the work you are doing today?

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I’m excited as well of course, I love Snowmelt and what it can offer our industry in particular so I'm really happy to be involved. I've spent most of my career working in really complex systems and health, community services, governance, I've been sort of across private and public. I think we quickly learn that problems are rarely isolated. And what brought me here is seeing again and again that outcomes are shaped upstream. If you really understand how systems interact or interoperate between people and the environment, data incentives, etc. you can design far better responses.

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And I think the curiosity for me about how things really work is what's pulling me into this space even further.

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In your field of work, what would you say are the biggest challenges and opportunities that you can see?

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I think the biggest challenge at the moment is the fragmentation that we have across, well I was going to say across borders, and it is really across borders because we have that federated model. Remember I'm just health so I'm just thinking about healthcare and we're still making decisions in silos. You know some government departments are making decisions within their own department that they don't realize that others are or that this is happening in the team next door and that's not their fault, that's how we've designed this, that’s how we’ve designed the federal versus state health system. And so, the opportunity is that we now have much better information and tools and the challenge is just using them together, not separately.

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How do you see systemic design helping to realise that potential and connection?

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I just think it stops you from jumping to solutions, that next bright shiny thing too quickly. And instead of asking, what's wrong? And, ask, what's connected? and I feel that the shift opens up more practical and long-lasting options and that's where you come in.

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What other things need to be true to get meaningful change?

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I think it helps in particular that you have to have trust. We need to trust each other and because that's to me a shared understanding and trust is something that doesn't come easy because to be able to trust someone you need to be around them to see what it is that they've been doing and what they've accomplished and that it's worked. So then you go, okay, I can see I'm going to follow Murray because Murray has done this before and Murray's had really good outcomes. And I can trust you, you're people who share the same values as well and I think that that's really important. And I think sometimes, what gets in the way is short-term thinking, trying to fix symptoms instead of the root causes.

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What excites you about systems and design-led practice?

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It helps people make sense of complexity, without dumbing it down. I think it creates a shared language for action.

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I think you know what they say, you don’t plan to fail you fail to plan and I think just taking that time to sit back and look at okay this is where we are now where do we want to get to and work back from there and that takes an experienced team now around you to be able to keep you focused and to be effective.

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What do you want to explore most in the intersections of your expertise and the work we do at Snowmelt?

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I think environmental signals like Snowmelt, can become a common ground. I want to work with different communities and with Snowmelt and planners, and I see what planners and decision makers can actually use before problems show up downstream, you'd like to be able to say that it's not going to happen but they do, so how do you sort of provide that.

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I'd like to understand more about and learn more. I believe I still have a lot to learn. As well about the different ways that we talk about change management, now because I've always felt that when you sit across in a room and you say okay we've got change management and people will go change and management - they're two really scary words, I don't know if I want to include those, where's the door? I think to change our language and explore more about how we can do that, that makes people want to follow you, not walk away from you.

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