Jet Swain
Stories, systems, and the people who shape us
About Jet
I work at the intersection of values, leadership, and systems change — helping people and organisations build trust, connection and growth without compromise.
Not as a mindset.
As a way of working.
I founded The Affection Economy to answer a question I kept seeing play out in boardrooms, teams, and communities:
What would work look like if we designed it around people and still delivered results?
Affection, in this context, isn’t softness.
It’s attention, care, accountability, and responsibility in action.
From rural Australia to global boardrooms
I was raised on a seventh-generation merino sheep property in northwest New South Wales, shaped by a long matrilineal line of women who understood grit, grace, and how to hold steady through hard seasons.
That inheritance — strength paired with care — underpins everything I do.
For more than three decades, I’ve worked across advertising, design, executive leadership, consulting, and purpose-driven transformation. My work sits where business, human behaviour, and systems meet, helping leaders navigate complexity, growth, and change without losing their humanity or their edge.
I’ve led and advised across creative, corporate, government, and not-for-profit sectors, supporting founders, senior leaders, and teams to make better decisions, faster, and together.
Authority shaped by lived experience
My authority isn’t only professional. It’s personal.
I’m a breast cancer survivor.
A solo parent who raised two daughters into strong, thoughtful women.
Someone who knows what it means to rebuild when life strips you back to what matters.
Those experiences sharpened my conviction that affection — care, connection, courage — isn’t an add-on to leadership.
It’s the strategy.
Whether I’m guiding an executive team, facilitating a workshop, delivering a keynote, or working one-on-one, my focus is the same:
To help people lead with clarity, act with conviction, and grow without compromise.
Why the Affection Economy exists
I founded The Affection Economy because I’d seen what happens when organisations lose connection to the people inside them.
Values look good on paper.
Without care, accountability, and follow-through, they rarely hold under pressure.
I’ve sat in countless rooms where the language sounded right, but the culture felt disconnected.
Where performance came at the cost of trust.
Where people burned out trying to belong inside systems that were never designed with humans in mind.
The Affection Economy grew from something I kept seeing again and again:
Affection, connection, and kindness aren’t soft.
They shape trust, belonging, resilience, and long-term impact.
Today, The Affection Economy sits at the centre of my work across keynotes, workshops, advisory, mentoring, writing, and leadership conversations.
It’s not a theory.
It’s a practical way of building cultures, relationships, and systems people genuinely want to participate in.
Personal writing —
She Who Holds the Map
Alongside my leadership work, I write She Who Holds the Map —
a memoir-in-essays exploring matrilineal memory, women’s stories, resilience, and legacy.
It’s where the personal threads live.
The lineage beneath the leadership.
Essays & Ideas —
The Affection Economy
The Affection Economy is my ongoing body of writing exploring values, connection, courage, kindness, and more human ways of living, leading, and working.
It’s where the philosophy deepens.
The thinking beneath the work.
Alongside my work in leadership, values, storytelling, and the Affection Economy, I lead Studio Jet — a multidisciplinary creative practice exploring object, surface, space, and story through art, design, and experience.
What I believe
Affection and accountability belong together
Care is not the opposite of performance
Values only matter when they’re lived
Leadership is something you practice, not perform
Growth without compromise isn’t idealistic. It’s necessary.
If that resonates, we’ll work well together.