It’s not always personal Recently a colleague approached me somewhat distressed. For the past year she had been working as a consultant for a small niche enterprise advising them on culture and leadership development. She had been so successful and had built up such a positive relationship with the CEO…

What’s the pattern that connects? The dominant logic in our organisations today is individual and interpersonal, not systemic. We are wired to see individual behaviour, not patterns. Seeing patterns of relatedness is a new way of making sense of and understanding behaviour in organisations. In a systemic paradigm, ‘behaviour is…

Redrawing the boundaries of where HR fits in the business A few years ago, I attended a workshop exploring how HR could become more relevant and ‘get a seat at the table’. Typically, we explored what the problem was with HR and how we could ‘fix’ it. In the final…

The gift of a new pair of glasses. In 1993 in Johannesburg South Africa I was gifted a new pair of glasses — a new way of seeing the world and a new lens on change and organisations. I was working as the People and Organisation Development Manager in a…

Redesigning our roles, rules, rituals and relations for this context. The COVID-19 crisis has challenged and shifted almost everything we are accustomed to and know about boundaries in our system. Implicit boundaries which we took for granted have fallen away and others, that weren’t there, that we took equally for…

Discovering implicit messages and ‘hidden’ contracts. Culture change is elusive, only 20% are successful. That’s because leaders are shining the light in the wrong place. They’re looking to explicit values and behaviours and missing the hidden contracts and implicit messages which really drive culture and keep it stuck. Culture is…