How I Work

Transformation succeeds when people, process and technology move together. My approach is practical and outcome focused. We clarify what is really getting in the way, we align the right people around a simple plan, then we deliver working solutions that last.

I don’t approach transformation as a delivery exercise. I approach it as a decision about what an organisation is prepared to make permanent.

Most change programs don’t fail because teams can’t execute. They fail because the problem has been framed too shallowly, the real constraints are left unspoken, or the system that gets built quietly preserves the old complexity in a new shape. My work is about making those things visible early, and then helping organisations make deliberate, survivable choices.

I work across people, process, data, and technology, but always with the understanding that in serious systems these are not separate concerns. They are different faces of the same underlying structure.

The Framework

A practical, six-step way of moving from intent to a system that can actually live in the organisation. Not a checklist. A way of forcing the right conversations to happen in the right order.

1. Discover the real barrier

Most programs start with the stated problem. I start by looking for the real one. We map where decisions get stuck, where workarounds exist, where incentives are misaligned, and where history has quietly shaped what is considered “normal”. The goal is not a better description of the symptoms, but a clear view of what is actually constraining progress.

Until that is understood, everything else is theatre.

2. Engage and align the people who carry the system

Transformation does not fail because of lack of stakeholder engagement. It fails because the wrong conversations happen too late. This step is about getting the right leaders, operators, and owners into the room early, establishing shared language, shared success criteria, and surfacing the uncomfortable trade-offs before they become structural problems.

Alignment here is not about consensus. It is about clarity.

3. Design the working model

This is where intent becomes something the organisation will have to live with. We translate objectives into an operating model across roles, processes, data, systems, and governance. We make decisions explicit. We define handoffs, accountabilities, and control points. We design for how the organisation actually works, not how it wishes it did.

This is also where long-horizon consequences start to matter, because these choices tend to become architecture.

4. Validate and pilot

Big failures usually come from untested assumptions. We identify what is riskiest, most novel, or most politically fragile and test those parts first in contained environments. The goal is not to prove the idea is perfect, but to discover where reality disagrees with the plan while it is still cheap to change.

5. Design for scale and survival

This is where most good ideas quietly die. We plan not just rollout, but ownership, support, training, transition, metrics, and governance. We remove friction points before they become institutionalised workarounds. We design not just for go-live, but for year three, year five, and year ten.

6. Implement for impact, not just delivery

Delivery is not the finish line. This step is about making sure outcomes are owned, measured, and defended after the project team has moved on. It is where the change becomes part of how the organisation actually operates rather than something it once did.

Keeping the human story visible

Alongside the structural and technical work, I use a perspective I call The Real Why.

It draws on narrative identity theory, the idea that people and organisations act through the stories they tell about who they are, what they value, and what kind of organisation they believe themselves to be.

In practice, this means we look carefully at the gap between stated values and lived behaviour, and we make decisions that are coherent for the people who have to carry them. This is often where the real resistance, and the real leverage, lives.

This is not a replacement for analysis or delivery discipline. It explains why rational plans sometimes meet emotional or institutional resistance, and how to deal with that resistance without pretending it is irrational.

Selected Experience

  • Large financial organisation: simplified workforce management and payroll for thousands of employees, reduced discrepancies and improved operational cycle time.
  • Multiple councils: modernised HR and asset systems, improved visibility, compliance, and cross-team coordination in data-heavy, regulated environments.
  • Targeted IoT programs: connected environmental and operational data to decision-making and established patterns that could scale without becoming fragile.
  • Pragmatic AI adoption: cut through hype to improve real workflows with measurable gains in quality and speed.

Next step

If you are facing a change program where the real risks are structural, not technical, we should talk.