Pioneering Authority

Leading change can be a very ‘fluffy’ field in which multiple practitioners and advisors have their preferred theories and models. I wish to create and work with change leadership frameworks that are both rigorously grounded in empirical research and highly relevant to real-world practice.

Together with a super team of research colleagues, in the last two decades I have led four major studies into the successful leadership of change that have generated breakthrough thinking in the field and global attention. I now work with three key concepts that my research shows bring the highest leverage and deepest movement when tackling big complex change.

First, and foremost, your personal leadership practice: the skills you need to lead a change trajectory well. Here I have discovered an important insight. How you need to be as a leader - the quality of your inner state - is as, if not more important, than what you need to do as a leader – your exhibited behaviours. If you are not in the right place personally, you will not be able to handle the difficulty and challenge of leading major change. You might be busily acting, but not still moving. How you combine your inner and outer game as a leader is central to your success.

Secondly, your overall approach to change: how you do change fundamentally determines where you end up. Most leaders I work with do not realise that there is a choice in how you implement change, and tend to approach change in linear and programmatic ways, assuming change can be controlled. My research  - and personal leadership experience - has shown that these approaches to change do not work. What brings true transformation are more emergent change approaches that assume complexity, whole system engagement and non-linearity. I can map that pathway with you.

Thirdly, the vital need to pay attention to the underlying systemic forces present in your organisation that will dictate whether or not your change will flow with ease, or get stuck. Ever present in all collective human systems are the orders of Time, Belonging, Place and Exchange: effective change leaders take into account how past events and future imperatives impact present dynamics, they pay attention to people’s needs to feel secure and included and where loyalties to perspectives and traditions may need to be loosened, they ensure that everyone knows their role in relation to each other and to the system’s purpose, and they make visible what might need to be owed, as well as gained, in any change process. Ignore these four system dynamics at your peril when embarking on change. 

What others say:

‘As an author, educator and practitioner, Deborah is able to translate into practicable strategies the seven decades of research, knowledge and experience in leading change that we now have in the field. People really value her for this rare capacity to “know what to do” – to be, at once, theory-grounded and also pragmatic. She shows the way to others with generosity, and she inspires them to make a difference in their own organisations.’

Executive Director