Real Dialogue
Better Work
The problem
Performance suffers when organisations lose contact with the reality of work.
In many organisations, insight already exists in the work people do, but it doesn’t travel well. It gets filtered as it moves across teams and levels.
The consequence is solutions that don’t support the reality of work, workarounds to make things function, delays, and investments that are misaligned with what is actually needed. As a consequence, frustration builds between people and across teams.
The solution
Open Change works with organisations to strengthen their contact with work and those that do the work, so that understanding moves and shapes action.
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Getting close to operations to surface what insight, concern and improvement exists in the work but rarely reaches the people with the power to act on it.
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Developing the everyday practices that help people make sense of work together, surface what matters, and act on what they find.
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Helping leaders stay close to the work, ask better questions, and create the conditions where honest information can travel.
The result is improved effectiveness, better alignment, and work that is more robust in practice.
Hi there, I’m Daniel..
I started out as a pilot, trained as a psychologist, and have spent the last two decades working with large, complex, high-risk organisations trying to understand why performance falls short of what people are actually capable of.
I’ve worked with organisations like Netflix, Laing O'Rourke, and Digital Realty. I spent six years as Chief Advisor Safety Innovation at New Zealand's national safety regulator. I’ve co-authored research, built practitioner communities, and sat with a lot of leadership teams trying to close the gap between how they think their organisation works and what's actually happening on the ground.
Central to my work is that performance challenges are almost always relational. Performance improves when leaders and employees work well together, not simply by tightening controls.
I wrote the book An Invitation to Safety Conversations to give leaders something practical to work with. And I founded Open Change to do the same thing at organisational scale.
If something here resonates, the most useful next step is a conversation. No pitch, no proposal. Just a genuine exchange about what's happening in your organisation and whether there's something worth exploring together.
