About Open Change
Every organisation is a bundle of (more or less locked up) intelligence, passion, knowledge, creativity, collaboration, knowhow, innovation that can be used to improve, detect, assess ambiguous environments, optimise cutting edge technology that we haven’t fully understood yet, carry out work under competitive pressures to do more with less, care about colleagues, speak up, and to lend a helping hand. And organisations are free to make use of this resource – to realise its intellectual, emotional and creative potential.
However, most organisations relate to that potential through logics and assumptions built for control and predictability. The result is performance that falls short of what people are actually capable of.
The biggest threat to great performance is not the non-compliant worker. The greatest danger lies in our belief in authority, uniformity, and external expertise. The challenge ahead is not one of winning hearts and minds. It is to figure out how we can enable people and organisations to unleash their own capacity to create the future they would like to see.
Open Change works with operational and executive leaders in high-risk industries to close the gap between how organisations currently perform and what they're actually capable of. The work is advisory, design, and delivery of services, designed to:
Seeing clearly. Getting close to how work actually happens: the trade-offs, the improvisation, the ways people succeed despite the systems provided rather than because of them. Bringing those stories back to leadership in a form that's unfiltered enough to be useful. Discovery work, frontline listening, and independent observation across levels of the organisation.
Shifting the lens. Working on the assumptions and logic that leaders use to understand people and performance. Through presentations, training session, workshops, and coaching, until the way people see and understand work and those that do the work starts to change. Keynote presentations, executive workshops, and one-to-one coaching.
Scaling the approach. Designing programs, training trainers, coaching coaches. So the new way of seeing spreads through the organisation and the capacity to sustain it stays behind. Training program design, train-the-trainer, and coaching new coaches.
Building conversational practice. Creating the structures and skills for ongoing dialogue. Facilitating conversations, training people to run them, helping organisations develop the habit of learning from themselves. Facilitated conversations, story coaching, and conversation training.
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 Qantas, Laing O'Rourke, and Netflix. 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.
What I've learned is that the gap is almost always relational. Risk surfaces when people feel safe enough to say something. Performance improves when leaders get genuinely close to the work. Neither happens by tightening control.
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. Start a conversation using the form below.
