STORY 01 — CHANGE MANAGEMENT
IT system adoption: from 17% to 89%
The situation
A global organisation had set out to standardise their HR operations across 18 countries. The first attempt at blueprinting had failed — country leaders could not align, trust in the central leadership team had broken down, and countries had begun strengthening their own internal systems in response. Digital transformation had stalled before a single system was in place.
The work
- Re-engaged the Senior Management Team to revisit what success actually looked like.
- Surfaced and named the tensions between country leaders and the central IT team.
- Identified and trained Change Champions across all 18 countries.
- Facilitated dialogue across stakeholder levels on the case for change.
- Shifted ownership of success to local leaders.
The outcome
- Adoption rose from 17% to 89% within three months.
- 88% standardisation across 18 countries, with 12% flexibility for local legal requirements.
- Local leaders took ownership of the system's success.
STORY 02 — DIAGNOSIS & CULTURE
Turning around a failing sales team
The situation
A HR solutions firm was watching its sales numbers fall. The Director felt helpless. Employees felt performance was managed inconsistently, bad behaviour was tolerated, and trust was breaking down. They had three months to turn it around before the survival of the business was at stake.
The work
- Conducted one-to-one diagnostic interviews across the organisation in two weeks.
- Identified that performance issues were rooted in the commission structure, not individual behaviour.
- Facilitated a whole-team workshop to review the past and plan the future together.
- Reorganised the commission structure to reward collaboration rather than competition.
- Created individual growth plans for every employee.
The outcome
- 70% of employees achieved their quarterly sales target; 30% exceeded targets by 40%.
- 12% increase in the success rate of shared leads.
- The organisation returned to health.
Every one of these began the same way.
A leader with a problem that looked like one thing on the surface — and turned out to be another underneath. The work is different every time. The starting point never is: understand what is actually happening before doing anything about it.
STORY 03 — GLOBAL STRATEGY, LOCAL CHANGE
Making a global strategy work locally
The situation
A global organisation was moving to open-plan hybrid offices. The strategy was set globally; implementation in Asia hit significant resistance — employees and local leaders felt the global approach did not account for how they actually worked. The risk was forcing through a strategy that would not stick, or drifting too far from the global mandate.
The work
- Spent one month observing current ways of working on the ground.
- Facilitated conversations with local leaders about their business strategy alongside their concerns.
- Engaged HR to align the workspace change with the broader people strategy and hybrid working policy.
- Worked through the local GM as sponsor to design a space employees had shaped — not one handed down to them.
The outcome
- Changes went live within three months, with full adoption.
- New ways of working developed bottom-up, within the global strategy.
- The narrative shifted from “they don't understand how we work” to “we can shape how we want it to be.”
STORY 04 — LEADERSHIP TEAM CONFLICT
Two weeks to repair a leadership rift — before a multimillion-dollar turnaround
The situation
A petrochemical plant in Singapore was two weeks away from a multimillion-dollar turnaround — a planned shutdown where execution has to be precise and every day of delay costs heavily. The two senior leaders responsible for planning and execution — close friends who had worked together for years — had fallen out. The team had split into camps around them. Rumour was filling the gap, some of it true, most of it not. The HR Manager called: the turnaround itself was now at risk, and the Regional VP was due on site in a week.
The work
- Conducted one-to-one diagnostic conversations across the team within days.
- Found that beneath the public conflict was deep hurt between two friends — a misunderstanding that had hardened into a rift, which the team around them was now carrying too.
- Worked at that level, not the surface: this was not a process problem to be managed but hurt that was translating directly into the work — at exactly the moment a project worth millions demanded the most focused execution.
- Met each leader privately to name what was at stake: if the rift was still visible when the Regional VP arrived, the likely outcome was a wholesale change of the team.
- Brought the full team, both leaders included, into one room — and shifted the focus from the conflict to the work ahead, so that reconciliation happened in service of the task, not as an end in itself.
The outcome
- The misunderstanding was resolved; the two leaders reconciled and the team refocused on the task.
- The turnaround started on schedule, two weeks later.
- The Regional VP's visit passed without escalation — the team stayed intact.
STORY 05 — ROLE CLARITY AT THE TOP
When four leaders were all doing the same job
The situation
At one of Singapore's largest social service agencies, four senior leaders had grown up together in the organisation over more than fifteen years. Then one of them was promoted above the others. Not wanting to strain the friendships, he led as before — all four making decisions collectively, the other three troubleshooting as they always had. Slowly, everyone was doing the director's job and no one was doing their own. The leadership layer below became caught in the middle: unclear who owned which decisions, and increasingly frustrated — as were the four leaders themselves.
The work
- Diagnosed the issue as role conflict entangled with friendship — one leader put it plainly: “I don't know how to say no when a friend asks, especially when he is the leader.” Supporting a friend had quietly replaced serving the organisation.
- Ran a role negotiation intervention: mapped each person's actual role against what they were really doing day to day, and where the conflicts sat.
- Held three sessions with all four leaders in the same room, asking each to tell the others what they would start, stop and continue — so that each could perform the role they actually held.
The outcome
- Within two months, roles and boundaries were clear — at the top and the layer below.
- A follow-up survey confirmed people now knew who owned which decisions and who to go to.
- The friendships survived — because the roles no longer depended on them.
