It is important to us that we learn with our clients and colleagues. Every year we undertake topical research, sharing our insights to give practical recommendations for leading and organising.

As research-informed practitioners, with interests in many fields – from ecology and anthropology to relational psychology and sociology, we explore what is happening in our client work from different perspectives. What we hear and learn from leaders across organisations informs our thinking, our research, and most importantly our practice. To date we have published a number of research reports on areas such as Strategy, Transformation, Designing Organisations, Culture Change, and Executive Teams.

Research topics:


Minding the gap
The challenges of strategy work that has integrity and makes a difference in the world.

Strategy work often suffers from a disconnect between the boardroom and the frontline. Our research on strategy, “Minding the Gap,” explores how organisations engage with strategy in an increasingly unpredictable world. We examine the reality—rather than the theory—of how strategies evolve and how people participate in shaping the future of their organisations.

Key Findings

  • The Strategy-Purpose Loop: Purpose is no longer a perfunctory part of the process; it frames strategy, which in turn shapes purpose. Stakeholders now demand authenticity, seeking a “lived” strategy rather than just an “espoused” one.
  • The Locus of Focus: Where leaders place their attention matters. Productive strategy requires a balance between internal capabilities and external contexts, as well as between immediate delivery and long-term horizons.
  • Strategy as Dancing: Rather than a static plan, strategy should be experienced as a “live” process. It requires leaders to be conscious of the pace they set and to involve a wider range of stakeholders early in the thinking process.
  • Beyond the Mechanical: Many strategy processes are experienced as “painful and passive.” To be effective, strategy must tap into collective energy and creativity, moving from a series of “disconnected nouns” to a continuous, meaningful “verb”.

Methodology

This research involved 20 in-depth conversations with senior leaders across the private, public, and third sectors. We explored their first-hand experiences, the language they use, and the mental models they hold when “strategising”.

Recommendations

  • Revisit founding stories. The original ethos and principles of an organisation often act as a touchstone for everything you do. Reframing them in a modern-day context and being explicit about what’s changed creates a link to the past, and grounds you in the present.
  • Ask what does ‘strategy’ need to achieve in your organisation right now. Rather than defaulting to existing underpinning and historical metaphors.
  • Connect strategy work to purpose in the broadest sense. Attend to any misalignments if you want a strategy people will care about. It’s fine if you are on a process of discovering your purpose but be authentic in doing so.
  • Identify a ‘north star’. Articulate an overall direction that everyone will recognise at an intuitive and literal level. This needs to be both clear and memorable enough so that a shorthand phrase for it emerges in the organisation.
  • Design the user experience of strategy. Create conditions for spontaneity, creativity and reflection as well as analysis through the process.  Be really thoughtful about who makes choices, how they are made and when you need to convene people.
  • Involve widely and early in the process. Be thoughtful about who is involved – a diversity of perspectives is essential to the quality of thinking. Make sure you get a good balance of time and attention on internal and external perspectives, as well as on the present and future.
  • Think iterations and loops right from the start. Continuous and explicit cycles of thinking with stakeholders and staff create opportunities to keep refining and learning on an ongoing basis rather than a one-off ‘launch’.
  • Take ‘the gap’ seriously. Conversations about purpose and strategy with stakeholders and staff must include space for their ideas on how to close the gap between current reality and the aspiration.

Interested in Metalogue’s approach to participative strategy? Find out more here.


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Organisation Design
“Whose design is it anyway?”

In a turbulent world, the ability to adapt how we organise has become a critical leadership skill. Our research explores the practical realities of organisation design, moving beyond the “structure chart” to understand how to transition effectively into new ways of working.

Key Findings

  • Participation is All: As the lifespan of organisational forms reduces, design must be an ongoing, participative process. Involving the right people early builds the trust necessary to make difficult choices and ensures easier transitions.
  • Technical, Social, and Political: Organisation design is never just a technical exercise. It triggers anxieties and power dynamics. Leaders must attend to the “social system”—the hopes, fears, and ambitions of those affected.
  • Good Enough vs. Perfect: There is no “perfect” design. Success lies in reaching a “good enough” agreement on trade-offs—such as balancing innovation with governance—that enables the delivery of strategic aims.
  • Transitions as Culture-Creating: The “real work” starts after the design is agreed. The transition phase is full of culture-creating moments, such as how appointments are managed and how endings are marked.

Methodology

We interviewed 25 leaders and change agents about their experiences of facilitating redesigns. This was supplemented by deep-dive inquiries into our own consulting practice and a review of established frameworks like the Galbraith STAR model and the Operating Model Canvas.

Conclusions & Recommendations

  • Accept the mess. It is risky to take a linear approach to organisation design, assuming that you can simply develop a design in isolation and then implement it.  The reality is more likely to consist of loops and strands that intertwine.
  • Focus on good enough. Avoid the seduction of perfection by focusing on a good enough design which enables delivery of the agreed strategic aims, is able to adapt and flex, and is motivating for those working within it.
  • Choose participative design processes. Involving the right people in a considered way helps you build and maintain trust and credibility across the organisation.  This is essential when it comes to implementation and to redesigning again in the future.
  • Build rigour and space for creativity into your design process. The design process needs to be rigorous enough to contain anxieties, enable decision-making, and to allow space for creative solutions to design challenges. Ensure you have an iterative process that deliberately allows for phases of divergent and convergent thinking.
  • Design with the future in mind and neglect history at your peril.  Good design addresses the challenges of tomorrow. However, the past is also a strong influence on how people will react and respond to reorganisations and change.  Use the learning from past design processes to help you design for your current strategy.
  • Take transitions seriously.  Plan for implementation and make a realistic assessment of what level of support people will require to help them to let go of the past, learn new skills, and transition into new roles and teams.  If you are making radical changes then you will need to invest more time, resources and energy than if you are making more incremental adjustments.  Consider what will be the major difficulties people will experience and talk to them about the help and support they want and need.
  • Leadership is critical. Leaders need to provide clear and consistent messages throughout on why change is necessary, the scope and intentions of the design effort, and what the new design will mean in practice.  Attend to both the rational-technical and social aspects of organising, exercising confident judgement, empathy and political sensitivity.
  • Develop internal design capability. Ensure you have skilled and capable change agents who understand the organisation design process and have credibility with senior managers. Invest in developing these skills.

Interested in Metalogue’s approach to organisation design? Find out more here.


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Culture… Where to start?
The realities of Culture Change in Organisations

Culture change is often viewed as ambiguous or overwhelming. Our research seeks to decode the complexities of organisational culture, moving beyond superficial “projects” to understand the deep-seated patterns, histories, and social processes that define how people work together.

Key Findings

  • Adaptive Challenges: Culture change is most effective when framed as a response to an “adaptive challenge”—one that requires changes in values, relationships, and discoveries rather than just technical fixes.
  • The Role of History: An organisation’s past is always present. Understanding how history shapes current beliefs is essential to ensure that redesigns aren’t merely reacting to “ghosts” of the past,.
  • Congruence is Key: There is often a gap between an organisation’s “espoused” values and the “lived” experience. True change requires rigour in aligning symbols, structures, processes, and everyday gestures with the desired culture.
  • Disrupting Norms: Shifting culture requires the disruption of established assumptions. This involves creating “cultural immersion” and using alternative forms of representation to help people see their patterns of interaction in a new light.

Methodology

The research drew on a blend of ethnography, observation, and inquiry with client organisations. We engaged with leaders and practitioners to understand their lived experiences of trying to shift cultural identities within complex social systems.

Recommendations

  • Ensure culture projects focus on what employees care about and want to achieve. Instead of ambiguous and all-encompassing change programmes, leaders should focus on achieving specific and tangible aims that matter to people and will make a difference. This needs to be translated into a simple, coherent and straightforward narrative that links the desired changes with the organisation’s long-term health and survival.
  • Create a rich description and shared understanding of the current culture. Exploring stories, artefacts, rituals and myths reveal rich, complex and deeper layers of culture. This can supplement more quantitative and abstract methods, such as surveys. This gives leaders and change agents insights into how to influence deep, sustained and meaningful change in support of what they are trying to achieve strategically.
  • Disrupt deep cultural beliefs and assumptions that maintain the status quo. Culture change processes have to challenge and disturb established patterns and habitual ways of working. For this to happen, people need a ‘cultural mirror’ to see how their actions can reinforce the very patterns they wish to change. This requires them to slow down, to notice what is going on and in what context, and to uncover what beliefs and assumptions lie behind their habitual responses.
  • Help leaders to act congruently and consistently. The behaviour of influential leaders, such as the CEO and the Executive Team, is highly symbolic, signalling which changes they actually believe in and which they do not. They need to be congruent, reliable and dependable in both their messaging and behaviour. This is only possible if they are fully committed to what they want to change. Ambivalence leads to inconsistency, contradiction and loss of trust.
  • Change structures, processes, workspaces and policies to reinforce important cultural messages. Each of these elements communicate cultural assumptions and beliefs. They influence how people think, how they see the world and how they act. Attention needs to be given to what is explicitly and implicitly communicated. If ‘the medium is the message’ then simply changing one without the other is likely to create contradictions and confusing signals about intent.
  • Play the long game! Meaningful, deep and sustained change takes time, perhaps two to three years at a minimum. Progress may be slow at first as employees test and wait to see if leaders and their colleagues are serious and willing to act. Be prepared for periods of slow progress, setbacks and sudden shifts. You will need to be clear about how and when you will know that things are changing, and then help people to notice what is different.

Interested in Metalogue’s approach to culture change? Find out more here.


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Organisation Transformation
Fateful Framings

In an era where the language of transformation is commonplace, success rates remain challenging. Our research investigates the practice of organisation transformation to develop practical insights grounded in the lived experience of those leading and navigating deep-seated change. We view transformation as a fundamental shift in an organisation’s form or function, requiring the discovery of new possibilities and a reformulation of purpose.

Key Findings

  • Mobilisation over Management: Organisation transformation is a social process of discovery and innovation. Success relies less on technical implementation plans and more on mobilising collective intelligence and imagination.
  • The Power of Framing: Most transformations are underpinned by a metaphor—often unconscious—that informs what the change means to people. These “framings” can either create a sense of possibility or generate fear and compliance.
  • Navigating Dilemmas: Leaders must reconcile fundamental challenges, such as the tension between speed and the emotional weight of change. The success of a transformation depends on how these strategic choices are worked through.
  • Emotional Reality: Transformations are emotional journeys. Leaders must provide the “containment” and confidence necessary for people to inhabit a new way of thinking long enough for change to emerge.
  • Transformative Conversations: Change happens when an organisation begins to tell itself different stories. Shifting everyday conversational patterns is the engine of radical change.

Methodology

Our findings are based on a comprehensive inquiry including interviews with leaders and change agents, detailed case studies of high-profile transformation programmes, and inquiry roundtables involving practitioners from over 20 diverse organisations across the private and public sectors.

Recommendations

  • Invest sufficient time and energy in creating the frame of the Transformation. This requires leaders to identify and make the critical strategic choices, to set boundaries and agree the underpinning principles of the transformation. Language and metaphor enable people to see new possibilities and action.
  • Communicate a coherent narrative that brings the transformation to life. Leaders need to be the chief storytellers for the transformation. Change agents need to help them to create a compelling narrative that answers: what we are doing, why are we doing it and why does it matter?
  • Pay exquisite attention to the language, images and metaphors that are used to describe the transformation. By listening to and noticing language, we can understand how different people see the organisation and are relating to the transformation. This gives leaders and change agents greater awareness and choice about how they use language and images to open up possibility and energise different groups.
  • Role model the transformation. Do what they are asking others to do. Leaders need to behave in a way that is congruent with both the transformation and the process of transformation. It’s a cliché to say: ‘Be the change you want to see’, but it’s true and it’s difficult. Small everyday gestures communicate powerful messages.
  • Create multiple and regular “Transformative Spaces” to engage people and stimulate creativity, innovation and experimentation. The transformation process needs to create space and time for people to talk together about what matters most to them, what they need to let go of and what they want to create together. These spaces need to give sufficient room for both requisite retrospection and thinking about what we are planning to do together.
  • Pay attention to what happens with rigour. Notice what works, what does not and learn about transforming the organisation by changing it. We learn through experimentation, risk taking and review.
  • Transformation happens because of wide involvement and commitment to reinventing the organisation. Many leaders and change agents carry too much of the burden of responsibility on their shoulders. Wide involvement generates energy, ideas and ownership. Equally, finding space and time to reflect and recharge gives perspective and ensures you do not burn out.

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The Unspoken Life of Executive Teams
of Executive Teams

While much attention is placed on individual CEOs, it is the collective leadership of the executive team that truly transforms organisations. Our research, “The Unspoken Life of Executive Teams,” gets beneath the surface of the team experience to understand how they can be supported to have a meaningful impact.

Key Findings

  • The Triple Challenge: Executive teams are currently facing a “triple challenge”: delivering immediate performance, leading transformation, and answering existential questions about their organisation’s role in society (such as the climate emergency and social justice).
  • The Burden of Responsibility: The weight of expectations from all directions often exceeds a team’s capacity to cope. This can lead to exhaustion, “crisis mode” thinking, and a narrowing of attention that prevents strategic leadership.
  • Fragmentation Under Pressure: Contextual pressures can cause teams to “separate along fault lines,” retreating into functional silos or functional identities rather than acting as a collective.
  • Surfacing the Unspoken: Teams often avoid difficult choices by maintaining a “polite” surface. Success depends on the team’s ability to work through their ambivalences and speak to what is implicit but unsaid.

Methodology

This inquiry took a systemic “outside-in” and “inside-out” position. We conducted interviews with CEOs and executives, observed teams in action during consulting projects, and held a roundtable inquiry with 30 senior leaders and practitioners.

Recommendations

  • Create punctuation points for the team. Given the myriad of forces that are pulling teams apart, we observed how important it is for teams to create protected spaces for themselves.  These provide opportunities for them to reflect on events, stand back from the immediate pressures and review how they are working together.
  • Clarify the role and desired impact. Executive teams benefit from clarifying the challenges they need to confront and taking time to agree on how they will add value over the longer term. One framework for doing this is the Three Horizons Model.
  • Be mindful around where the team’s attention is directed. It is important for teams to be mindful of where time and attention it is focused.  The real test for a team is to maintain the ability to move attention across different time horizons when they are under pressure.
  • Ask the difficult questions around purpose and impact. If executive teams are going to make a difference, they need to be asking themselves difficult questions around purpose and impact.
  • Invest in relationships and building support. Given the tendency for people to hold unrealistic expectations of leaders, it helps leadership teams to make specific and explicit agreements with different stakeholder groups.  These need to be revisited on a regular basis given the rate and degree of change.
  • Support risk-taking in speaking openly and directly. Our research highlights that teams are more effective when their members take risks to express themselves and their points of view.  In our experience, leaders create trust by speaking clearly and directly with their teams and supporting individuals who take a risk to say something difficult.
  • Work through ambivalences and doubts. Leadership teams need to take time to explore their emotional life whilst they are working together. Pausing to notice their doubts, fears or hopes helps them to recognise how their emotions influence their dynamics, decisions, and acts of leadership.

Interested in Metalogue’s approach to executive team development? Find out more here.


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