We improve organisational performance by helping firms develop & connect their digital business capabilities, drawing on our experience as pioneers of digital ways of working

We take pride in the diligent, detailed approach we take to our work, and aim to leave behind more productive, collaborative teams wherever we go.

To really improve the way an organisation works with emerging technology requires a combination of skills and knowledge that extend way beyond software features and functions – org design, agile and collaborative ways of working, digital leadership, change movements, psychology and personal productivity are also important.

It is our experience and ability to operate confidently across these domains that our clients say they find most valuable.

Some insights into our thinking:

Browse our blog and newsletter archives

Learn what we mean by an Organisational OS

Read our Smarter Simpler Social founding paper

View an interactive history of the digital workplace

Download a sample research report on Digital Strategy

Leadership Team

Livio Hughes

Cerys Hearsey

Lee Bryant

Explore Our History

2002

A revelation

We realised blogs were better and cheaper than the big hand-made systems we were building, so we exited our previous startup and decided to focus on something new...

2003

A new vision

We created a new venture - Headshift - wrote our paper 'Smart, Simpler, Social' and set about trying to persuade organisations to switch from top-down big IT systems to lightweight, digital collaboration

2004

Building the social web

We enjoyed working on some pioneering social web initiatives and social enterprises in healthcare, civic engagement and business

2005

Award-winning in Legal

Social knowledge sharing successes in top tier law firms - who knew lawyers could be so open to sharing ? 😉

2006

Pursuing org change through social tools

Whilst our peers pursued consumer social media growth, we doubled down on the potential of these tools to transform the way we relate and work in our organisations

2007

Re-thinking enterprise IT & collaboration

It is fair to say we locked horns with a few IT departments in trying to popularise the use of wikis and other sharing tools inside large organisations, but we found enough allies to make some real progress

2008

Built a great team and learned how to pitch

That time our amazing head of design thought n the UK everybody would turn up in fancy dress at Halloween even if we had a very serious pitch meeting, Sometimes you have to just style it out.

2009

We managed one of the craziest online + real-life events ever attempted

Artist Antony Gormley was given a Trafalgar Square plinth in London for 100 days and chose to run a nationwide open access process that culminated in one person per hour (24/7 for 3 months with no gaps) standing on the plinth and doing whatever they wanted. Everything was live online and on TV, and even participant had a live blog. It was mad, but it worked. Our only project to be archived in the British Museum.

2010

Acquisition, growth and Vegas nights

We agreed to merge into a much larger and better funded US scale-up, which meant we ran the European operation of a much large entity. It was fun while it lasted and annual all-hands week-long meetings in Vegas were ... memorable.

2011

Developing social systems to identify actionable data

We built some interesting tools to surface data anomalies and find actionable needles among the haystacks, trying to zig towards organisational use cases when others were zagging towards consumer social media

2012

A long-term transformation role with Bosch

Perhaps it was the Mario slide or the tie, we will never know, but this was the beginning of a very rewarding and interesting engagement with the Bosch group's senior leaders to create and help run the Project for an Agile Company.

2013

Time for another fresh start to refocus on transformation

We exited from the Dachis Group (taking back the Headshift name and wiki) to focus on organisational transformation from a systems perspective, and not just tech. We called the new venture Postshift and launched with a hilariously optimistic post that (once again) was about a decade too early

2014

A new space

We established a co-working space / new office and invested in some startups, whilst continuing transformation work with our long-term clients and partners

2015

Developed our approach to agile, distributed transformation

We continued exploring ways to leverage small transformation teams to have maximum influence in large organisations and started working on tools to enable others to use this approach

2016

Exploring organisational capabilities as change goals

We had an enjoyable year working with Daimler's Digital Life team as well as other new clients, and we found more use cases for our emerging approach of organisational capabilities as change goals

2017

Re-thinking internal functions in an agile organisation

We took on more professional services work with a focus on adoption of new ways of working, and completed a top-to-bottom internal service review for one firm to help them re-imagine back-end functions as potential platform services

2018

Capability Mapping for Digital Leaders

We helped create Digital Leadership Groups in client firms, and worked with their execs to apply capability mapping as a way to bring together all their various digital initiatives and plans to avoid waste and encourage a connected platform approach

2019

Lisbon, hybrid locations and lots of learning

We set up our Lisbon office and in London we switched to an itinerant hybrid working model using co-working spaces for flexibility (and more varied lunch options). We did a lot more executive education projects and enjoyed being part of Astra Zeneca's excellent leadership programme in Cambridge, working with Duke CE.

2020

Started a new long-term digital capability project

We got stuck in to a large-scale digital acceleration programme for a major European industrial firm, which involved everything from strategy to adoption, learning and agile transformation

2021

Greater focus on executive education

During the pandemic, we took on a lot more executive education and emerging leader learning projects working direct with clients and also with business school partners

2022

Expanded our curriculum for digital leadership

With more executive education projects and a dearth of practical, tested learning content, we worked hard to expand our own curriculum to cover all aspects of leading a digital organisation

2023

Platform development

We completed a first release candidate for our digital capability accelerator platform, and began shaping up to deploy this with early test clients

2024

Launch of Shift*Base as a new venture

We launched our new venture with a personal learning companion Shift*Academy, and previewed our Shift*Base digital capability accelerator for the enterprise - see shiftbase.info for more details

Selected Blog Posts

Context, Codification & Cognitive Capabilities

Context & Codification are still hard problems A lot of enterprise AI investment has gone into models and prompt quality. But there is a growing body of evidence that points to the main constraints on reliability, cost, and organisational capability still being...

Don’t Outsource Agentic Capability Design

For the past couple of weeks, I have been interviewing senior function heads and operational leaders in a large hi-tech firm as part of an AI literacy programme. What struck me most was not their enthusiasm for AI, but the degree to which they already know what they...

Agents are Easy; the Agentic Enterprise is Not

Agentic AI is showing great promise in coding and personal productivity, but the shift from personal to organisational agent usage in the enterprise is harder and more complicated than it looks. It also heralds a profound shift in what we consider to be ‘work’ and...

CHROs as Systems Architects not Programme Owners

Enterprise AI-led transformation is changing the focus of most leadership roles to a greater or lesser extent, but one of the most impacted is likely to be the HR function and CHRO roles in particular. CHROs are being asked to lead AI transformation, ensuring...

Embrace the Human to Overcome the AI Capability Absorption Gap

The Capability Absorption Gap in enterprise AI is widening, not narrowing, as model and tool development outstrips the ability of incumbent business leaders to adapt to what it makes possible. Adoption programmes are not cutting it, and their focus on getting people...

Agents at the Ready? Yes and No…

Agentic AI capabilities are developing within several pace layers at once - economic, infrastructure, capability readiness, and knowledge engineering - and it is getting harder to stay on top of these developments whilst tracking their interdependence. But...

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