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
Explore Our History
A revelation
A new vision
Building the social web
Award-winning in Legal
Pursuing org change through social tools
Re-thinking enterprise IT & collaboration
Built a great team and learned how to pitch
We managed one of the craziest online + real-life events ever attempted
Acquisition, growth and Vegas nights
Developing social systems to identify actionable data
A long-term transformation role with Bosch
Time for another fresh start to refocus on transformation
A new space
Developed our approach to agile, distributed transformation
Exploring organisational capabilities as change goals
Re-thinking internal functions in an agile organisation
Capability Mapping for Digital Leaders
Lisbon, hybrid locations and lots of learning
Started a new long-term digital capability project
Greater focus on executive education
Expanded our curriculum for digital leadership
Platform development
Launch of Shift*Base as a new venture
Selected Blog Posts
AI Could Redefine Enterprise Systems, But Where Do We Begin?
With successive waves of technology innovation and adoption, the initial applications tend to be those that make our current ways of working slightly better, and we measure their success in terms of marginal cost reduction or productivity improvement. Sometimes, like...
Strawberry (Da)Queries, Machines and Possibilitarianism
Strawberry (da)queries are more sophisticated than single shot prompts The big news in GenAI this weekend was the launch of GPT o1-preview, aka Strawberry, which is capable of limited reasoning and thinking through problems from different angles before trying to solve...
Asking Better Questions
Two very impressive demonstrations of GenAI capabilities have caused a stir in recent days, and they both challenge our assumptions and precepts about the art of the possible. Playing the classic video game DOOM on devices is the new ‘Hello World’ of programming, and...
Visibility and Legibility in the Connected Company
One overlooked benefit of AI and smart technology is its potential to solve the problem of coordinating work and related communications in large, complex organisations. We have studied better alternatives to the cascading hierarchy for decades, and in the hands of...
Don’t Let the AGI Soap Opera Overshadow the Practical Applications of Enterprise AI
I ran a small GenAI teaching experiment last week, asking 9 groups of South African executives to develop detailed customer personas for a finance product through dialogue with Anthropic's Claude LLM. The results were genuinely interesting, and some groups were able...
How Could AI Agents Improve The Co-ordination of Work?
In large organisations today, the dominant form of work co-ordination is still old-fashioned ‘manual’ management and meetings, despite the existence of accessible, simple technologies that could solve this problem more effectively. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson...