We helped pioneer digital ways of working in the enterprise 20 years ago, and continue to improve organisational performance by helping firms develop their strategic digital business capabilities

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
Z

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

Selected Blog Posts

Avoiding the Upskilling Whack-a-Mole

Avoiding the Upskilling Whack-a-Mole

Employees trying to up-skill face a real dilemma, one which becomes even more acute when their organisation is undergoing transformation: on one hand, they are caught in the prevailing cult of bare minimum learning, and on the other, the organisation’s ever-changing...

Principles and Patterns over Dogma and Rules

Principles and Patterns over Dogma and Rules

Transforming our organisations will require huge shifts in basic digital literacy and ways of working for almost every employee outside of technology & development teams. New digital hotspots are starting to emerge, but scaling and replicating these emerging areas...

Overcoming Hidden Obstacles in Transforming Bank Operations

Overcoming Hidden Obstacles in Transforming Bank Operations

As the COO of a new bank-owned fintech, my first task was to set up the new company's operations to support users on our app and our network of partner merchants. Our goal was to deliver a superior customer experience through intelligent capabilities like...

Getting lost in the organisational cave

Getting lost in the organisational cave

Organisations generate rules and guidelines to govern behaviour and to avoid problematic outcomes, but over time these rules can chip away at the sense of ownership, autonomy and accountability that we want to see in a modern workplace. Getting the balance right is...

The Antidote to the Anti-Social Enterprise

The Antidote to the Anti-Social Enterprise

Last week, Meta launched its anticipated Threads platform, a Twitter-esque experience, linked to your Instagram account.  Ever an early adopter of social media, I signed up, and immediately got a wave of nostalgia from 15 years ago joining Twitter for the first time....

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