“Most organisations don’t fail through lack of strategy, but because the strategy never reaches the front line.”

How do we ensure that our organisational strategy truly reaches the front line of operations, preventing it from remaining solely at the board level?

Matt & I delve into this critical challenge facing leaders today. We uncover how to bridge this gap, ensuring your strategic vision translates into frontline execution and sustained growth.

The tension between “explore” (innovation) and “exploit” (business as usual) is a constant balancing act for organisations. and we need to inherently foster both. But how ?

The Square management system provides an architecture for leaders to scale their culture without stifling innovation, a critical balance for companies. Matt shares his journey, from transforming underperforming sports franchises to investment banking and corporate development, where he observed how different companies created or captured value. He realised the importance of intentional organisational design when asked how to maintain culture across multiple offices and states, leading to the development of his book and approach.

“square” does not imply a rigid, binary system but represents a dynamic space for culture. He defines good culture as the alignment between an individual’s perceptions, beliefs, and values and the company’s systems and procedures. The “square” changes in size and shape depending on the company’s needs. Discover the four "I"s—Identity, Instruction, Intercommunication, and Information Feedback—that form the foundation of an effective organizational design. We discuss how leaders can utilize this system not just as a culture tool, but as a comprehensive operating framework, especially vital during M&A integrations or major reorganizations.

How do you balance freedom for innovation with the need for operational consistency in your organization ?

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

- Regardless of sector, there are commonalities in terms of workplace cultures and thriving, i.e. understanding where value lies and how to create or capture it - the square management system is an architecture for leaders to scale culture without suffocating innovation.

- The Culture of Alignment is a philosophical exercise around how to run a company, a model for operationalising strategies into tactics, as strategy often stays at the top, without penetrating the front line.

- Rather than copying what others have done, it offers a way to intentionally structure a high-performing organisation, with direct tools to provide for growth and scale - not a blueprint, but an invitation to create a bespoke model.

- The system factors in both alignment and flexibility by understanding what the culture is and intentionally designing for it: the culture is the square, but the size of the square and the walls can change.

- The square comprises: identity (do customers and staff know what we stand for), instruction (expectation for performance standard across the organisation), intercommunication (flow of information across the company), information feedback (data and information on the company and employees).

- The fifth i in the middle of the square is constrained independence (the known degree to which an employee can action their own ideas) = culture; a lack of constraint leads to mini squares = chaos.

- Most companies fall short in one area: identity deviation erodes trust; instruction deviation leads to a varying standard of...

"Think about how stretchy you are and what you accept. Where are your breaking points?"

One particularly striking data point: 70% of people face obstacles asking questions at work.

This statistic underscores a core issue. Curiosity is often cited as a value, yet many environments make it unsafe to ask for clarification or challenge ideas. Fear of looking incompetent, challenging authority, or slowing down progress often silences valuable input.

Julie and I discuss how curiosity, respect, and self-awareness can transform organisational life. We explore practical strategies for leaders to foster psychological safety and inclusive collaboration, using Julie's own unique journey and the powerful “Seven Forms of Respect” framework for guidance.

We often talk about “soft skills” in organisations, but as teams become more global and complexity increases, these skills are anything but soft. They’re foundational. We discover a refreshing perspective to curiosity, respect, and self-awareness, showing us how to make these invisible dynamics tangible and actionable. This in turn allows leaders to shift from just “knowing” to truly “learning” — a real leadership superpower in our changing world.

Recognising your “rubber band” stretchiness - Understand personal boundaries and breaking points, and communicate them to others is also key as it prevents snapping and strengthens relationships. This episode offers key insights into navigating complex team dynamics and maintaining a learning mindset in high-pressure environments.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

- Being a self-taught organisational development consultant taught the critical value of sharing resources and building communities in times of crisis; there is tension and friction in any community but making the invisible relational dynamics tangible helps to understand them.

- When it comes to learning from other people, curiosity and self-assessment are required for the shift from knowing to learning, and to decode the different dynamics; curiosity requires questions, but do people feel safe enough to ask questions?

- Internal narrative and cultural formatting influence communication - we are all members of multiple cultures, communities and identities simultaneously, and inward curiosity is a prerequisite: What matters to me?

- Our multiple identities mean that we must slow down and reflect to enable good decisions to be made from a place of curiosity; leadership rituals (e.g. meeting facilitator rotation) can help teams maintain curiosity when under pressure, create empathy and force listening.

- Using the seven forms of respect as a framework for collaboration helps understand how respect is relative, dynamic, subjective and contradictory: Procedure, Punctuality, Information, Candor, Consideration, Acknowledgement, Attention.

- A useful analogy here is with language: the organisational level represents the national language; departments represent dialects; and the individual is represented by their own language – we all need to be multilingual.

- Intercultural working results in unclear messages, which lead to perpetuated actions and unmet expectations that were never made explicit - a team must understand what respect means to them, not by guessing, but by asking others.

- Inward curiosity is about self-reflection and admitting what challenges us and what our expectations are – this can be difficult to acknowledge given that it can be perceived as a challenge to our identity.

- Curiosity in practice means approaching...

"it’s faster to implement a piece of technology than it is to get 10,000 people to stop doing what they’ve been doing for a decade and start to do new things and work in new ways"

Hilton and I unpack the hidden dynamics of organizational change, and the influence of informal power dynamics on transformation. Most change programs falter, not due to strategy, but because leaders often overlook the invisible power of trust and connection networks. Amidst the 'talent' lists and org charts, do you know where your powerful influencers are in your organisation ?

Hilton shares his powerful “people, not pixels” philosophy, explaining how technology investments frequently overshadow the critical human element. It is difficult to budget for, and prioritise, translating a ‘people not pixels’ approach into culture change; similar to what we are finding with AI today, digital transformation stands and falls with the people and the culture of an organisation, not the technology. We also dive into the “3% rule" from Innoviser, exploring how identifying and activating informal power networks can create significant momentum and surface untapped potential and highlight the 'key influencers' in your organisation. This conversation challenges traditional views of leadership and offers a fresh perspective on cultivating a resilient, adaptable culture.

Discover how to transform your approach to change by understanding the relational and emotional infrastructure that truly drives performance. Learn why acknowledging emotions and mapping your organisation’s real connections are non-negotiable for future success. Look at where and how you can unlock potential in your teams and organisations.

How can you use data differently to understand the potential of your organisation ?

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

o C-suite is under such immense pressure that people are overlooked and investment is made in technology, which becomes an efficiency tool that is quicker to implement and yield results than changing people’s habits.

o We ignore previous failures and neglect to learn lessons, yet without an enthusiastic commitment of the culture to change, strategy will flounder and adoption will slow – the vital balancing act is to engage humans proactively: tech + humans, not tech v humans.

o The invisible part of culture is where it has been made amorphous and ambiguous, so that it is seen as the ‘soft’, human-related aspect of change when it is actually the most challenging aspect – to motivate, entice and energise others.

o How humans behave and make decisions within an organisation is important because of how we interact with each other across ecosystems – the many decisions that are made (or not made) on a daily basis must align with the strategy.

o Culture can be defined as the worst behaviour tolerated by management - this is pivotal to sustainable transformation because of the importance of the relational and emotional infrastructure when building culture and performance.

o Functioning informal power networks and humanly - not digitally - connected organisations are built on the basic tenets of humanity, i.e. trust, advocacy, commitment and energy, which in turn are reliant on relationships as the currency of systems.

o In terms of influence, leadership impact involves many other parties on the edges who build communities, create momentum, and unlock hidden potential (cf. Innovisor’s rule that 3% of employees drive 90% of change in an organisation).

o The inherently human approach of organisational network analysis to define the connectors in the organisation enables leaders to unlock potential by engaging those people who provide the ideas and the energy and invite trust.

o Agency is diluted by a lack of clear accountability – a more...