Enabling people and organisations to deliver what matters.
Understanding before solutions. Connection before action. Leadership that stays close to the work.
Open Change partners with organisations facing complex performance challenges by bringing people closer to the reality of their work and closer to each other.
When problems are complex, understanding comes before solutions.
Instead of starting with assumptions about what’s wrong, we start by understanding how work is experienced across the system. We combine story-listening, studying work practices, look for patterns , and use collective sense-making to support decisions grounded in reality.
Performance depends on relationships.
Focus, alignment and coordinated action emerge when people understand each other's realities and work through different perspectives together. We design structured conversations that help knowledge move across teams, functions and levels, turning fragmented experience into shared understanding.
Leadership shapes the conditions for performance.
When work is complex, leadership is less about directing people and more about creating the conditions for people to think, learn and improve together. We help leaders build the curiosity, confidence and capability to stay connected to the reality of work and lead meaningful change.
The approach
Most organisations already have what they need to improve. They have the knowledge, the ideas, and the people who can see what is getting in the way. What they often lack are the connections and conditions that allow those insights to reach the right people and shape action.
Open Change works close to the work. That means spending time where things actually happen, listening to the people who understand it best, and bringing different perspectives together so organisations can see more clearly and act more effectively.
We work with leaders to strengthen the questions they ask, their connection to what is really happening, and the conversations that allow people to speak honestly and think together. We help teams turn individual experience into shared understanding, and shared understanding into action.
The results
Open Change helps organisations build the foundations that sustainable performance depends on.
Clearer priorities. People understand what matters and how their work contributes to it.
Better decisions. Leaders act on a deeper understanding of operational reality, not assumptions or filtered information.
Stronger coordination. Teams work across boundaries with less friction and greater shared purpose.
Continuous improvement. People at every level are better equipped to identify challenges, solve problems, and improve how work gets done.
Because better performance starts with a better understanding of the work itself.
Meet the founder
Daniel Hummerdal started out as a pilot, trained as a psychologist, and has spent the last two decades working with large, complex, high-risk organisations trying to understand why performance falls short of what people are actually capable of.
He’s worked with organisations like Netflix, Laing O'Rourke, and Digital Realty. He spent six years as Chief Advisor Safety Innovation at New Zealand's national safety regulator. Daniel co-authored research, built practitioner communities, and sat with a lot of leadership teams trying to close the gap between how they think their organisation works and what's actually happening on the ground.
Central to his work is that performance challenges are almost always relational. Performance improves when leaders and employees work well together, not simply by tightening controls.
Daniel is the author of the book An Invitation to Safety Conversations a practical guide helping leaders use conversation as a driver of organisational learning and performance. And he founded Open Change to do the same thing at organisational scale.
If these ideas reflect challenges you're seeing in your organisation, the most useful next step is a conversation. No pitch, no proposal. Just a genuine exchange about what's happening in your organisation and whether there's something worth exploring together.
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