Why this.

The pattern I kept seeing

I started my career inside small, scrappy creative teams where decisions happened fast, everyone could see the whole picture, and the work moved because the people cared.

Then I moved into bigger organisations. And the picture changed.

It didn't matter which side of the table I was sitting on. Agency side, pushing new products and brands into organisations that weren't ready to receive them. In-house, trying to shift engineering-led cultures towards design while the system pushed back with process and approvals. Innovation teams built at arm's length, quietly suffocated by the very structures they were supposed to disrupt.

Every time an organisation was under pressure, the response was the same: more process, more governance, more control. And every time, the drag got worse.

The belief that broke

For a long time, I believed better management could solve it. Scope it properly. Protect the team. Push back harder. But you can't out-manage a system that's adapting to forces it doesn't understand. You can't fix burnout with process. And you can't shield people from complexity by absorbing it all yourself.

My last corporate role was the loneliest job I've had.

Hero culture. Information dumping disguised as collaboration. Passive-aggressive resistance wrapped in process compliance. Repetitive work cycles that choked out value before it reached the market. A system that looked productive from the outside and was quietly breaking people on the inside.

I started mapping the mess. Workflows, friction points, unnamed assumptions. Not to fix anything. Just to see the pattern. What looked like chaos had structure. What felt personal was almost always systemic.

And then I crashed. Walked away from all of it.

What changed my mind

After the crash, I found complexity science. Not "here's the answer," but "here's how to recognise what kind of question you're actually asking."

The problems I'd spent three decades trying to solve weren't complicated. They were complex. And the tools I'd been using were designed for a different kind of terrain entirely. The playbooks, the governance frameworks, the stage-gate processes. All built for certainty. Applied to emergence.

The choice I made

I could have gone back in. Found another seat at another table and tried again with better tools.

Instead, I built Unflocked.

Focused interventions. No retainers. Make the invisible visible, coach the team through what surfaces, and build enough navigational capacity that it holds after we step back. Because the longer I'd watched interventions run inside these organisations, the more I saw them become part of the system they were supposed to change.

What I believe now

Working inside these organisations taught me something I couldn't have learned from a framework alone: leadership teams almost always know something is wrong before the data confirms it. They just don't have a shared language for what they're seeing.

That's what Unflocked does. The goal isn't consensus or alignment. It's visibility.

We start with stories from across the organisation, not just the org chart, and make visible the patterns that are shaping behaviour in ways nobody planned for.

"The crash taught me you can't fix systemic drag with individual heroics. Complexity science taught me how to see the system. Unflocked exists so that leaders standing in the middle of it don't have to crash to find a different way through."

- Sherryl Tarnaske