We diagnose the system. Then we change what is getting in the way.
People Shaped Work is an organisational design and transformation consultancy for organisations facing complex problems that will not yield to another isolated intervention.
We examine how the whole system works: purpose, work, people, power, information, technology and learning. Not as seven separate topics, which is often how a review gets organised, but as one system in which each part quietly shapes the others.
The organisation chart is the smallest part of the story. What matters is how decisions actually get made, how work actually moves, where authority runs out, where information is lost, where the technology creates friction, and where people have built workarounds because the intended system does not survive contact with the actual job. Those workarounds are usually the most honest documentation an organisation has.
Then we work with the organisation to change it..
A DIFFERENT
STARTING POINT
Most consulting arrives with the answer already chosen: a new structure, a new operating model, a new platform, a new programme.
We start somewhere else: not with who is underperforming, but with what this organisation is currently designed to produce. Systems produce what they are built to produce, reliably, whether or not anyone intended it.
That diagnosis determines what happens next. Sometimes the answer is structural. More often it is governance, decision rights, workflow, information, technology adoption or operating model design. Sometimes the most valuable intervention is deciding what to stop.
The approach at scale
Michelle Corrigan, who founded People Shaped Work, has applied it to a national transformation that took cyber security adoption across a workforce of 1.5 million people from around 15 per cent to more than 75 per cent.
Nobody achieves a shift like that by telling 1.5 million people to be more careful.
The way we work
DISCOVER
Find the problem underneath the problem.
We start with the People-Shaped Test: who is excluded by the way this is currently designed? That question runs across seven connected dimensions, from purpose and power through to information and technology.
The Ideal Worker Myth names the person your systems were quietly built around.
The Human Cost Diagram shows what the distance between that person and your actual workforce is costing, and who is absorbing it.
Output: an organisational diagnostic and a prioritised set of places to intervene.
Discover can be commissioned on its own.
REDESIGN
Redesign the system, with the people who work inside it.
The diagnosis determines the intervention: structure, decision rights, governance, service design, workflow, information flow, technology adoption, or the work the organisation should stop doing. We design with the people who will have to make it work, which is the difference between a plan that gets implemented and a plan that gets announced.
Output: a transformation plan with owners, sequence and measures.
CHANGE
Turn the design into reality.
A recommendation is not a transformation. Most programmes are declared a success at roughly the point where the difficult part begins. We stay while the organisation does the work, bringing challenge, pace and an outside view, and we test whether the change is happening in the organisation or only in the progress report.
We do not take accountability away from your executive team. We make the organisation capable of carrying the change itself.
EMBED
Make the new system sustainable.
Good consultancy should make itself unnecessary. Most of it is structured to do the opposite. We hand over the governance, the measures and the capability to keep finding problems without us.
Who you will work with
Engagements are led by Michelle. Depending on the scope of the work, she is supported by associates selected for the specific problem in front of us. The team stays small and senior.
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You may not need a transformation programme. Sometimes what is required is a room, the right people, and an honest examination of one problem that has resisted every obvious solution.
A People Shaped Work Problem Session is not a workshop. We bring the relevant evidence and perspectives together, map the system around the problem, separate symptoms from causes, and establish what should happen next. It may resolve the question outright. More often it shows that the problem is bigger than anyone had assumed, which is worth finding out before committing to a programme. Either way, you leave with a clearer view of the system and a defensible basis for deciding what to do.
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We do not sell technology, or implement it for its own sake. We do not recommend restructures because restructuring is familiar. We do not provide generic engagement programmes, off-the-shelf leadership training, or strategies that are never built into how an organisation actually operates. And we will not help an organisation demand more from its people while leaving the systems around them unchanged.
The only test we care about is whether the organisation works better because the system does.
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You may already know the problem. You may only know that something important is not working and cannot see why. Either is a good place to start.
Michelle’s standing instruction to her own teams is: tell me everything, and tell me early. The same applies here. Tell us what is happening, what you have already tried, and what is at stake. We will help you establish what needs examining, what kind of intervention it warrants, and whether People Shaped Work is the right partner for it.