About Matt Mansell
Strategist, adviser, and writer. Thirty years helping complex organisations find clarity and build things that last.
Matt Mansell is a strategy and organisational design consultant with three decades of experience in large, complex organisations, predominantly in the New Zealand public sector. His career has followed a consistent pattern: walking into difficult situations and standing up new capabilities, building the full stack of people, process, policy, governance, and technology that makes a new function actually stick.
He began in technology: testing, quality assurance, and digital delivery, before moving into strategy, architecture, and organisational design. He is as comfortable designing an enterprise architecture as he is facilitating a co-design workshop with concerned frontline staff. The technical and the human are not separate problems.
Alongside the consulting career, Matt has spent twenty years as a preacher and is an emerging writer across three streams: professional essays on leadership, strategy, and complexity; theological writing; and fiction, including a completed YA fantasy novel manuscript.
He lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with his wife and four children.
If you are looking for Matt's fiction writing, visit Mythopoeia.
What I bring
- Futures-back problem solving. Diagnosing complex problems by reasoning backwards from a future state where they don't exist. Forming rapid, accurate views of what's going on and what's needed.
- Capability design. Building new organisational functions from scratch: policy, process, roles, governance, technology, training. The full stack.
- Co-design facilitation. Bringing people to the answer rather than delivering it. Implementation is a social problem. Designing for adoption and ownership from the start.
- Organisational navigation. Experienced at slotting new capabilities into complex, entrenched organisations. Knows the political and social work required to make change stick.
- Cross-domain synthesis. Drawing from complexity science, systems thinking, theology, and organisational behaviour, and translating them into practical insight.
- Writing and public communication. Long-form writing that bridges complex ideas to practical application. Twenty years of preaching has sharpened the ability to move people, not just inform them.
Work together
If you are navigating a complex challenge and want a thinking partner who has been in the room before, get in touch.
Get in touch