Experiencing Theeo

With Kathryn having my back, Streamline has grown revenues by 5x. More importantly perhaps, a growing discipline to find footing in my own uncompromising truths has been a best outcome. Peeling back the layers to lead at the intersections of growth, sustainability, and the team is real work and what can feel lonely to do alone as a founder. Therein lies the genius that Theeo brings using equal parts expertise, humility, and directness. Now focused on our refreshed business vision and further expansion, I see even more potential on the go forward. While maybe the harder choice as a leader, the dimensional work always at hand within systems is impossible to ignore or step over. For Theeo’s support around it all, we are grateful.

Partnering with Kathryn to shift the way I lead teams, substantively changed the vision and direction of my organisation(s). It aligned strategy and priorities anew, molded them in rigorous rhythms which resulted in my own transformation to a more coherent, truthful vision for my professional direction as a global leader. Our work together has been an invaluable asset personally and professionally. Kathryn's creative and methodological intention behind Theeo’s brand and viewpoint on system designing, organisation change, and modern leadership are an imperative for building and leading organisations truly fit for a modern, generative future.

Working with Kathryn is like having open heart surgery on yourself. Painful, sometimes nauseating, and eventually life-saving. She brought structure, strategy, honesty, and poetry to a systems-change process that began long before I joined the party. She created a format for working that was trusting, agile, ambitious, digitally-enabled and in every sense of the term, fit for modern people. I am glad I caught the tail-end of her journey with us and was able to, with her guidance, shed outdated concepts of efficiency and productivity. Theeo's work with us officially concluded more than a year ago, yet my team and I reference Kathryn's teachings on a daily basis (and sometimes even think we can hear her voice coaching us through it.)

I have experienced Kathryn’s change work from when I joined the BCG Global Marketing leadership team back in 2018 and it has had a significant impact on my professional life and career. She understands that change happens from within the organisation and the individual, and works at a profound level, constituting real development of mindset, personal accountability and interaction with colleagues alongside the organisational redesign. This can be challenging stuff, but is held together with Kathryn’s deep empathy and innate understanding of social dynamics. This is work that those who experience it take with them and become agents of change. Because once experienced, it is very hard to go back to old habits and working practices.

Working with Kathryn and Theeo is like jumping out of an airplane — completely exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. You quickly realize that Kathryn is both pushing you out of the plane and providing the parachute. You just need to trust. If you want to tackle deep work that changes everything about the direction and impact of your work and your team, Theeo is for you.

The time spent working with Kathryn was already a time of change. I was leading a team that was still navigating the pandemic and facing a return to office. So many questions were afloat. How would we re-establish our flow of work? What did hybrid look like? What strategic opportunities could we seize upon? What attitudes, beliefs, practices should we leave behind? I led a Partnerships Team through these questions, where we actively rewrote the rules of our work. As we established a renewed team vision and outcome-focused operating strategy, an agreed-upon way of working, we soon realised that all boats were rising in the process. As I was evolving my own role, so too was everyone on the team. It was certainly a humbling process, and I'm incredibly proud of the collective design work we did and the team morale that we achieved together. Change is inevitable. It is how you navigate it that counts. "No (wo)man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and (s)he's not the same (wo)man" (Heraclitus)