My Philosophy on Practice
Change, Changing + Leading with Presence
Prompt
This is my response to the question "What do you truly know about what you do as a change practitioner?"
Leading from presence with rigor, rather than from posturing with waywardness, orients your change field to one of reception, reflection, and results.
If I give you anything to refine as your fundamental leadership instrument, learning presence is it.
Because you cannot want change without changing, becoming present to the foundational principle of presence — and then buckling in to do the work is primary.
My proficiency lies in building the reasonably adventuresome and ambitiously strategic change containers, opening the spaces, and awakening systems to the know how and possibilities.
We then begin to harness the frequency for an upleveled field, activating your system for change and changing.
Because systems hold a natural yearning and capability for progression and operating in flow, system responses always emerge where open to it, although often not where you expect.
We listen, notice, go where the higher energy is, graft, and ground to anchor iteratively in the new.
When we're talking about unlocking latent power and potential to effect system change — and what we mean by modern leadership — this is the science and the art.
Learning to do tangible change work means learning to be an ever-upleveling you while learning to run teams and organisations positioned in an ever-upleveling change field, dialed in to the moments.
The future is you operating from that presence, standing amongst the diverse collective, rooted in modern operating awareness - to build healthy, happy, and higher minded work habitats.
As a practitioner of change, I return over and over again to these principles to ground and steer along the way.
Narrative Bio, Kathryn Maloney
Kathryn Maloney, Head of Theeo
Kathryn is an advisor, strategist, coach, and systems design consultant working with organizations large and small to nurture and advance progressive change and innovations, team functioning, and novel approaches to leading that enable fluency and fluidity. In a world that can feel deeply disconnected in its connectivity, a quickening pace that meets so much headwind, and the greatest access to intelligence in human history, she spends much of her time working with leaders to bridge organizational worlds, design companies and functions that will thrive in a post-industrial landscape, learn new org and leadership languages, and transition from former leadership paradigms to become more comfortable, adaptable, and resilient in current ones.
Understanding and applying methodologies and technologies without holding too tightly to them and projecting unreasonable expectations onto them is a large part of her professional charm. Having worked for over twenty five years in the spaces of strategy, transformation and change, leadership, org design, and culture with companies as large as Boeing, Boston Consulting Group, Edelman, and GE; government agencies and NGOs like the United Nations (World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, UNFPA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Reserve, IRS, and Health and Human Services; educational and research companies like Kaplan and Rand Corporation plus start-ups and female-founded businesses, Kathryn is excited by and cautious about this moment in time. Easy fixes are few and far between. Focus, presence, and a committed and applied progressive change approach will always win the race.
She has an academic background in the Applied Behavioral Sciences, is conditioned with a systems thinking lens, influenced by the org development and systems pioneers of the 20th century, and trained as a process and systems design consultant for organizational (as opposed to family) systems. She has deep research and data analysis chops and the rare experience of designing and executing large-scale, rigorous qualitative (human-centered, user-centered design) studies and facilitating the application of grounded results into organizational and public policy changes. She is trained and practiced as an executive/systems coach and master facilitator.
She did her undergraduate work in Italian Language, Literature, and Art History. The blessing of studying art history, language, and culture as an undergrad is a bedrock of her practice and teaching today. Her graduate work in Applied Behavioral Science (applied practice of consulting on leadership and change in organizational systems) through an experiential program (Leadership Institute of Seattle, LIOS) within a naturopathic college (Bastyr University) also gave her a practitioner tapestry far beyond a traditional theory education. A student of Vedic meditation, yoga, and eastern philosophy for close to a decade, Kathryn blends many minds - to include the one in her own belly - to bring wisdom and insight to any moment.
One of her favorite places is silence. Another is the sound of brilliant - and loud - music. Travel, beautiful food and wine, art, design, sunshine, the beach, sunsets, good people, grappling with ideas, solving riddles, and enjoying the moments by not taking it all too seriously make her days feel like good ones.
And while the education, professional and life experiences have taught her plenty, Kathryn's best motivation and most favorite teacher has always been her son, Sean Simonds. He is a kind, deeply insightful, and passionate human who dabbles at the intersections of strategy, the financial markets, research, and writing for UBS in NYC.
