EVOLVE

Matthew Hodgson has spent over thirty years inside complex, high-compliance, resource-constrained organisations — government and corporate — helping executives through the same types of problems: why investment in technology change so rarely produces what it was designed to achieve. He co-founded Zen Ex Machina after establishing, across enough engagements to be certain, that the cause is structural — that the organisational design itself determines the outcome, regardless of how well the people within it execute. Most practitioners identify what is not working and move on. Matthew stays until the replacement model is in place, and behaviours are self-sustaining, because the conditions that produced the original failure will reassert themselves if the replacement is not deeply embedded. He has found, over and over again, that few practitioners are willing to do this and fewer still are capable of it.

Evolve is the diagnosis he has been developing for thirty years.

Matthew holds a Master of Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Newcastle. He is one of only a few people in the Asia-Pacific region who holds both a SAFe SPC and Scrum.org PST certifications. He lives in Canberra, Australia, with his partner Mia Horrigan and their dog, Chewie.hold

Standard advisory starts with a solution, framework or vendor product in search of a problem. ZXM starts with a diagnostic — an independent, structured inquiry into what the organisation is actually dealing with before any recommendation is formed.