• Dr Sharen Paine

    FOUNDER

  • About me

    My career has provided me with a unique systems perspective and a series of real-world tools that are applicable to a range of settings and outcome-focused projects.  My work encompasses whole-of-system thinking and intra- and inter-organisation networking and collaboration to support organisational adaptability and viability.  My key focus is on working with organisations to define their organisational functioning such that organisational effort is aligned with purpose and strategy. This leads to improved service provision and organisational performance (productivity), and an ability to more rapidly leverage the benefits technology has to offer. 

    I can work across a range of sectors by applying the broad concept of system-thinking to diverse and at times competing interests. I have experience locally, nationally, and internationally working with organisations and diverse stakeholders. I have worked in a variety of sectors including energy, telecommunications, customs, health, and software development. My roles have included work at the senior management level, externally as a consultant, and as a project manager or director for information technology development companies both in New Zealand and in Australia, and in telecommunications in the UK.

    I hold a doctorate in organisational cybernetics and systems thinking, specifically in the use of model-based management to address the disconnects between governance, management, and operations to improve organisational functioning and performance. My research utilised a model that ensures the parts of an organisation are connected, coherent, and cohesive, with a focus on aligning the services provided with the variety of needs of consumers, to achieve the overall purpose of the organisation. Key features of the model are its dynamism, ensuring the organisation remains adaptable and aligned to its environment, an emphasis on communication utilising robust data, and balancing the autonomy of the organisation’s parts with the cohesion of the whole. The same model applies to the whole organisation and each of its parts, providing a common framework and language across the organisation.

I have been involved with understanding organisational functioning, how organisations work, and especially how we can use diagrams and frameworks to improve our understanding of them for many years.

I am fascinated by the fact that so many organisations seem to have only a vague idea about how they really function. The view they do have is often siloed, disjointed, incomplete, and varies markedly amongst individuals.

Most of my work has been involved, one way or another, with helping organisations to work this out. Unfortunately, they are not seeking this clarity to improve their performance per se, but because they have a project, often IT-related, that requires this clarity. The driver for better understanding, therefore, does not come from within the organisation and is periodic at best.

When starting a project months can be spent as the organisation attempts to define and articulate what it does and how it does it. Furthermore, only a moment-in-time understanding is achieved. The initiating project is implemented but the organisation does not set itself up to evolve and adapt its functioning in response to the ever-changing environment.

How is this so? Why do organisations put up with often chaotic functioning, rework, stressed staff, and frustrated customers, until the next ‘big change’?

How can organisations be effectively governed and managed when they operate in such an opaque way? How can such an organisation generate the information it needs? How can it hope to leverage the potential value of the rapidly changing IT landscape if it is not constantly reviewing and adapting its functioning and maintaining a clear understanding of it?

Organisations would be wise to move beyond the chaos, opacity, and project-based approach, towards a clear, integrated, and continually adapting understanding of their functioning – utilising systems thinking, cybernetic principles, and a model-based-management approach.

This is what I aim to help organisation’s achieve.