CollaborationImpartialityTransparencyIndependence
Transcend Change We Embrace Change We Lead Innovation We Make a Difference
A learning enterprise helping boards and senior executives lead change in challenging, technical and highly regulated environments, through a better conversation.
Collaboration
We work alongside you, not around you.
Impartiality
Independent counsel, free of agenda.
Transparency
Open, honest conversation throughout.
Independence
Objective thinking that serves your goals.
What we do
What we do and how we do it
Transcend Change is a learning enterprise that helps others move their own organisation forward, in the challenging context of today and the inevitable opportunities of tomorrow. Working at board and senior executive level, we resolve top-level discontinuities; harmonise organisational activity; refine corporate governance; strengthen assurance; and build the cultural understanding and behaviours that let the acceptance of change become routine business: evolution, not revolution. The result is programme-management excellence in challenging, technical and highly regulated environments.
We've found this is best achieved through a better conversation, collective or individual, with collaboration, independence, impartiality and transparency at the heart of all we do.
We help others help their own organisation move forward, turning the acceptance of change into routine business.
Transcend Change
Leadership, Risk & Governance
Our approach
Time spent across the public, private and third sectors has shown the intrinsic link between our people, leadership, risk and governance. We're all comfortable with the individual elements, but the critical relationships between these four fundamentals are rarely well understood, and seldom properly used, either within organisations or during organisational change.
As a former Force Commander in the Royal Air Force, and a businessman working across all three sectors, I've learned that understanding these interactions and dependencies is key to success, and essential for any executive, board member or chairman to be effective in role. This isn't a dark art; it's a part of everyday life, of natural evolution, growth and understanding. You just need the confidence to see it for what it is. Join me on a personal journey that reflects on who you are, what you do, and how you do it.
Leadership
Let your identity expose your power as a leader.
Risk
Let holistic risk management create the opportunity to make a difference.
Governance
Let effective governance ensure you set the pace in best practice.
A better conversation
I specialise in fixing the unfixable.
Big words. But I love a challenge, and I love a conversation.
It's all about having a better conversation. As a skilled mediator, that's what I find so fulfilling: seeing someone begin a process of resolution, contentment or understanding simply because they've had the chance to talk it through. A better conversation leads people to solve their own problem, not to have you solve it for them. The reason is simple: ownership. If they don't own it, they can't live it. When I apply that principle to every aspect of a client's challenge, the work becomes incredible.
I could give you a long list of what I've done, but what I do is not who I am. Who I am informs what I do. My career, whether as a public sector director, CEO, mediator, or former senior officer and pilot, is the wide spectrum of experience that engages my mind, knowledge and passions.
I love learning new things; I love doing things better; I love understanding why something works; and I love a conversation where both sides take away something to savour. I believe I've always been able to offer clients the best service because I never tire of developing myself.
It requires a different way of thinking and sensing.
While the planet is a closed system, the mind needs to be an open one, to recognise the opportunities it has yet to explore.
As one of a small cadre of business leaders to have completed the sustainability leadership development programme, I feel ready to address the issues of our future with a keen knowledge of the environment. One model I developed came directly out of the pandemic: residents of Venice saw fish in the canals for the first time in 120 years. How powerful is that, to witness something not seen in generations? The question, literally and metaphorically, is how we get Venice back on its feet without losing sight of the fish in clear water.
Getting people to bring their own senses to life, neglected or suppressed, is both liberating and inspiring. The prime takeaway from the UK's Higher Command and Staff Course was T E Lawrence's ‘kingfisher moment’: the agility to strike when you recognise the fleeting opportunity. But we can only do that if we understand how we sense things, because often we don't ‘see’ what's there until we've trained the mind to see it.
Our team
The people who leverage the future
Working with people is, without doubt, the most important and most enjoyable part of what we do, and it's people who leverage the future.
James C M Johnston
DirectorJames is a highly experienced public-sector director, CEO, former senior officer and pilot, with deep technical knowledge and a reputation as a professional leader in the business community. He has worked at the heart of government and across a range of senior private-sector and operational roles. An experienced executive consultant, he is recognised for strategic leadership and for inspiring people to deliver organisational change and decommissioning success. Dynamic, enthusiastic and politically astute, he is a skilled decision-maker who thrives on complexity and ambiguity, adapts rapidly to new situations and manages risk effectively, with a sharp understanding of the cultures and behaviours within organisations and structures.
The acceptance of change should become routine business. It's about evolution, not revolution.James C M JohnstonDirector, Transcend Change
Get in touch
Let's have a conversation
Tell us a little about where your organisation is, and where you'd like it to be. We'll come back to you to arrange a conversation.