Coming Soon
A New Way to Think About Transformation
"A deeper exploration of why the problem often isn't what we think it is and why the quality of our connections, shapes the level of our impact."
Coming 9th December 2026
Pre-orders are now open.
Be among the first to explore Melanie Bedggood’s new book exploring what it really takes to align purpose, people and planning for transformational impact.
CHAPTER 1
When the Problem Has a Face
2013
I walked into a room and found my client cowering in the corner, her arms wrapped around her face. She was visibly upset, tears streaming down her face. What struck me most was how different she looked from the person I usually knew. She was normally the toughest person in the room. She had a hard exterior and a way of holding herself that made it clear she could handle almost anything. But that day the wall was down. A young mum carrying more challenges than most adults ever will, like nearly every young person our service worked with. She was just fifteen years old. Little did I know that this work inside complex human systems would become a bridge into much of the work that followed: working with leaders, organisations, communities and systems where the challenge was to create the conditions for many people to move together.
At the time, I was leading an intensive casework service for some of New Zealand's most complex and high risk young people and families. I was still deeply involved in the frontline work while leading the service, and this was the kind of complexity we were working with every day. There were layers of family, relationships, history, responsibility, fear, loyalty, professional systems and community networks operating at once. Nothing happened in isolation. A decision made by one person could affect someone else. An intervention that reduced one risk could create another consequence somewhere else. A family could be both a source of support and a source of risk. Back then I didn't have the language I have now for what I was seeing. The girl was tough, but whatever had happened that day had brought the wall down. And around her were other people, other relationships and other realities that mattered just as much to what needed to happen next. Her mother had her own perspective, the other professionals involved had theirs and the young woman had hers. The history between them mattered and the relationships between them all mattered; and the question of what would actually help her could not be separated from all of those things. This was the world I was working in. And it was teaching me that sometimes the hardest part of change isn't the work you do with the person in front of you, it's the work you do in the space between people.
My education had given me a number of different lenses for understanding people and systems. I had studied political studies, counselling, sociology and the social sciences, alongside the theory and practice of social work. I was interested in what happens when we look beyond the individual and consider the relationships, families, communities and wider environments around them. I had been exposed to family systems thinking and ecological ways of understanding human behaviour, and these ideas gave me language for something I was already beginning to notice: people don't exist separately from the environments and relationships around them. But working directly with families taught me something that theory alone couldn't. In real life, the layers don't arrive separately. They arrive all at once. A young person can be a daughter, a mother, a sister, a partner and a client at the same time. A family can be both a source of support and a source of risk. A service can be trying to protect someone while unintentionally removing something they also depend on. One professional can see an immediate safety issue while another is thinking about long term wellbeing. Everyone can be acting from a legitimate perspective and still be creating a system that isn't moving. And this wasn't simply a feature of family work, it was a feature of human systems. And so organisations are no different. A person arrives at work carrying a whole life with them. A manager is simultaneously responsible to the people above them, the people they lead, the customers they serve and the results they are expected to deliver. A team can be both a source of belonging and a source of pressure. A department can be essential to the organisation while being experienced by another department as the thing getting in the way. A decision that looks right from the executive table can create consequences on the frontline that are almost invisible to the people who made it. The same is true as systems become larger. Organisations sit within communities. Communities sit within wider societies. Decisions made in one part of a system can create consequences somewhere else, often far removed from where the decision was made. The scale changes, but there is a simple truth underneath it all: whenever people are trying to move together, what happens between them matters.
At the time, I didn't have such a deep insight. I was simply passionate about creating change and talented at understanding how to approach that, and we were getting remarkable results. Within months, the service was recognised as the country's top new start up. In our first year we achieved one hundred percent client retention, something that was virtually unheard of in the sector. I was still doing a lot of the work on the floor while leading the service. We were building partnerships across community and service providers, developing pilot programmes including specialised family violence and mental health programme delivery, and building a local community network with more than fifty organisations as members. From the outside, it looked like we had become very good at working with highly complex clients. Inside the service, we had a running joke: the clients were the easy part.
What we meant was that the work with the immediate client was often not the hardest part. The hard part was getting everyone else to collaborate. The family, the school, social services, health professionals and community organisations. The people who had been involved for years and had their own experiences, their own relationships with the family and their own understanding of what needed to happen. We could often see what needed to happen for the young person, but that didn't mean everyone else could see it in the same way. People were coming from different professional perspectives, different experiences, different responsibilities and different understandings of what the problem actually was. Everyone could be working incredibly hard, everyone could genuinely care, everyone could be doing what they believed was right. And yet everyone could still be pulling in different directions. The collaboration wasn't an annoying layer sitting around the work. The collaboration was the work.
I was naturally good at helping people find their way into that work. I could understand where people were coming from and provide the context that helped them understand where someone else was coming from. I could use storytelling to help people see what they couldn't necessarily see from their own position. I could connect people, build relationships and create a picture that allowed different parts of a situation to make sense together. At the time, I didn't think of this as a methodology. I certainly didn't call it Unity. I was simply following something I had been developing through my work for years: helping people see more of the picture.
What the complexity of this work gave me was another layer: I began to see what happened when people could only see the part of the system they were standing in. A decision could make perfect sense from one perspective and create consequences somewhere else. Removing a young person from a family could reduce an immediate risk while also removing a source of connection and support. Protecting someone from one relationship could create another kind of isolation. A service could be meeting its own responsibilities while the wider system became more fragmented. Nobody necessarily had to be doing anything wrong, yet the system as a whole could still be producing the problem. Later in my career, I saw it in leadership teams, organisations, communities and whole systems. The environments changed. The language changed. The problems looked different. But underneath them, I kept finding the same pattern. People were trying to move from one reality to another, and they were dependent on doing it together. And when the relationships between them weren't working, transformation became harder, no matter how capable the individual people were.
If you have ever led change in an organisation, you may recognise the pattern. You can have a strategy that makes complete sense to the executive team, capable managers and people who care deeply about the work, and still struggle to get the organisation moving in the same direction. You can communicate the strategy repeatedly and still find that people aren't hearing the same thing. You can have all the right people in the room and still not have alignment. You can invest in leadership development, restructure teams, introduce new systems and create new processes, and still find that the same problem keeps appearing. And eventually, the problem often gets a face. Someone becomes the difficult employee, the resistant manager, the person who doesn't get it, the person who isn't aligned, the person who keeps causing problems. Sometimes that person genuinely is behaving in ways that need to be addressed. But sometimes the person carrying the problem isn't the person who created the pattern. Sometimes they are simply where the pattern has become visible.
This became particularly clear to me in organisations; think about the middle manager. Senior leadership may have a strategy, a direction and a clear picture of what needs to happen. The people closest to the work may be experiencing something entirely different. They are dealing with customers, clients, workload, competing priorities and the consequences of decisions made further up the organisation. The middle manager sits between those worlds. They are expected to translate. When the systems are connected, they can become a powerful bridge. When they aren't, they can become the place where the tension lands. They may be described as weak because they can't get their team to do what leadership wants. They may be described as controlling because they are pushing too hard. They may be told they are not aligned because they are raising concerns from the frontline. But sometimes the person in the middle isn't the source of the problem. They are where the disconnection has become visible.
Once you see that pattern, it's difficult to unsee it. A child becomes the problem in a family. An employee becomes the problem in a team. A middle manager becomes the problem between leadership and the frontline. A department becomes the problem in an organisation. One organisation becomes the problem in a community. A community becomes the problem in a policy system. The scale changes. The pattern doesn't.
This doesn't mean we should stop looking at individual behaviour. Quite the opposite. Individual behaviour matters enormously. But if we only look at the individual, we can miss the conditions that are shaping what is happening. We can spend enormous energy trying to fix the person who is displaying the problem while leaving the relationships and conditions around them untouched. That was something I saw repeatedly in the family work. The system would become distressed, someone would respond and the immediate situation would stabilise. Then another crisis would happen, everyone would respond again and we became very good at responding to crisis. But responding to crisis can become a pattern in itself. The busier we became, the more important it was to ask whether we were actually changing the pattern or simply becoming more efficient at managing it.
There is a profound difference between a system that is functioning and a system that is transforming. A system can become highly organised around dysfunction. It can have meetings, processes, interventions, escalation pathways and dedicated experts, all working exactly as they are meant to, and still not be moving towards anything different. As I understood this more and more, a key question began to change for me. What needs to happen between the people and within the broader system for transformation to become possible? That was a much bigger question. It meant looking at the relationships between people, not simply the people themselves. It meant creating shared understanding. It meant helping people see the context they couldn't see from where they were standing. It meant building relationships before expecting collaboration or gaining insights. It meant finding a direction that people could genuinely move towards rather than simply telling them where they needed to go. And it meant recognising that sometimes the most important intervention wasn't another service delivered to the person at the centre of the problem. Sometimes the intervention was changing what was happening around them.
This was also where I began to understand the difference between understanding a system and knowing how to create movement within one. I was training to see the systems, see the relationships and see the different perspectives. But transformation required something more. It required knowing what needed to happen first, what could happen next and what couldn't happen yet because something underneath it hadn't been established. I became fascinated by sequencing. Not simply what should be done, but what needed to happen first, what could happen next and what could not yet happen because the conditions underneath it were missing. I would eventually see this everywhere: in leadership, business, organisational change, policy development, family work and community transformation. Transformation isn't simply a collection of good interventions, the sequence matters and that wasn't just about the change strategy.
Over time, through years of working across different environments, I began to recognise that there were certain conditions that made movement between people more possible. I didn't have the language for them at first. I simply knew that something changed when people could trust one another enough to stay in relationship, when they could find enough shared meaning to understand what they were moving towards, and when they experienced themselves as having a place in what was being created. Eventually, those conditions would become part of what is now identified as Unity Formula: Trust, United Meaning and Belonging.
But Unity wasn't about everyone agreeing and it wasn't about making people think and behave the same. It wasn't even about removing difference or conflict. It was about creating enough connection between different people and perspectives for movement to become possible. People don't have to become the same to move together.
That is what I couldn't yet articulate in that room back in 2013. I could see the young woman, I could see her mum and I could see the family. I could see the services and I could see the history and complexity around them. I could feel the tension between what each person wanted and what each person was capable of hearing from the other. But I didn't yet have the language for understanding why some systems could come together and others could not. I only knew that when people were connected, when they could see one another, when they could find enough shared meaning and when they felt they belonged in the process, something different became possible. This seeing is what sat behind the high performance and success rate of the service. What I didn't yet fully understand was that when those conditions were missing, even extraordinary effort could fail to produce movement. I think about that fifteen year old girl differently now. Not because I have discovered the perfect answer to what should have happened that day, but because I can see more of what was happening around her. I can see how easy it would have been to make her the centre of the intervention because that was where the pain was most visible. I can see how easy it would have been to focus on getting her to change, or her mum to change. But the deeper work was in the relationships around her. In the family, in the services and in the conditions that might allow all of those parts to move in a more unified direction.
Sometimes those conditions are there and transformation can begin. Sometimes the work is to create them. If transformation is the goal, we have to become willing to look beyond the face of the problem and into the space between people. We have to ask what is happening in the system, what conditions are present, what conditions are missing and what needs to happen next. Because the person carrying the most visible pain isn't always the source of the pattern. Sometimes they are simply the place where the pattern has become visible.
So the question becomes, what needs to be true between us for transformation to become possible? And that question changes everything.
At the time, I was leading an intensive casework service for some of New Zealand's most complex and high risk young people and families. I was still deeply involved in the frontline work while leading the service, and this was the kind of complexity we were working with every day. There were layers of family, relationships, history, responsibility, fear, loyalty, professional systems and community networks operating at once. Nothing happened in isolation. A decision made by one person could affect someone else. An intervention that reduced one risk could create another consequence somewhere else. A family could be both a source of support and a source of risk. Back then I didn't have the language I have now for what I was seeing. The girl was tough, but whatever had happened that day had brought the wall down. And around her were other people, other relationships and other realities that mattered just as much to what needed to happen next. Her mother had her own perspective, the other professionals involved had theirs and the young woman had hers. The history between them mattered and the relationships between them all mattered; and the question of what would actually help her could not be separated from all of those things. This was the world I was working in. And it was teaching me that sometimes the hardest part of change isn't the work you do with the person in front of you, it's the work you do in the space between people.
My education had given me a number of different lenses for understanding people and systems. I had studied political studies, counselling, sociology and the social sciences, alongside the theory and practice of social work. I was interested in what happens when we look beyond the individual and consider the relationships, families, communities and wider environments around them. I had been exposed to family systems thinking and ecological ways of understanding human behaviour, and these ideas gave me language for something I was already beginning to notice: people don't exist separately from the environments and relationships around them. But working directly with families taught me something that theory alone couldn't. In real life, the layers don't arrive separately. They arrive all at once. A young person can be a daughter, a mother, a sister, a partner and a client at the same time. A family can be both a source of support and a source of risk. A service can be trying to protect someone while unintentionally removing something they also depend on. One professional can see an immediate safety issue while another is thinking about long term wellbeing. Everyone can be acting from a legitimate perspective and still be creating a system that isn't moving. And this wasn't simply a feature of family work, it was a feature of human systems. And so organisations are no different. A person arrives at work carrying a whole life with them. A manager is simultaneously responsible to the people above them, the people they lead, the customers they serve and the results they are expected to deliver. A team can be both a source of belonging and a source of pressure. A department can be essential to the organisation while being experienced by another department as the thing getting in the way. A decision that looks right from the executive table can create consequences on the frontline that are almost invisible to the people who made it. The same is true as systems become larger. Organisations sit within communities. Communities sit within wider societies. Decisions made in one part of a system can create consequences somewhere else, often far removed from where the decision was made. The scale changes, but there is a simple truth underneath it all: whenever people are trying to move together, what happens between them matters.
At the time, I didn't have such a deep insight. I was simply passionate about creating change and talented at understanding how to approach that, and we were getting remarkable results. Within months, the service was recognised as the country's top new start up. In our first year we achieved one hundred percent client retention, something that was virtually unheard of in the sector. I was still doing a lot of the work on the floor while leading the service. We were building partnerships across community and service providers, developing pilot programmes including specialised family violence and mental health programme delivery, and building a local community network with more than fifty organisations as members. From the outside, it looked like we had become very good at working with highly complex clients. Inside the service, we had a running joke: the clients were the easy part.
What we meant was that the work with the immediate client was often not the hardest part. The hard part was getting everyone else to collaborate. The family, the school, social services, health professionals and community organisations. The people who had been involved for years and had their own experiences, their own relationships with the family and their own understanding of what needed to happen. We could often see what needed to happen for the young person, but that didn't mean everyone else could see it in the same way. People were coming from different professional perspectives, different experiences, different responsibilities and different understandings of what the problem actually was. Everyone could be working incredibly hard, everyone could genuinely care, everyone could be doing what they believed was right. And yet everyone could still be pulling in different directions. The collaboration wasn't an annoying layer sitting around the work. The collaboration was the work.
I was naturally good at helping people find their way into that work. I could understand where people were coming from and provide the context that helped them understand where someone else was coming from. I could use storytelling to help people see what they couldn't necessarily see from their own position. I could connect people, build relationships and create a picture that allowed different parts of a situation to make sense together. At the time, I didn't think of this as a methodology. I certainly didn't call it Unity. I was simply following something I had been developing through my work for years: helping people see more of the picture.
What the complexity of this work gave me was another layer: I began to see what happened when people could only see the part of the system they were standing in. A decision could make perfect sense from one perspective and create consequences somewhere else. Removing a young person from a family could reduce an immediate risk while also removing a source of connection and support. Protecting someone from one relationship could create another kind of isolation. A service could be meeting its own responsibilities while the wider system became more fragmented. Nobody necessarily had to be doing anything wrong, yet the system as a whole could still be producing the problem. Later in my career, I saw it in leadership teams, organisations, communities and whole systems. The environments changed. The language changed. The problems looked different. But underneath them, I kept finding the same pattern. People were trying to move from one reality to another, and they were dependent on doing it together. And when the relationships between them weren't working, transformation became harder, no matter how capable the individual people were.
If you have ever led change in an organisation, you may recognise the pattern. You can have a strategy that makes complete sense to the executive team, capable managers and people who care deeply about the work, and still struggle to get the organisation moving in the same direction. You can communicate the strategy repeatedly and still find that people aren't hearing the same thing. You can have all the right people in the room and still not have alignment. You can invest in leadership development, restructure teams, introduce new systems and create new processes, and still find that the same problem keeps appearing. And eventually, the problem often gets a face. Someone becomes the difficult employee, the resistant manager, the person who doesn't get it, the person who isn't aligned, the person who keeps causing problems. Sometimes that person genuinely is behaving in ways that need to be addressed. But sometimes the person carrying the problem isn't the person who created the pattern. Sometimes they are simply where the pattern has become visible.
This became particularly clear to me in organisations; think about the middle manager. Senior leadership may have a strategy, a direction and a clear picture of what needs to happen. The people closest to the work may be experiencing something entirely different. They are dealing with customers, clients, workload, competing priorities and the consequences of decisions made further up the organisation. The middle manager sits between those worlds. They are expected to translate. When the systems are connected, they can become a powerful bridge. When they aren't, they can become the place where the tension lands. They may be described as weak because they can't get their team to do what leadership wants. They may be described as controlling because they are pushing too hard. They may be told they are not aligned because they are raising concerns from the frontline. But sometimes the person in the middle isn't the source of the problem. They are where the disconnection has become visible.
Once you see that pattern, it's difficult to unsee it. A child becomes the problem in a family. An employee becomes the problem in a team. A middle manager becomes the problem between leadership and the frontline. A department becomes the problem in an organisation. One organisation becomes the problem in a community. A community becomes the problem in a policy system. The scale changes. The pattern doesn't.
This doesn't mean we should stop looking at individual behaviour. Quite the opposite. Individual behaviour matters enormously. But if we only look at the individual, we can miss the conditions that are shaping what is happening. We can spend enormous energy trying to fix the person who is displaying the problem while leaving the relationships and conditions around them untouched. That was something I saw repeatedly in the family work. The system would become distressed, someone would respond and the immediate situation would stabilise. Then another crisis would happen, everyone would respond again and we became very good at responding to crisis. But responding to crisis can become a pattern in itself. The busier we became, the more important it was to ask whether we were actually changing the pattern or simply becoming more efficient at managing it.
There is a profound difference between a system that is functioning and a system that is transforming. A system can become highly organised around dysfunction. It can have meetings, processes, interventions, escalation pathways and dedicated experts, all working exactly as they are meant to, and still not be moving towards anything different. As I understood this more and more, a key question began to change for me. What needs to happen between the people and within the broader system for transformation to become possible? That was a much bigger question. It meant looking at the relationships between people, not simply the people themselves. It meant creating shared understanding. It meant helping people see the context they couldn't see from where they were standing. It meant building relationships before expecting collaboration or gaining insights. It meant finding a direction that people could genuinely move towards rather than simply telling them where they needed to go. And it meant recognising that sometimes the most important intervention wasn't another service delivered to the person at the centre of the problem. Sometimes the intervention was changing what was happening around them.
This was also where I began to understand the difference between understanding a system and knowing how to create movement within one. I was training to see the systems, see the relationships and see the different perspectives. But transformation required something more. It required knowing what needed to happen first, what could happen next and what couldn't happen yet because something underneath it hadn't been established. I became fascinated by sequencing. Not simply what should be done, but what needed to happen first, what could happen next and what could not yet happen because the conditions underneath it were missing. I would eventually see this everywhere: in leadership, business, organisational change, policy development, family work and community transformation. Transformation isn't simply a collection of good interventions, the sequence matters and that wasn't just about the change strategy.
Over time, through years of working across different environments, I began to recognise that there were certain conditions that made movement between people more possible. I didn't have the language for them at first. I simply knew that something changed when people could trust one another enough to stay in relationship, when they could find enough shared meaning to understand what they were moving towards, and when they experienced themselves as having a place in what was being created. Eventually, those conditions would become part of what is now identified as Unity Formula: Trust, United Meaning and Belonging.
But Unity wasn't about everyone agreeing and it wasn't about making people think and behave the same. It wasn't even about removing difference or conflict. It was about creating enough connection between different people and perspectives for movement to become possible. People don't have to become the same to move together.
That is what I couldn't yet articulate in that room back in 2013. I could see the young woman, I could see her mum and I could see the family. I could see the services and I could see the history and complexity around them. I could feel the tension between what each person wanted and what each person was capable of hearing from the other. But I didn't yet have the language for understanding why some systems could come together and others could not. I only knew that when people were connected, when they could see one another, when they could find enough shared meaning and when they felt they belonged in the process, something different became possible. This seeing is what sat behind the high performance and success rate of the service. What I didn't yet fully understand was that when those conditions were missing, even extraordinary effort could fail to produce movement. I think about that fifteen year old girl differently now. Not because I have discovered the perfect answer to what should have happened that day, but because I can see more of what was happening around her. I can see how easy it would have been to make her the centre of the intervention because that was where the pain was most visible. I can see how easy it would have been to focus on getting her to change, or her mum to change. But the deeper work was in the relationships around her. In the family, in the services and in the conditions that might allow all of those parts to move in a more unified direction.
Sometimes those conditions are there and transformation can begin. Sometimes the work is to create them. If transformation is the goal, we have to become willing to look beyond the face of the problem and into the space between people. We have to ask what is happening in the system, what conditions are present, what conditions are missing and what needs to happen next. Because the person carrying the most visible pain isn't always the source of the pattern. Sometimes they are simply the place where the pattern has become visible.
So the question becomes, what needs to be true between us for transformation to become possible? And that question changes everything.
A New Way to Think About Transformation
Coming 9th December 2026
Pre-orders are now open.
Be among the first to receive Melanie Bedggood’s new book exploring what it really takes to align purpose, people and planning for transformational impact.
Save $10 via Pre-order $29 (RRP $39).
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