Meet Melanie Bedggood
WORKING WITH
LEADERS, ORGANISATIONS & COMMUNITIES
I work with leaders, organisations and communities that are navigating significant change priorities.
I began my formal professional journey in 2005. One of my earliest and most enduring insights was this: connection isn’t separate from the outcome. It is what makes the outcome possible. Since then, I have worked across service development, leadership and transformation with people, families, leaders, businesses, organisations, communities and systems.
My undergraduate studies at Massey University focused on social sciences, humanities and societies. I loved understanding how people could develop a shared understanding of what mattered and then use that understanding to create meaningful change. I had an intuitive understanding of connection and relationships, but I also found that I could articulate it and turn it into practical design that aligned with priorities to achieve outcomes in complex environments. More than two decades later, although the environments have changed of the years, I have been noticing the same patterns. I have seen what connection makes possible, and I have also seen what happens when it isn’t there.
When it comes to creating significant change, we are often good at focusing on the plan or strategy, but we are not always as good at seeing how all the parts need to move together as we progress our priorities, nor are we that good at understanding that creating the conditions for the whole to move together, is the foundation required to successfully implement our change plans.
That has become the focus of my life’s work.
2008 | From People to Systems
I began my postgraduate studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2008, focusing on mental health and wellbeing from a psychosocial, non medical perspective. I went on to work within some of New Zealand’s most complex and challenging change climates, and this is where many of my early lessons about transformation were formed. A lot of the work was actually about information flow. Different people were holding different pieces of the picture, and getting the right understanding to the right people could fundamentally change what was possible. Where risk was real and difficult decisions had to be made, I learned that it required reverse engineering around the desired outcome and potential risk outcomes, along side of the ability to create the psychological conditions for change. Even in high pressure environments, people can participate willingly in things that are incredibly difficult when the conditions are right.
Alongside my professional journey, lived experience has also shaped the way I understand people, organisations and society; both the environmental conditions and the systemic factors from an operationional poitn of view, that either hinder or promote growth and change. It has given me a perspective that cannot be learnt solely through study or professional practice, and has continually challenged me to look beyond the presenting problem to the conditions surrounding it. I moved into service development early in my career, and this suited the way my mind naturally worked. I would start with the person who was going to use the service and ask: what happens at the point where the service meets the person? What do they need there? What needs to sit around that? What needs to happen next? And always, where are we trying to get to? I have always started with what we are here to achieve. Sequencing became fundamental to the way I designed services. From 2011-2016 I become a start up leader for services operating under Ministerial contracts, working across both kaupapa and mainstream environments. A pattern emerged: the services I led through start up consistently became top performing services in the country within their first year. While I loved the complexity of the work, my apporach was simple. What are we here to achieve? What do we need to build from the ground up to make that possible?
What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that a foundational factor in this success was also my ability to build the environmental conditions for change adoption across the system. Later, while working strategically within the New Zealand health system, contributing to national planning and becoming part of a transformation leadership team, I saw something that became a turning point for me. The misalignment was clear. Different parts of the system were working hard, but they were not always moving towards the same outcome. It was so obvious that I began to ask a different question. What if we could make the underlying pattern visible so people could actually see what was getting in the way?
That question led me to pivot from my public sector career and begin developing a practical solution.
Alongside my professional journey, lived experience has also shaped the way I understand people, organisations and society; both the environmental conditions and the systemic factors from an operationional poitn of view, that either hinder or promote growth and change. It has given me a perspective that cannot be learnt solely through study or professional practice, and has continually challenged me to look beyond the presenting problem to the conditions surrounding it. I moved into service development early in my career, and this suited the way my mind naturally worked. I would start with the person who was going to use the service and ask: what happens at the point where the service meets the person? What do they need there? What needs to sit around that? What needs to happen next? And always, where are we trying to get to? I have always started with what we are here to achieve. Sequencing became fundamental to the way I designed services. From 2011-2016 I become a start up leader for services operating under Ministerial contracts, working across both kaupapa and mainstream environments. A pattern emerged: the services I led through start up consistently became top performing services in the country within their first year. While I loved the complexity of the work, my apporach was simple. What are we here to achieve? What do we need to build from the ground up to make that possible?
What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that a foundational factor in this success was also my ability to build the environmental conditions for change adoption across the system. Later, while working strategically within the New Zealand health system, contributing to national planning and becoming part of a transformation leadership team, I saw something that became a turning point for me. The misalignment was clear. Different parts of the system were working hard, but they were not always moving towards the same outcome. It was so obvious that I began to ask a different question. What if we could make the underlying pattern visible so people could actually see what was getting in the way?
That question led me to pivot from my public sector career and begin developing a practical solution.
2018 | The Solution is Simple
I founded Growth Development in 2018, a private New Zealand based company set up to develop this solution. The founding group of eight brought together expertise across human psychology and performance, culture development, leadership and governance, human resources and change practice.
The solution was developed at the outset and over the following five years Growth Development worked with organisations through engagement insight, training and research projects, alongside the desk based research needed to understand how the approach needed to evolve to create impact at an organisational level. Through this work, I gained an intimate understanding of how transformation efforts break down. I saw how an organisation can have a strategy, capable leaders and good people, and still struggle to achieve the change outcomes it set out to achieve.
As the research and practical work developed, I came to understand that the focus on change buy in was misleading. Ownership was much closer to what we were seeing as the missing link. People need to understand what we are seeking to achieve, why it matters, where they fit and what they can influence. We invested around $2 million in research and development and worked with more than 40 organisations across Aotearoa. What became increasingly clear was that this was not simply a public sector problem. We saw the same underlying dynamics in private organisations, supply chains, value chains, local government and community change. The context changed, but the conditions needed for successful change adoption were remarkably consistent. That was a significant shift in my thinking. I was no longer simply looking at how organisations change. I was beginning to understand something broader about how people and systems move together.
The solution was developed at the outset and over the following five years Growth Development worked with organisations through engagement insight, training and research projects, alongside the desk based research needed to understand how the approach needed to evolve to create impact at an organisational level. Through this work, I gained an intimate understanding of how transformation efforts break down. I saw how an organisation can have a strategy, capable leaders and good people, and still struggle to achieve the change outcomes it set out to achieve.
As the research and practical work developed, I came to understand that the focus on change buy in was misleading. Ownership was much closer to what we were seeing as the missing link. People need to understand what we are seeking to achieve, why it matters, where they fit and what they can influence. We invested around $2 million in research and development and worked with more than 40 organisations across Aotearoa. What became increasingly clear was that this was not simply a public sector problem. We saw the same underlying dynamics in private organisations, supply chains, value chains, local government and community change. The context changed, but the conditions needed for successful change adoption were remarkably consistent. That was a significant shift in my thinking. I was no longer simply looking at how organisations change. I was beginning to understand something broader about how people and systems move together.
2023 | Creating the Conditions for Collective Change
As the work developed, I wanted to explore what these ideas could make possible beyond individual organisations and into communities. We initially tried to work through existing nonprofit organisations and structures. What I encountered was something I had seen in other systems before. The intention was to create change, but the infrastructure around it could make change slower, more complex and more expensive.
Time and resources were being consumed by the requirements of the system itself. Public and community funding could end up supporting administration, reporting and oversight rather than the change it was intended to enable. There was also another consequence. Decisions that needed to happen quickly could take much longer, and the people closest to the problem were not always able to respond with the speed or flexibility the situation required. It became another example of something I had been learning throughout my career: Sometimes the problem is not the people trying to create change. It is the conditions in which they are trying to create it. So rather than continuing to work around a structure that was creating friction, I created a different one.
In 2023, I established UNITY. Aotearoa, a nonprofit social enterprise designed to create a more flexible way to support community change. The purpose was not to create another organisation for the sake of having one. It was to create an infrastructure that could bring businesses, sponsors, community groups and initiatives together and allow resources to move quickly towards the opportunity or problem that needed attention. Any profits are reinvested into the work.
This structure gives us the ability to stand up community initiatives quickly, work alongside businesses and sponsors and respond to emerging needs without creating unnecessary layers of administration. It has reinforced another important lesson for me: if the conditions for change are not right, even good people with good intentions can struggle to create the outcome they are trying to achieve.
Sometimes transformational change means changing the people. Sometimes it means changing the behaviour. Sometimes it means changing the relationships. And sometimes it means changing the system itself.
Time and resources were being consumed by the requirements of the system itself. Public and community funding could end up supporting administration, reporting and oversight rather than the change it was intended to enable. There was also another consequence. Decisions that needed to happen quickly could take much longer, and the people closest to the problem were not always able to respond with the speed or flexibility the situation required. It became another example of something I had been learning throughout my career: Sometimes the problem is not the people trying to create change. It is the conditions in which they are trying to create it. So rather than continuing to work around a structure that was creating friction, I created a different one.
In 2023, I established UNITY. Aotearoa, a nonprofit social enterprise designed to create a more flexible way to support community change. The purpose was not to create another organisation for the sake of having one. It was to create an infrastructure that could bring businesses, sponsors, community groups and initiatives together and allow resources to move quickly towards the opportunity or problem that needed attention. Any profits are reinvested into the work.
This structure gives us the ability to stand up community initiatives quickly, work alongside businesses and sponsors and respond to emerging needs without creating unnecessary layers of administration. It has reinforced another important lesson for me: if the conditions for change are not right, even good people with good intentions can struggle to create the outcome they are trying to achieve.
Sometimes transformational change means changing the people. Sometimes it means changing the behaviour. Sometimes it means changing the relationships. And sometimes it means changing the system itself.
2026 and Beyond | Making Change Possible at Scale
For more than two decades, I have worked across people, services, businesses, organisations and communities. What I see now is that the challenges we experience at different levels are often more connected than we realise. A leadership problem can be a relationship problem. A performance problem can be a systems problem. A change problem can be a problem of ownership, meaning or connection. We often try to solve what we can see without understanding what is creating it. That is where my work is now focused.
Through my writing, speaking, leadership advisory work and the Transformational Change Institute, I am bringing together the frameworks, research and practical experience that have emerged over the years into a broader body of work around transformational change. At the heart of it is still one simple question: What if the problem isn’t the problem? Because when we can see the deeper pattern, we can stop treating symptoms and start focusing on the cause. My ambition is not simply to help people manage change better. It is to contribute to a different understanding of how people, organisations and communities actually change and what makes meaningful change possible. My next chapter is about redefining leadership, not simply as something we do within organisations, but as something we practise across every part of our lives; how we lead ourselves, how we lead our families and children, how we show up in our relationships, our teams, our organisations and our communities. Wherever we have influence, we are leading, whether we recognise it as leadership or not. My latest body of work, which I will be launching in 2027, was initially developed for a traditional leadership audience, extending the Unity work I have been so deeply involved in; but as I delved deeper into the patterns that sit beneath how people respond, behave and relate, I began to see another layer to the work, one that sits at the intersection of leadership and personal development.
We have spent decades developing approaches to leadership, while personal development has largely focused on understanding ourselves, changing our behaviours and becoming the best version of ourselves; yet there has always seemed to me to be a gap between the two. Personal development tends to focus on the individual, while leadership tends to focus on the individual within an organisation or collective; my question became, what happens when we bring those two perspectives together and understand the individual not in isolation, but as part of the families, relationships, teams, organisations and communities we belong to?
That is where this next body of work began to emerge. My work has always been about developing practical frameworks, formulas and compasses that help people make sense of complexity. Through delving further into dysregulation, neuroscience, the brain and neurodiversity, I became increasingly interested not only in understanding why people behave the way they do, but in learning to see the patterns; the patterns in ourselves, the patterns in others and the patterns that emerge between us, and then using those patterns as a compass for understanding what is actually needed.
Because understanding behaviour is one thing; knowing how to respond is another. Our patterns do not exist in isolation, we bring them into our families, our relationships, our parenting, our teams and our organisations, while those environments and relationships continually shape us in return. This is why I believe we need to broaden our understanding of leadership; leadership is not confined to the person with the title, the position or the responsibility, but is something we all practise through the way we respond, relate, influence, create conditions and shape the experiences of the people around us.
This next body of work is therefore not simply another leadership model, nor is it a return to traditional personal development; it is an exploration of what happens when we understand the human being and the collective as part of the same system, giving us a way to see the patterns, understand what sits beneath them and use a practical compass to know what to do next. Because leadership is not just about how we lead others; it is about how we lead ourselves within the systems and relationships we belong to, and that, I believe, is where we begin to redefine leadership.
Through my writing, speaking, leadership advisory work and the Transformational Change Institute, I am bringing together the frameworks, research and practical experience that have emerged over the years into a broader body of work around transformational change. At the heart of it is still one simple question: What if the problem isn’t the problem? Because when we can see the deeper pattern, we can stop treating symptoms and start focusing on the cause. My ambition is not simply to help people manage change better. It is to contribute to a different understanding of how people, organisations and communities actually change and what makes meaningful change possible. My next chapter is about redefining leadership, not simply as something we do within organisations, but as something we practise across every part of our lives; how we lead ourselves, how we lead our families and children, how we show up in our relationships, our teams, our organisations and our communities. Wherever we have influence, we are leading, whether we recognise it as leadership or not. My latest body of work, which I will be launching in 2027, was initially developed for a traditional leadership audience, extending the Unity work I have been so deeply involved in; but as I delved deeper into the patterns that sit beneath how people respond, behave and relate, I began to see another layer to the work, one that sits at the intersection of leadership and personal development.
We have spent decades developing approaches to leadership, while personal development has largely focused on understanding ourselves, changing our behaviours and becoming the best version of ourselves; yet there has always seemed to me to be a gap between the two. Personal development tends to focus on the individual, while leadership tends to focus on the individual within an organisation or collective; my question became, what happens when we bring those two perspectives together and understand the individual not in isolation, but as part of the families, relationships, teams, organisations and communities we belong to?
That is where this next body of work began to emerge. My work has always been about developing practical frameworks, formulas and compasses that help people make sense of complexity. Through delving further into dysregulation, neuroscience, the brain and neurodiversity, I became increasingly interested not only in understanding why people behave the way they do, but in learning to see the patterns; the patterns in ourselves, the patterns in others and the patterns that emerge between us, and then using those patterns as a compass for understanding what is actually needed.
Because understanding behaviour is one thing; knowing how to respond is another. Our patterns do not exist in isolation, we bring them into our families, our relationships, our parenting, our teams and our organisations, while those environments and relationships continually shape us in return. This is why I believe we need to broaden our understanding of leadership; leadership is not confined to the person with the title, the position or the responsibility, but is something we all practise through the way we respond, relate, influence, create conditions and shape the experiences of the people around us.
This next body of work is therefore not simply another leadership model, nor is it a return to traditional personal development; it is an exploration of what happens when we understand the human being and the collective as part of the same system, giving us a way to see the patterns, understand what sits beneath them and use a practical compass to know what to do next. Because leadership is not just about how we lead others; it is about how we lead ourselves within the systems and relationships we belong to, and that, I believe, is where we begin to redefine leadership.
A New Way to Think About Transformation
People don’t always share a clear understanding of the bigger goal or see how it matters to them. Once we are clear on where we want to go, we need to understand what is getting in the way: different needs, perspectives, priorities and ways of seeing the world that pull people in different directions.
Transformation requires us to understand these tensions and how to create the conditions for people to move forward together.
That is the art of building unity.
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).
TL101 | Transformational Leadership
A one day foundation course. Learn how to become a transformational leader that creates the conditions for people to move together toward what matters.
SIMPLE101 | Transformational Management
A one day introductory course to transformational management discipline that develops the conditions your people need while you make real progress on your priorities.
TL101 & SIMPLE101 | 2 Day Foundation Pathway
Two days that unite the two disciplines of transformation. The leadership that builds unity, and the management that delivers priorities, taught as one system so change no longer stalls in the gap between them.
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