WHO WE ARE
Dr Elsbeth Johnson
Founder & Managing Director
SystemShift was founded by Dr. Elsbeth Johnson in 2016, in response to leaders asking Elsbeth to help them bring her academic knowledge and commercial experience to bear on some of their biggest issues.
Some of these issues – such as "we have an execution problem" or "we're not growing fast enough" – suggested they had a strategy problem. It needed to be either clearer, and/or more widely shared and understood within their organisation.
Other issues – such as "we need better leadership", or “we’re not showing up in the right way” – suggested they had capability or culture gaps they needed to address.
Whatever the issue, Elsbeth’s approach was to took was to look at the whole system that is producing these results and diagnose the underlying gaps. This was the founding philosophy for SystemShift – and remains so today. And Elsbeth’s background, as an equity analyst, a corporate strategist and a business school professor, brings an almost unique skill-set and perspective to the issues an organisation is facing.
This background, combining both academic rigour with commercial acumen, and the approach it enables, is at the heart of what SystemShift offers clients – and what makes us so different. While still led by Elsbeth, we now have a network of fellow “pr-academics” and coaches with these same combinations. Which means our clients get concrete, actionable solutions, grounded in the best research – solutions that neither professors without business acumen, nor consultants without academic heft, could offer.