ABOUT
Merian is an advisory practice that helps boards and executive teams see their organisations clearly, the real picture, not the managed one.
-
I spent two decades arriving after the decision was made - leading change, managing consequences, working with what's left when things have already gone sideways. I was on the receiving end of bad change, decisions poorly chosen and poorly planned, not because anyone lacked intelligence or good intent, but because the knowledge that would have changed them never surfaced.
-
The knowledge was almost always there. People inside the organisation knew what would work and what wouldn't but that knowledge never made it to the room where it mattered. It got softened on the way up, or there was no channel for it, or the room wasn't safe enough to say it in.
I got good at the things that surface it: getting people to tell me what was really going on, reading through and beyond the documents, learning how different kinds of organisation tend to behave. Held against each other, those resolve into something far closer to the truth than any board pack on its own.
-
Merian exists to help boards and executive teams read their own organisations clearly, before a choice becomes a crisis.
THE PERSON
Kylie Butler
I love people but I find organisations - the strange machines we build out of each other -endlessly fascinating and genuinely perculiar. Twenty years of working inside them hasn't cured me of either sentiment and if anything it’s deepened both.
I've seen organisations from every angle. I've worked in them, on them, and alongside them, at the frontline of service and at the boardroom table. I've been on the receiving end of poorly considered decisions, and I've made a few of my own, which matters, because I think you can only read a system honestly if you've been humbled by one.
My work involves saying things that are true but not always comfortable, and I've spent a career getting good at raising the issue without raising hairs. My unique skill is knowing what questions to ask to get underneath the managed version of things.
I'm relentlessly curious, dogged about problems that don't want to be solved, and a compulsive connector of dots that don't look related until they suddenly do. Equally at home nerding out over a research paper or shamelessly taking up space on a dance floor.
I've worked alongside leaders and teams in aged care and community services, state and local government, defence, manufacturing, utilities and mining, finance, ports, research, education and FMCG. The surface is similar every time. What sits underneath - the dynamics, the history, the strange and beautiful things that happen when humans gather in numbers - almost never is.
Having seen the same structure resolve a hundred ways is what lets me read a new one fast, and say, kindly, what the people standing inside it can't quite see.
WHY MERIANMaria Sibylla Merian was a 17th-century naturalist with an unusual conviction: that you cannot understand a living thing by studying it dead. While the science of her day worked from preserved specimens and received knowledge, she raised insects herself, feeding them, watching them, painting every stage of their transformation, because she wanted to know how they actually changed, not how they were said to.
At fifty-two she funded her own voyage to Suriname to study them in their real habitat, and learn from the indigenous people who lived alongside them. What she brought back overturned settled beliefs that had simply never been checked against reality.
She understood that real knowledge is earned through patient observation of the living thing and that the received picture, however confidently held, is no substitute for going and looking. I believe this entirely. Your organisation, your leadership and your people deserve a deeper look.
THE WORK
What we do
Board Reviews
A review that reads the board as it actually operates, not as it answers surveys.
Sit through enough board reviews and you'll notice a pattern: the survey comes back mostly positive, the interviews surface a few familiar themes, and the report lands somewhere between reassuring and politely vague. The board files it and carries on. That's not because reviewers do bad work — it's because a board answers a survey the same way it runs a meeting: carefully. So this review starts from a different place.
First I read the board as it actually operates: the papers, the meetings, the gap between what's said at the table and what's known around it. Then I put in front of the board the picture it hasn't been able to see about itself, in a form it can act on — and we build the habits that keep that picture visible after I leave.
Big Decision Facilitation
For the decisions you only get one go at.
A merger, a closure, the next CEO. Watch a board in the weeks before one of these and you'll see the same thing every time: the papers recommend a direction, the meeting agrees with the papers, and the people who can see the problem discuss it in the car park. Then the decision meets reality, and it turns out the problem was known all along. Not anyone's fault; it's what rooms do under pressure.
So the work has two parts. First, find out where the real views sit: not what people will say in front of the chair, what they actually think. Then build the meeting where the decision gets made so those views are inside it, while there's still time for them to be useful.
Clearing the Air
For teams carrying something everyone remembers and nobody mentions.
A restructure, a hard year, a conflict that never got its conversation. These teams are easy to spot: the meetings are polite, the decisions are slow, and the real work happens in workarounds. The usual fix is a values day, which asks people to be different. This works on the conditions instead, because the people were never the problem.
First I hear it straight — what each person actually thinks is going on, said to me because it can't yet be said to each other. Then we get the team in a room and make those things sayable, one at a time, until the team can have its real conversation without me in it. That last part is the point.
Strategy Expeditions
Strategy days that go and find out, rather than rearrange the exhibits.
The usual strategy day is a museum tour: the exhibits chosen in advance, the route fixed, everyone home by four with the conclusions they arrived with. Along the way it produces a wall of butcher's paper and a room full of people who said less than they knew, not because they're disengaged, but because saying "I don't believe this plan" across a table is expensive, and nobody wants to spend that on a Tuesday. An expedition makes a different promise: we go and find out what's actually there.
First I find the real question, the one the day is actually for, which is rarely the one on the agenda. Then I run the day using shared pictures that let people describe what's really going on without pointing at anyone.
In 1699, Maria Sibylla Merian sold her paintings to fund an expedition to Suriname, because the specimens reaching Europe were dead, pinned, and wrong about how anything actually lived. A strategy built only from the papers is a pinned specimen.
Building the Room
Setting up a new leadership team before the concrete sets. A Candour Engineering program.
For teams that have just formed; a new chief executive's leadership team, an executive group after a restructure, a board after renewal. New teams set like concrete. Whatever patterns form in the first few months — who speaks, who defers, what goes unsaid — harden into how the team works, and are expensive to break later. Most teams let this happen by accident. This is the deliberate build.
First I read what this particular mix of people is likely to produce under pressure — where it will be strong, where it will go quiet. Then we build the team's working rules together, in the room, before the concrete sets: how disagreement happens here, what gets said at the table, what never gets left for the corridor.
Advisory and Coaching
For leaders who want to see their organisation as it is, not as a specimen.
Some problems don't need a project. They need someone outside the room who reads it clearly and says what they see - a chair navigating a difficult CEO, an executive team mid-reform, a board sensing something is off before it can name it. Merian advisory is a standing arrangement, not a review:
I read what crosses your desk, sit alongside the hard conversations, build trust with your teams and tell you plainly where the managed version has crept in, including your own.
Eyes open, knowledge shared, tension held.
Decisions are only as good as the conditions they're made in