About | Merian — Kylie Butler

We help boards and executives see their organisation as it actually is, not as it's reported. We read the room, and we build the room.

THE PREMISE

Maria Sibylla Merian broke with her era by studying insects alive — in their habitat, through metamorphosis — rather than as dead specimens pinned to a board. Most advisory studies the pinned version. We work with the living one.

CHIEF CANDOUR ENGINEER

Kylie Butler

Kylie Butler facilitates the rooms most people would rather not be in: the executive team that has stopped disagreeing, the leadership group halfway through a change nobody believes in, the board that wants a straight answer and keeps being handed a summary.

She has spent more than twenty years doing this, for RAA, SA Water, BHP, BAE Systems, ASC, HomeStart Finance, Anglicare, ACH Group and Helping Hand, and has designed and delivered leadership programs to more than 500 leaders. She is a certified organisational coach (IECL), a certified HBDI practitioner and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

What she is known for is what she does about an hour in. She will name the thing the room has spent that hour walking around, say it plainly, and keep everyone in their seats and still thinking.

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 hastily made 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 slide deck on its own.
Merian exists to help boards and executive teams read their own organisations clearly, before a choice becomes a crisis.

Work With Me

What Merian Does

01 - For Big Decisions

Clarity before a choice becomes a crisis. I 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.
02 - For Strategy Days

A day with your team using shared pictures that let people describe what's really going on without pointing at anyone. I specialise in bringing together boards, executives and cross functional teams to develop strategy that can be understood without the slide deck.
03 - For Board Effectiveness

The board as it actually operates — the papers, the meetings, the gap between what's said at the table and what's known around — to create a picture of the board it hasn’t been able to see itself. From there we build habits that keep the picture visible after I leave.
04 - For Clearing the Air

Workshops for teams carrying something everyone remembers and nobody mentions after a restructure, a hard year, or a conflict. Exploring what each person actually thinks is going on and making those things sayable until the team can have its real conversation.
05 - For Building the Room

Building the conditions for candour in new teams before the concrete sets. I read what this particular mix of people is likely to produce under pressure - and then we create working rules together; how disagreement happens, what gets said at the table, what never gets left for the corridor.