Our Philosophy
Business transformation is a people problem, not a strategy problem.
After 25 years leading organisations through growth, turnaround and transformation, the lesson is clear: understanding human psychology is the single most powerful lever available to any leader. Everything else is secondary.
The uncomfortable truth
Most transformations fail, and it's almost never about the plan.
Organisations invest heavily in new systems, processes and strategies. Yet research consistently shows that between 60–70% of transformation programmes fail to deliver their intended outcomes. The root cause is rarely the strategy itself.
It comes down to culture, values and the psychological dynamics at play within teams. Culture is not a soft issue. It is strategy in operation. When transformation ignores the human operating system beneath the organisational chart, new behaviours simply don't stick.
Primary reason transformations fail
Source: McKinsey & Harvard Business Review meta-analysis
How Field works
We map the psychological terrain before we prescribe any solution.
Understand the real drivers
Every organisation has visible behaviours and invisible motivations. We use psychological assessment to surface the values, fears and identity dynamics that are actually shaping how people act, and resist.
Map the cultural landscape
Most organisations contain multiple competing subcultures. Transformation initiatives frequently create conflict between these subcultures rather than bridging them. We surface these dynamics before they become blockers.
Build lasting change
We embed psychological intelligence into every stage of transformation design, from stakeholder engagement through to leadership development, so that new ways of working genuinely take root.
Psychological assessment dimensions
The six dimensions of Field's psychological mapping process
124-factor analysis
You cannot change what you cannot see.
Our psychological mapping process assesses 124 factors across six dimensions, from individual values and motivational drivers to group identity and trust dynamics. This gives leaders a granular, evidence-based picture of exactly where resistance will emerge and why.
High performers, for instance, are often the most resistant to change, not from stubbornness, but because their sense of self is tightly bound to mastery of the existing way of doing things. Transformation asks them to become novices again. Without understanding this dynamic, most organisations accidentally undermine the people they can least afford to lose.
Once you can see the psychological landscape clearly, you can design transformation that works with human nature rather than against it.
A pattern we see constantly
The competence trap: why expertise becomes an obstacle.
Individuals and teams who have achieved success by becoming exceptionally good at one way of working find it genuinely difficult to unlearn those patterns, even when the context has changed. This is not a failure of intelligence or willingness. It is a feature of how expertise is encoded.
Deep competence creates cognitive efficiency, the ability to perform complex tasks quickly and reliably, but this same efficiency makes it hard to step back and question the fundamental assumptions behind the task.
The most effective approach is to give high performers a meaningful role in designing transformation, rather than positioning them purely as recipients of change. When people feel ownership, the psychological threat diminishes significantly.
Without psychological insight
- Change imposed top-down
- Resistance treated as obstruction
- Culture programme runs separately
- New behaviours don't stick
- 70% failure rate
With psychological insight
- Change co-designed with key players
- Resistance understood and navigated
- Culture embedded in transformation design
- Lasting behavioural change
- Measurable performance improvement
About Matthew
Matthew Bayfield
Matthew founded his first startup at 24, growing it to three countries and multiple millions in revenue before exiting in 2010. Over the following 15 years, he founded a further five startups and took the CEO role at eight additional organisations, including a PLC on the London Stock Exchange, spanning retail, technology, professional services and financial services.
Throughout those roles, the organisations that transformed successfully were those where Matthew invested in understanding the psychological dynamics of the people involved. The ones that struggled were those where strategy and structure were treated as sufficient on their own.
"The most dangerous assumption a leader can make is that people will simply adopt new behaviours because they have been told to. Behaviour follows belief. Change the beliefs, and you change the organisation."
25+
years as CEO
8
organisations led
£7.4m
startup revenue built
1.5 yrs
avg. turnaround time
The entrepreneurial lens
Bringing startup psychology into established organisations.
What makes startups psychologically different
The energy and agility of an early-stage startup are not primarily structural features. They are psychological ones. They emerge from clarity of purpose, genuine psychological safety, high accountability, and compressed feedback loops. Every person's contribution is visible and consequential.
This creates a level of intrinsic motivation that most established organisations can only dream of, and it is reproducible, with the right understanding.
Why importing the surface features doesn't work
Open-plan offices, flat hierarchies, innovation labs. These miss the point. The deeper blockers are psychological. Established organisations carry layers of risk-aversion, political self-protection, and status anxiety that make genuine creative risk-taking feel dangerous.
Until these dynamics are addressed, structural changes will not shift underlying behaviour. Field's approach is to create psychologically protected spaces where new ways of working can take root and demonstrate their value.
Ready to understand what's really driving your organisation?
Every transformation engagement begins with listening, deeply, before recommending anything.
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