Curiosity
We're obsessed with finding what's causing the problem. We keep digging.
Who we are
We know how organisations work. We know how humans work.We know what to do when they collide.
Global experts in community engagement, customer experience, strategy and leadership, with 60 combined years inside the systems we now help organisations fix.
Our vision
A world where every person is seen.
Our mission
To make systems work for the people they exist to serve.
Our values
Safety
Psychosocial safety matters. People need to be able to tell us what's really going on.
Fearlessness
We say what we see, clearly and respectfully, even when it is uncomfortable.
Difference
We seek out different perspectives that help us see assumptions, barriers and patterns others may miss.
Well known for Community Engagement and Strategic Planning practice · Author, speaker and facilitator · Award winning entrepreneur
Becky has spent close to 30 years at the intersection of strategy, community and humanity, across all levels of government and with organisations navigating complex, politically sensitive decisions. Named South Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010, she's an author, speaker and facilitator, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and co-instigator of Global Community Engagement Day. She also sits on the SACE Board of South Australia. She knows her way around strategy, governance and systems, and what happens when the humans inside them aren't really in the room. She's spent her career making the unsaid sayable.
We're making a decision about them. Why aren't they here?
Diagnosed neurodivergent late, she brings perspective, language and very little patience for systems that don't work for the people using or working in them. She names the thing everyone's thinking but nobody's game to say, kindly and usually immediately, before it costs anyone another decade of pretending.
Nothing off limits. Open book.
Well known for Customer Experience and Leadership Development practice · Award winning corporate guru, now entrepreneur
Built her Customer Experience practice over thirty years in senior leadership, with national accountability for product portfolios worth hundreds of millions. She also has a Masters in Business Leadership and has spent years working with leaders on the human side of organisations. She loves 360 feedback, leadership development and ADHD coaching. Give her a complicated human, a broken system and some feedback nobody knows what to do with, and she's happy.
I am exhausted from trying to fit my life into your process.
Diagnosed neurodivergent late after health issues that made a lot of things make sense. She brings the operating model brain and the people brain: where the system is breaking, and the shortest honest path to fixing it. No management theatre. No 87-slide deck. Just the fix.
Nothing off limits. Open book.
What we discovered about fixing systems, and about ourselves.
We first met in 2017. But when we reconnected years later, around sobriety, recent diagnosis, and the neurodiversity of our children, we actually connected. Neurodivergent people naturally gravitate toward each other. Research shows that similar brains form stronger connections, even when nobody's called it that yet. We didn't need the research to know it was real.
Work wise, we were both running successful consulting practices: Becky in community engagement and strategy, Karen in customer experience and leadership. Different sectors, different angles, but when we started talking, we realised we were solving the same problems for the same kinds of organisations, the same kinds of people. The work was identical. Only the names were different.
So we built FTS., the same way our brains actually work: in voice notes, not meetings. On energy, not schedule. With a dashboard we built that gave us a ridiculous pig scrolling down the screen every time something gets done, because we needed dopamine, not discipline.
And somewhere in that, we realised something bigger. We were already designing systems that worked for us while building a business about fixing systems for everyone else. We were the proof of concept.
Two neurodivergent entrepreneurs who recognised each other, and built a business that works because it's built for how we think, not despite it.
Becky & Karen
We don't turn up as trainers. We turn up having run the things we're looking at.
Between us, that's sixty years inside organisations: carrying national accountability for product portfolios worth hundreds of millions, shaping statewide policy reform, running hospitals through governance overhaul, sitting on statutory boards, managing centres and IT functions, and putting communities in the room where decisions get made. Not studied from the outside. Lived from the inside, in the rooms where the hard calls got made and we were the ones making them.
That depth is why we can tell the difference between a symptom and a cause within the first conversation. See how we apply it through our EVA model.
- 60
- combined years inside organisations and systems
- 200+
- clients across government, not for profit and private sectors
- $100m+
- product portfolios carried with national accountability
- 50,000+
- people involved in conversations about things that matter
Where those thirty years each actually went
Board and governance
Statutory boards, finance, risk and compliance, chair and director roles across health, education and environment.
Policy and legislative reform
Statewide reform processes and politically sensitive decisions that had to hold up in public.
Community and stakeholder engagement
Over 200 government, not for profit and private clients. Award winning practice, from outback halls to ministerial roundtables.
Customer and staff experience
National accountability for large product portfolios, and CX thinking pointed at internal process, not just the shopfront.
Leadership development and coaching
Masters level business leadership, 360 feedback, executive coaching and ADHD coaching, alongside workforce, organisational and operating model design.
Operations, centres and IT
Centre management, service operations and IT management, through large-scale digital transformation and change implementation. We know what it takes to actually run the thing, not just describe it.
Health, education and public services
NHS trusts, SA Health, hospitals, schools and the senior secondary qualifications authority. Complex systems with real consequences.
Strategy, research and evaluation
Strategic plans, participatory evaluation frameworks, impact reporting and published research behind the practice.
Facilitation and communication
Keynotes, workshops, bestselling authorship and the knack for making the unsaid sayable in a room that would rather not.
FTS. is led by two incredible founders who happen to have neurodivergence, and that's exactly what makes us able to see where things are going wrong for you so clearly. We notice the workarounds, the friction and the absurdity that everyone else has learned to live around.
Our own neurodivergence is the push-pull of Autism and ADHD interacting, which research links to higher rates of anxiety, depression and burnout, and which, for us, shows up in the gap between what we can do and what the system expects. That's been our experience, to varying degrees and at different times.
However, that's a very different experience to what's often called high support needs autism, where someone might be nonverbal or minimally verbal, need full support with daily living like dressing, eating or staying safe, and require care around the clock, for life. That is daily reality for a lot of families, not a metaphor. We are not speaking for that experience, and we don't want our story to blur into it.
The spectrum is wide for a reason, and the people at the higher-support end of it deserve to be seen and resourced on their own terms, not folded into ours.
So when we talk about being brilliant, unapologetic, boss-bitch versions of ourselves, that's specifically about our end of the spectrum. It is one part of the story of autism: ours.
Boss-bitch brilliant, for us, means knowing what you're brilliant at and equally knowing what you're not, and owning both.
Get in touch
Ready to see your system differently?
Tell us what your people are working around. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right people to help.
Start a conversation