Phoenix Strategic Management

Name: Phoenix Strategic Management
Address: Sydney, NSW, AU
Telephone: +61402060649

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Phoenix Strategic Management

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Improving performance is always a challenge. Phoenix can help enterprises shift from:
• Chaos to clarity.

As a strategist, advisor, & speaker, I help teams regenerate leadership, evolve strategy, and navigate conflict—so they can thrive in a FRAGILE world.

📚 Author of Confronting the Storm
🦤 The Dodo Paradigm is next…

If you're ready, let’s talk. Phoenix Strategic Management is a small, independent management consulting firm with a background in sustainability, strategy & foresight that exists to support transformational change that benefits society & the environment. We are passionate about helping enterprises advance a genuine contribution to community & environmental causes, whilst transforming their own reputation & performance. For many, progress towards optimal performance is being hampered by “wicked problems”, waves of external social, economical &/or environmental changes that have no precedent or may not have a clear solution but still impact upon the majority of organisations. In response, leading enterprises are increasingly addressing their social & environmental opportunities & challenges as part of their overall corporate strategy. However, as many are finding, this is no easy task with many often finding it a challenge to deliver noticeable returns. Through government & NFP organisations, we help communities with the challenges & opportunities through the development & implementation of, for example, strategic plans, crime prevention plans, economic development plans.
• Outrage to integrity. We assist organisations take a proactive approach to stakeholder engagement or, alternatively, can be independent mediators.
• Greenwash (ie a superficial approach to your social &/or environmental issues) towards genuine sustainability.

25/09/2026

Before you think about skimming over this post and moving on, The Fragile World Briefing 👇 is written for leaders and managers who realise that they are navigating conditions that no longer behave as expected.

#7. Legacy Thinking: A Definition of Insanity

"Legacy thinking is, categorically, a victim of its own success, having been remarkably successful at maintaining business as usual, a world organised around shareholder value, and the self-interest of a select few. It facilitates extraordinary blind spots, extraordinary gaps in an organisation’s cap(ability) to confront transformational change, both internal or external.

Critically, the thinking that got institutions to here won’t get them to there. The same instincts that built resilience in a stable world become a hindrance in one that no longer holds still.

What makes it dangerous, increasingly, is that it doesn’t hold the intended status quo. It feeds Fragmentation, Rapidity, Alienation, and Ground-shift. It compounds existential challenges that were never isolated to begin with, while offering the comforting illusion that yesterday’s playbook still applies."

If you haven't got the time to read the Briefing, you may be interested in contemplating the reflections; namely:

👉 Which part of your organisation’s design - or culture - would you build differently if you were starting today?
👉 If historical strength no longer guarantees future strength, what is your organisation still betting on that it shouldn’t be?
👉 What from the past could now be stifling your organisation?

The link to the Briefing is in the comments. 👇

Otherwise, I look forward to reading your thoughts or what came out of the reflections for you. Where are you seeing legacy thinking? And what are the ripples, subsequently, created?

19/08/2026

IS YOUR ORGANISATION MARCHING INTENTIONALLY INTO OBLIVION?

You know, it was as recent as Saturday night that I was talking to friends, making reference to my observation of the “white noise”, as I call it, that we are constantly met with by our institutions, despite all of the extraordinary and interconnected global challenges that we now face.

Despite these huge existential challenges, we instead focus predominantly on the superficial – including, here, on LinkedIn. We focus incessantly on celebrities. We hysterically talk about the need to “jump” on the AI juggernaut without managing the impacts on the workforce. On people. I could go on.

Sound familiar in your organisation?

There's a better word than white noise for this. Hypernormalisation.

Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined it to describe the final years of the Soviet Union — a period when everyone, leaders included, could see the system decaying in real time. And yet the machinery of institutional life carried on as if nothing at all was wrong.

Ten years ago, filmmaker Adam Curtis took that idea and pointed it squarely at the West. At our institutions. At our organisations. He argued we perform stability and control precisely because the alternative — confronting the truth — is unbearable.

Can you relate to that?

The truth is stark. Survey after CEO survey finds leaders privately fearful their organisation won't exist in ten years without a fundamental shift in direction and mindset.

Yet still — we chase shadows. We stay tuned to the white noise.

In the quiet moments — when the noise finally drops away — what do you see?

And what are you actually doing to transcend the madness, before oblivion stops being a metaphor?

Image courtesy of Logan Voss, UnSplash

18/08/2026

Thanks to Pan-Asian think tank, Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), for bringing this to my attention.

For those truly interested in the big picture, I am sure that this event will be fascinating.

13/08/2026

Australia was burning.

In late 2019 and early 2020, my home country felt like it was on fire from one side of the continent to the other.

Standing at Sydney Harbour, you could see almost nothing of the iconic Bridge or Opera House through the smoke. We are estimated to have lost three billion animals.

Three billion.

I had begun researching Confronting the Storm at that time, surrounded by seething public fury at leaders who appeared slow to act, lacking in empathy, and focused on spinning alternate facts.

Then we began hearing about a virus in Wuhan.

Almost overnight, the demand for climate action dissipated. Leaders who struggled to walk and chew gum at the same time pivoted to pandemic response. And quietly, the other storms kept building.

That is what this age of uncertainty actually looks like. Not one crisis at a time, but many — compounding, accelerating, interconnecting.

For leaders who still believe that normal is just around the corner: I understand the appeal.

But I can't share it.

For more details on Confronting the Storm, head to: https://bit.ly/43umGyW

13/08/2026

Before you think about skimming over this post and moving on, The Fragile World Briefing 👇 is written for leaders and managers who realise that they are navigating conditions that no longer behave as expected.

#6. *Inertia: When the World Moves Beneath Your Feet*

"Inertia is more than resistance to change. it is the tendency of systems to continue doing what they were designed to do, even when the environment around them has fundamentally changed. The greater the investment in today’s structures, incentives, and assumptions, the harder they become to interrupt. Inertia is not simply a failure of leadership; it is evidence that many institutions are faithfully producing the outcomes they were designed to produce.

The problem is that they were designed for a world that no longer exists. That inaction is not passive. It is signaled, consistently, by the institutions."

If you haven't got the time to read the Briefing, you may be interested in contemplating the reflections; namely:

👉 Where, in your own decision-making, have you mistaken “looking busy” for making progress? For achieving outcomes with respect to those issues that are important but not so urgent?

👉 Which of your organisation’s short-term incentives are quietly protecting the status quo - and who benefits from them remaining in place?

👉 If inertia’s ramifications are already seismic yet often invisible, what would it take for you to act before the evidence becomes undeniable?

The link to the Briefing is in the comments. 👇

Otherwise, I look forward to reading your thoughts or what came out of the reflections for you. Where are you seeing inertia? And what are the ripples, subsequently, created?

10/08/2026

Your stakeholders are more sophisticated, coordinated, and demanding than ever before.

They compare notes across organisations. They organise before you've finished your first internal meeting. They know the playbook you're running because they've seen it fail elsewhere, and they no longer wait patiently for you to catch up. This isn't a communications problem. It's a structural shift in who holds power in the relationship, and most organisations are still responding as if it's 2015.

The reason conflict is showing up more often isn't that stakeholders have become more difficult. It's that the world they're operating in has become more fragile — supply chains, institutions, and public trust all thinner than they used to be, all failing in ways that ripple faster and further.

Fragility doesn't create conflict on its own. It removes the slack that used to absorb it. Every misstep now finds an audience already primed to react. The organisations that will hold their ground aren't the ones with the best messaging — they're the ones who understand that the terrain itself has changed.

13/07/2026

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Entering the flow state with Cliff. 🌊 Cliff Kimber is a thoughtful business coach and writer based in the UK. We’d like to congratulate him on today’s release of his new book ‘Born to Flow’, published by Routledge. Smorgasbord developed the book’s diagrams in collaboration with Cliff; it was a satisfyingly chewy exercise to find the best visual metaphors to express subtle concepts and help the reader engage fully with the book’s themes.
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13/07/2026

Imagine you live in far northern Queensland. You have two little neurodiverse girls – and you might even be a little neurospicy yourself. What resources can you draw on? Where do you go to link up with other similar families? Do you feel seen?
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This was the reality facing Sam Paterson and her husband Phil. But, together, they decided to do something about it. First, a practical project: fitting out a trailer as a mobile sensory space for rent. When things feel overwhelming outside, it offers a comfortable, quiet space to rest and reset. Light sculptures glow in the dark as a soft soundscape plays in the background.
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We were thrilled to work with Sam and Phil from the very beginning. After a brand workshop to help define what they wanted to be, we developed an identity that featured an active, dancing figure – symbolic of a confident participant, not a timid ‘special case’. In between, we found them a name – Everyday People – that reflected their belief that labelling some people as ‘special’ wasn’t as helpful as broadening the attitudes and environments around them. So that more people, everyday people, can feel like they belong.
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See for more
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13/07/2026

Address

Sydney, NSW

Telephone

+61402060649

Website

http://www.phoenixstrategic.com.au/, http://twitter.com/David_G_Ross, http://au.linkedin.com/pub/david-ross/5/873/6a

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