Who we are, what we believe, and the lineage of thinking the work stands on.
Impact Thinking is a leadership development and research practice for those who lead in unprecedented times — where yesterday's answers no longer fit today's questions.
We develop leaders by changing the ground they operate from rather than the techniques they collect, and we publish the research that explains why that produces change other approaches don't. The work is drawn from a serious intellectual lineage and kept rigorously practical: every distinction has to earn its place by changing what a leader can do.
That knowing about leadership and being a leader are different things, and only the second changes performance. That language is where coordinated action is actually built. That trust can be made specific enough to build deliberately. And that the leaders who most need this work are the ones facing problems no existing playbook was written for.
Our approach stands on the work of Humberto Maturana on the biology of cognition, Hubert Dreyfus on skilled expertise, Fernando Flores on language and coordinated action, and Werner Erhard on the ontological model of leadership — among related thinkers. We hold that inheritance lightly and use it relentlessly in service of organisations operating in 2026.
Ben Botes is an organisational psychologist and the author of Unstoppable Growth, an Amazon bestseller. Over more than two decades he has worked at the intersection of leadership, language, and human behaviour — across the public and private sectors, with leading technology firms and one of the world's largest consulting firms, and through four years with the Future Human Technology Think Tank.
His work is grounded in the premise this practice is built on: that leadership is determined less by the techniques a leader collects than by who they are being, and by the conversations they are able to have — the ontological tradition of Maturana, Flores and Erhard, kept firmly in service of practical results. He brings that lens to the problems leaders face when the established playbook has run out — new markets, new mandates, and complexity that conventional development can't reach. His perspective on leadership has been featured by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.
At Impact Thinking, Ben leads the design of the programmes and the research desk, translating a serious intellectual lineage into work that holds up in the room.
Lynne Krishna is a corporate transformation specialist who works where strategy meets execution — helping organisations close the distance between high-level ambition and what actually changes on the ground. Over more than a decade she has led change inside complex public and private environments, including a global enterprise technology company and a leading consulting firm.
Her focus is the behavioural and linguistic alignment that makes strategy land: shifting entrenched habits, opening the conversations teams avoid, and aligning people around a shared purpose rather than a new process. She works closest to the leadership teams responsible for delivery, where transformation either takes hold or quietly stalls. Her work has been recognised in industry research, including Deloitte publications, and she is a co-leader within the Business Women's Network (BWN), where she advocates for diversity and human empowerment in the workplace.
At Impact Thinking, Lynne leads the organisational and cultural side of the practice — treating transformation as a generative shift in how leaders relate, coordinate, and speak to one another.
If you lead where the old answers have run out, this is built for you.
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