Fathom Practice
Strategy, foresight and sense-making for regulators and the boards that govern them, in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.
Most agencies already hold what they need to see it coming. It sits in different places and arrives after the decision. I connect it in time to be used.
I was Chief Advisor Strategy at Maritime New Zealand, where the work was harm prevention across an operating environment that was complex and rarely still, and where the decisions that mattered most were seldom the ones the framework had anticipated. That is the work I do now, wherever it turns up, and much of it goes into building the capability to anticipate and adapt, in the people holding those decisions, and in the system around them.
Wellington, New Zealand. Working across New Zealand and Australia.
Thirty years in the New Zealand public sector, ten at Maritime New Zealand, most recently as Chief Advisor.
HIFO piloted in Wellington in 2023 with 40 regulators, and in Victoria in 2024 with 24 participants from 15 agencies.
Guest faculty at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). Published in Policy Quarterly.
One week, one regime, one finding.
Sweep is a short diagnostic on a single regime. I work from records you already hold, run one instrument with your team, and leave you a finding your board can read. Fixed price. Sized to sit inside most second-tier delegations.
If the regime is settled and performing, I will say so.
Book a sounding callTwo minutes
What the work is, what kind of situation it is for, and where best practice stops helping. Around eighty per cent of regulatory problems never need any of it. It plays without sound.
A Fathom Practice primer. Reading complexity, and acting in it. What the work is, what kind of situation it is for, and where best practice stops helping. Sound judgement in deep water.
The paper says the regime is performing. The room is not so sure. Somebody says it out loud near the end, and it does not make the minutes.
The first decision. The first regulatory decision is not what to do. It is what kind of situation this actually is. Best practice holds in the shallows and drags in the deep.
Read the water you are in. Clear at 25. Complicated at 50. Aporetic at 100, the fog. Complex at 200. Chaotic at 300.
Not everything is complex. Eighty per cent sits in the ordered water, where good or expert practice belongs. Pareto, as a rule of thumb.
On-screen attribution: Cynefin. Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co.
What that changes. In ordered conditions you act to solve. In complex conditions you act to learn. Small, bounded, reversible, and chosen for what it teaches.
Who says so. Rob Warner. Nine years as Chief Advisor, Strategy and Foresight, Maritime New Zealand. Thirty years in the sector. Guest faculty, ANZSOG. Published with Dr Grant Pink in Policy Quarterly, and through the ANZSOG National Regulators Community of Practice. Sessions with regulators in New Zealand and Australia.
Capability is what regulators need to do. Craft is how they exercise judgement when the future is uncertain. Pick one regime. Send me three lines about what is not sitting right. Fathom Practice. fathompractice.com.
Sound familiar
If more than one of those lands, the situation has changed kind while the response has not.
What the work is for
Risk-based methods work while probabilities can be assigned and the system holds still. Under deep uncertainty they strain. Probabilities become contested, and regulated parties adapt to whatever you do about them.
Agencies usually hold the knowledge they need already. It sits in different places and arrives after the decision. This work connects it in time to be used.
Track record
Foresight and regulatory systems sessions for the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance.
Foresight and strategy sessions for Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, the Ministry of Education, Maritime New Zealand and MBIE.
Sessions and workshops with regulators in New Zealand, Australia and internationally, on my own and with Dr Grant Pink.
Trained through The Cynefin Co, Oxford-trained scenario planner, NeuroLeadership-trained coach.
On method
Regulators mostly analyse from above the surface, where the regime can be described and the numbers sit still long enough to be counted. The harder work begins once you accept that you are inside the thing you are assessing, and that your own presence changes what the water does.
Regulators feel this every time an intervention alters the behaviour it was meant to measure. The sense-making I run is built for that second position.
Services
Down the page are the three services. Across each service are the three modes. You can commission any one on its own, and most engagements begin in one mode and move to another.
The work runs with the front line, with managers, with executive teams and boards, and usually with more than one of them in the same room.
Most engagements start with a workshop. If you are not sure which, start with Sweep above. The primer above shows how the sorting works.
Half a day to two days. A group in a room, building something they keep.
A defined piece of work with an end point, or two to three hours with the people who hold the decision.
Named support over an agreed period, alongside you on one thing.
Hindsight, insight, foresight, oversight
Four questions asked together, so that lessons, live signals and what is forming reach the same table while the decision is still open.
Warner and Pink. Published through ANZSOG, 2023.
Workshop
Most common start
Operational
Your team runs a live decision through all four sights, and finds which one it has been relying on and which one has gone quiet.
You leave with: A decision record: the choice, the evidence behind it, the assumptions relied on, the review point and the stop rules.
Enquire about thisProject
Strategic
A board or executive team surfaces the factors and actors shaping the next few years, what would be noticed first, and who is watching for it.
Enquire about thisAdvisory
StrategicOperational
Sustained work on one issue. How monitoring, intelligence and assurance connect, where signals stall, and what the board should be asking between reports.
Enquire about thisChoices made explicit, then tested for coherence
Regulatory strategy is a set of intentional choices made to drive preferred changes in a defined context. The choices have to cohere, or planning, alignment and execution pull apart.
Workshop
Strategic
Separate what will not move from what can, and pick the moves that are open to you now. Uses Estuarine mapping.
You leave with: An operating environment map.
Enquire about thisProject
StrategicOperational
A draft regulatory strategy, Cabinet paper or licensing change read for the choices it makes, and whether planning and delivery can follow from them.
Enquire about thisAdvisory
Operational
Outcome frameworks, measures and reporting built for the decisions they support, and honest about what they cannot tell you.
You leave with: An outcome framework with its measures and reporting.
Enquire about thisThe regime as the regulated party meets it
Sense-making from the outside in, because compliance is decided well away from where the rule was written.
Warner and Pink. Policy Quarterly, volume 21, issue 4, November 2025.
Workshop
Operational
Trace the regime step by step from the outside in, and find the points that decide compliance.
You leave with: An experience map of the regime, step by step.
Enquire about thisProject
Tactical
Structured sense-making with regulated parties and frontline staff, run so people say the thing they would never put in a survey.
Enquire about thisAdvisory
TacticalStrategic
Read the settings against the outcomes intended and the experience intended, so both are designed on purpose and then checked.
Enquire about thisLayer tags read as follows. Tactical, the decision in front of you. Operational, how the regime runs. Strategic, whether the regime still fits. Size, duration and cost are agreed separately, and any piece of work can be scoped up or down.
Not sure which mode? That is usually the first conversation.
Inside HIFO
Lessons sit with assurance, live signals with inspectors and analysts, anticipatory work with strategy, and authority with the executive. Each function performs, and the agency still cannot assemble a decision-ready view.
What earlier cases, reviews and near misses taught, and whether the next decision changed.
What data, complaints and frontline observation show now, and whether the signal carried.
Which assumption is most likely to fail, and which future would find the regime least prepared.
What matters now, what is authorised, who owns it, and what evidence would show it worked.
The first three build understanding. The fourth turns it into a decision.
You are left holding a decision record: the choice, the evidence behind it, the assumptions relied on, the review point and the stop rules.
HIFO. Warner and Pink, published through ANZSOG.
The frame
The first regulatory decision is what kind of situation this is.
Sense, categorise, respond
The shallows, where routine compliance holds and established practice is enough.
Sense, analyse, respond
Deep water that instruments can still chart, where expertise does the work.
Decompose, assign
The fog. A deliberate pause to reframe before the kind is settled.
Probe, sense, respond
Deep water and novel harms, where bounded safe-to-try action comes first.
Act, sense, respond
The storm, where you stabilise first and reassess after.
Fig. 01 · Leverage and depth
After Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990). The wording is mine, the idea is his.
You cannot read depth from the surface, so you take soundings.
Structure and reporting sit above the waterline. Constraints, relationships and informal practice sit below it, and that is where most of the leverage is.
Take a sounding
About
I was Chief Advisor Strategy at Maritime New Zealand, where the work was harm prevention across an operating environment that was complex and rarely still, and where the decisions that mattered most were seldom the ones the framework had anticipated. That is the work I do now, wherever it turns up, and much of it goes into building the capability to anticipate and adapt, in the people holding those decisions, and in the system around them. What I want to be known for is regulators across Australasia who can tell what kind of situation they are in, and who act while the choice is still open.
Strategic foresight, complexity practice and regulatory craft usually sit in three different people. My foresight training runs through the Oxford Scenarios Programme at Saïd Business School, Melbourne Business School, the University of Houston and The Futures School, and I have spent the last decade in professional development and training with The Cynefin Co, whose frameworks remain the intellectual property of Dave Snowden and that company. The regulatory side is thirty years of practice, including operating models, regulatory outcomes and impact, always inside particular regimes with their own history and politics. Few people practising in Australasia carry all three, which is why the problems I am asked into are usually the ones a conventional strategy process has not settled.
I am a guest faculty member at ANZSOG, and I work with the Institute of Regulation (UK) and the ANZSOG National Regulators Community of Practice. I have delivered sessions and workshops with regulators in New Zealand, Australia and internationally, on my own and with Dr Grant Pink.
I am interested in resilient decision making, and in the judgement that good regulation asks of the people who carry it.
Selected thinking
ANZSOG editorial
The article that sets out the four sights.
Warner and Pink. Published through ANZSOG, 2023.
Read the articlePeer-reviewed journal article
What regulation feels like from the receiving end, and why that experience decides compliance long before enforcement does.
Warner and Pink. Policy Quarterly, volume 21, issue 4, November 2025, pages 90 to 99. Published by Victoria University of Wellington.
Read the paperANZSOG editorial
For agencies whose harm crosses a border and whose counterpart sits in another jurisdiction. How regulators build the standing relationships that let them anticipate together.
Read the articleANZSOG editorial
How an agency builds capability for conditions that will not hold still: recognising them, responding, and readying for the next turn.
Read the articleVideo
Two minutes on reading the water you are in.
Watch the primerShort pieces
Short notes from the practice on what regulators find when the usual pattern stops working. The first will be posted shortly.
Collaborators
RECAP Consultants
Regulatory practice, capability and evaluation across Australia and internationally. Grant and I deliver seminars, webinars and applied work together, including Rx.
recapconsultants.com.au
With Purpose
Work with leadership teams on direction and culture. Together we look at how organisations hold a course while the conditions keep moving.
withpurpose.solutionsHIFO and Rx are Fathom Practice work developed with Dr Grant Pink, RECAP Consultants. Cynefin® and Estuarine mapping are the intellectual property of Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co. Fathom Practice applies that work and does not claim it.
How it starts
An email with a few lines about the situation you are holding. I answer myself, usually within two working days.
A short conversation, without charge, to work out what kind of problem this is and whether I can be useful to it.
A written scope with the work, the dates and a fixed price.
If the regime is settled and performing, I will say so.
Get in touch
If you would rather watch than read, the primer is here.
Pick one regime. Send me three lines about what is not sitting right. I answer myself, usually within two working days, and I will tell you if it does not need me.
Regulation means holding constraints steady while conditions move. Regulators cannot govern for a future. We steward our way through uncertain futures, and the work is to leave a trace while doing it.
I work with Australian agencies regularly and travel for the sessions that need to be in the room. Invoicing in New Zealand or Australian dollars, GST registered in New Zealand. Comfortable with your agency's procurement and probity requirements.
Certified Foresight Practitioner
The Futures School. Foresight practice certified against an international standard.
