The practice I couldn't find, so I built it.

I have spent more than twenty years inside HR transformations — as a practitioner, as a client, as a consultant, and, in the years that mattered most, as someone who stayed after the vendor had rolled off. I have lived through every wave the industry has sold. The first proper HRIS rollouts, when we retired the filing cabinets and learned what “single source of truth” was supposed to mean. The migration to the cloud, which was sold as liberation and delivered, in many cases, a more elegant cage. The people-analytics era, which promised that data would make us wise and mostly made us busier. Each wave arrived with a manifesto, a vendor, and a keynote. Each one promised transformation. Each one delivered, to be fair, a great deal.

But each one also left behind an email. A manager — usually in operations, rarely senior enough to have been in the steering committee — writes it a few weeks after go-live. It begins: “I know this is probably just how it works now, but…” What follows is a description of a thing the old system let them do with a phone call, and the new system does not let them do at all. The email gets forwarded. It lands in a backlog. The transformation is, by every measure the steering committee agreed to track, a success. But something was in the building that is no longer in the building, and the manager felt it first.

“I could not find the firm I wanted to hire, twenty years ago, when I first watched this pattern play out. By the time I had watched it happen thirty more times, I had decided to build it.”

I came to believe, over those years, that the industry I work in does not have a vocabulary for what gets lost in these programmes. We have a rich vocabulary for what gets gained. But the triad we evaluate transformations against — experience, cost, future readiness — misses the column that actually matters: what the organisation is still capable of, six, twelve, twenty-four months after go-live. The slow accumulation of small losses. The quiet thinning of culture. The demo that gets polished, the workshop that gets shortened, the exception that gets routed into a backlog instead of a conversation. None of these, individually, is a scandal. Together, over the course of an eighteen-month programme, they are how a firm gets measurably colder.

Clover & Myrtle is the practice I wanted to find, twenty years ago, and could not. It is built on the observation that transformation is not a project you ship — it is a condition you cultivate. It is designed around the column the industry does not count. It is conducted by the same hands, from proposal to post-implementation review twelve months later, with no pyramid of juniors and no implementation-partner kickbacks compromising the judgement. It is, by design, small.

The current wave — the one now being sold under the banner of artificial intelligence — is going to make the old pattern more acute, not less. The efficiency gains are real. The temptation to spend them on more volume, more speed, more dashboards will be enormous. Most of the market will take that path by default. That is why this firm exists. There is another path, and it is the one I intend to help organisations take.