# Fiona McSheehy

Fiona McSheehy writes about leading organisational change and scaling operations, drawing on experience supporting complex emergency responses. The focus includes aligning local changes with wider goals, clarifying team responsibilities, and using information to guide decisions.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/fiona-mcsheehy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18
- LinkedIn followers: 1,008
- Topics: leadership
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-01

## Summary

Fiona McSheehy is useful for expert commentary on organisational change, scaling operations, coordination, and evidence-led decisions in complex settings.

- Best for: Thought-leadership or advisory work for a consulting firm targeting operations and change leaders.
- Not for: Paid social campaigns with product mentions, set sponsorship packages, and tracked reach targets.
- Check first: Confirm reach, engagement, profile visits, audience roles, and commercial terms before contacting.

### Takeaways

- Local change only holds if it connects to the wider system.
- Overlapping teams need clarity, not a redrawn org chart.
- In South Sudan, evidence led them to use logistics instead of direct programming.

## Main ideas

- **Local change only holds if it is connected to the wider system**: Teams closest to the work spot duplication, inefficiency and friction first, so change often starts locally. But fixes designed in isolation can create delays for other teams, undermine consistency or governance, and hide wider costs. Before acting, McSheehy asks: how does this support the organisation's overall purpose, what dependencies does it create or disrupt, what precedent does it set, and what unintended consequences might it create elsewhere?
- **Overlapping teams need clarity, not a redrawn org chart**: When several capable teams handle closely related work, duplication creeps in, responsibilities blur and accountability becomes hard to pin down. Overlap is often assumed to create resilience, but under pressure it can do the opposite: decisions slow and nobody owns the outcome. McSheehy's answer is to define purpose, interfaces, decision rights and collective accountability so people can work with them. They also warn against redesigning everything at once, favouring the most critical overlaps first, then testing and adjusting. People, they note, can become attached to roles and ways of working that no longer serve the organisation.
- **Evidence strengthens judgement rather than replacing it**: Conviction, urgency and pressure can start change but rarely sustain it. In McSheehy's account, information depersonalises difficult decisions: conversations shift from defending positions to solving problems, resistance becomes easier to address, and leaders can explain why they chose a path and what would show it needs to change. They ask what has been tried before, what worked, what failed and why, and which assumptions might be wrong.
- **Scaling faster than systems are ready is often unavoidable; pretending otherwise is the real risk**: Rapid growth exposes what an organisation is not yet ready for. In high-pressure operations, reach, complexity, staffing and financial responsibility grow before systems and structures exist. McSheehy argues this is not necessarily a planning failure; the danger is denying the gap. Growth puts pressure on decision-making, communication, governance, finance, oversight and people. Staff usually feel the strain before systems visibly fail, through rising confusion, blurred roles, multiplying workarounds and fragmented communication. McSheehy asks what must be standardised immediately, what can stay flexible, which short-term risks are manageable, and which temporary measures are acceptable until stronger systems arrive.
- **Bring delivery teams in early, but do not confuse that with consensus**: Change is often designed at a distance from the people who will make it work: strategies, systems, structures and timelines are agreed first, and delivery teams come in afterwards. Those closest to delivery see bottlenecks, the informal relationships that make a system function, dependencies other teams rely on, and small changes with large unintended consequences. McSheehy draws a clear line: co-creation does not mean surrendering leadership responsibility. Leaders still set direction and make decisions people disagree with; involving people does not give everyone a veto. The distinction is between consulting people about a decision already made and involving them early enough to influence how it will work.
- **Capability is usually wider than the job description**: Organisations talk about talent gaps while underusing the talent they already have, especially when capacity is stretched and formal structures cannot flex quickly. Roles rarely capture the full range of what people bring; once structures harden, those capabilities become invisible. McSheehy argues leaders should make them visible and deploy people by strengths, experience and potential impact rather than title alone, while keeping expectations explicit, managing workloads and respecting formal responsibilities.
- **Multicultural leadership is a discipline problem, not a cultural-awareness problem**: Leading teams drawn from different cultures, disciplines and professional backgrounds is usually described as a challenge of communication or cultural awareness. McSheehy treats it as a challenge of leadership discipline: assumptions break down quickly, and norms around hierarchy, decision-making and accountability vary even within a single organisation. Their answer is not to smooth out difference but to create enough clarity, consistency and fairness for difference to coexist productively, with everyone understanding what success looks like, how decisions are made and which standards apply regardless of role, background or location.

## Work to read

- [Why Conviction Alone Doesn't Sustain Change](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_changeleadership-evidencebasedleadership-activity-7482691100772851713-UYpV)
- [The Hidden Cost of Disconnected Change](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_systemsleadership-transferable-strategicalignment-activity-7480153803103711233-0d4B)
- [When Teams Start Working Against Each Other](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_systemsleadership-organisationaldesign-changeleadership-activity-7475080318484611072-Q9HW)
- [Growing Faster Than Your Systems](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_systemsleadership-scaling-operationalleadership-activity-7472543494100848640-5vBB)
- [When Change Is Designed Too Far From the Work](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_changeleadership-organisationalchange-systemsleadership-activity-7505524518501838848-qWuk)
- [Seeing Capability Beyond Job Titles](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_leadershipdevelopment-talentmanagement-organisationaleffectiveness-activity-7490300514048401408-cGsF)
- [Leading Large Multicultural, Multi-Skilled Teams](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiona-mcsheehy-0b837a18_inclusiveleadership-teamculture-leadershipunderpressure-activity-7424361334261276673-RqPI)

## Partnerships

Fiona McSheehy's posts do not document any sponsorship, brand-partnership, or paid-collaboration format. Across seven LinkedIn posts published between February and September 2026, each piece is written as first-person commentary on organisational change, scaling operations, evidence-based decisions, and leading multicultural teams. Every post closes with a discussion question to readers and topical hashtags such as #SystemsLeadership and #ChangeLeadership. None names a sponsor, discloses a paid partnership, describes a media kit, rate card, or deliverable, or points to a commercial inquiry route. A brand planning work with McSheehy therefore has no published format to buy against; scope, deliverables, and terms would have to be agreed directly with McSheehy. The absence of a documented offer is not a claim that McSheehy never accepts sponsorship — it reflects only what the posts here show. McSheehy's LinkedIn profile is the only channel represented here, so terms that might appear elsewhere, such as in a media kit or a direct pitch, are outside what the posts here show.

## Alternatives

- Federico Presicci: Pick Presicci over McSheehy when a consulting firm commissioning thought-leadership content and an advisory relationship wants to reach commercial and revenue leaders rather than operations and change leaders across the organisation. Presicci's two posts stay within the go-to-market function: they argue that managing only through functions leaves end-to-end outcomes unowned, map three to five GTM processes from outcome to owner to task to hand-off, and decide which tasks stay human-led, which an AI agent can run within clear boundaries, and which work best as a shared system. Presicci has also set out an eight-area sales leadership competency model, offered as a one-pager and a longer guide. A firm whose clients are sales, enablement and revenue-operations leaders, and whose angle is redesigning commercial work around AI agents, would get a more directly usable framework from Presicci than from McSheehy.
- Giovanna Jagger: Choose Jagger when the firm's clients are facing corporate real estate, workplace or sustainability-reporting decisions. Jagger's two posts work the same evidence-first seam as McSheehy's, but in a property and ESG setting: they ask which ESG priorities buildings and workplaces can meaningfully influence, what evidence is already collected across a portfolio, and where ownership, measurement or action is missing. They frame the revised European Sustainability Reporting Standards as a prompt for better decisions rather than a publishing exercise. A firm advising on healthy buildings, portfolio strategy or ESRS readiness would find Jagger's subject matter closer to a campaign aimed at those clients than McSheehy's change-and-scaling material.
- Kieran Gilmurray: Gilmurray is the stronger choice when the firm wants a long-form, citation-backed analytical article rather than a first-person operational case. Gilmurray's strategic subtraction piece runs a triple test—efficiency, resilience and prominence—then sets out six ways to subtract, with named examples (IKEA's printed catalogue, Zipline's medical drone deliveries in Rwanda, Estonia's once-only data principle, AWS abstractions) and a reference list of published research. It argues that cutting starts with budgets while subtraction starts with work, the same underlying point as McSheehy's warning that a local fix can create costs elsewhere. Gilmurray also publishes a book, a newsletter and a podcast, so formats beyond a co-authored article are already established. The subject—what work no longer deserves the organisation's capacity—sits directly beside a campaign about scaling.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/