Two Decades Inside Complex, Constantly Changing Organisations

Bas’s career has been built inside large international and mid-sized organisations undergoing continuous structural change, from a global consumer and healthcare multinational to advisory work with businesses navigating acquisition, integration, implementation, and scale.

Over that period he moved from hands-on change delivery to leading change as an enterprise capability, including HR leadership roles and building and running a global change function of more than fifty change professionals supporting transformation across regions and business units. He has applied that experience to major integrations, shared-services transformations, and enterprise-wide capability programmes.

That combination — delivery experience at the front line and accountability for change at a global, structural level — shapes how he works with clients today.

Diagnosing Why Well-Designed Transformations Stall

Most transformations are not undone by a flawed strategy. They stall somewhere between a well-designed strategy and the reality of making it work across an organisation.

What sets Bas apart is a simple reframe with significant consequences: resistance is not a communications problem to be smoothed over, it is feedback on the design itself. An incentive that quietly rewards the old behaviour. An operating-model assumption that only works on paper. A KPI that no one has pressure-tested before rollout. Bas tests disputed elements before they are scaled, rather than discovering the problem at go-live.

This is the balance he describes as the science and the art of change: the structural discipline to connect every intervention back to the business outcome it is intended to deliver, and the behavioural insight to understand what will actually make people work differently.

A Different Perspective on Change and Transformation Advisory

Bas will challenge a brief before executing it. He tests assumptions — his own and the client’s — before anything is scaled, whether that is an incentive structure, a performance measure, or an operating-model design choice everyone has agreed to but no one has stress-tested. He is explicit about what sits outside his remit, so scope stays honest rather than being renegotiated after the fact. And he will say plainly when he is not sure. As Bas puts it:

“I’ve sat in enough steering committees to know the quiet nod isn’t agreement, it’s someone deciding not to tell you yet. I’d rather hear and understand it now.”

That willingness to challenge, test, and refine is closely aligned with how we believe advisory work should be done at KennedyFitch. Change holds not because everyone was convinced in the room, but because the organisation found out ahead of time what was likely to break, and fixed it before discovering it the hard way, at scale, after the budget was already spent.

Strengthening KennedyFitch’s Change & Transformation Capabilities

In his role as Partner at KennedyFitch, Bas will focus on:

• Change Management
• Business Transformation
• Operating Model Change
• Post-Acquisition Integration
• Shared-Services Transformation
• Organisational Design
• Employee Experience
• Purpose & Culture

His expertise will help clients close the gap between the transformation they designed and the one that lasts — turning agreed strategy into changed ways of working, and changed ways of working into business outcomes.

We are delighted to welcome Bas to KennedyFitch and look forward to the experience, insight, and pragmatism he brings to our clients, partners, and colleagues.