What does Five NZ do?

Five NZ is a management consulting firm that helps NZ executive teams align leadership, culture, people and technology to deliver strategy with certainty, speed and ROI.

Is Five NZ a WalkMe partner in New Zealand?

Yes. Five NZ is New Zealand's most experienced WalkMe delivery partner, specialising in digital adoption to maximise software ROI and transformation outcomes.

What services does Five NZ offer?

Five NZ offers consulting in Strategy & Leadership, Performance, Culture, People development, and Technology including WalkMe digital adoption and AI Compass.

Nick Mackeson-Smith - Chief Curiosity Officer, Founder and Director

Nick is an expert in leadership development, executive coaching, learning strategy design and implementation, culture change and employee engagement. He's led transformative programmes in agile, technology implementation, diversity and inclusion, mental health and wellbeing, mindset and behaviour change, ways of working and learning enablement, and is very interested in building great employee experiences to drive great customer experiences which drive great business outcomes. He's a highly skilled facilitator and public speaker, and has a knack for spotting and unleashing the potential in those around him. He's got over 20 years of experience in doing the small stuff and the very big stuff at some of the world's and NZ's leading organisations - in financial services with Barclays Capital, Barclays Wealth Schroders, Lloyd's of London, and Goldman Sachs. In consulting services with Deloitte. In the public sector with Auckland Council, and most recently in digital services and telecommunications with Spark New Zealand.

I've recently written about:

Technology

Printed process maps covered in handwritten annotations, a sticky note reading In practice, and a notebook headed The reality showing a loop of workaround, validate, report and rework. A monitor behind reads Rollout complete.

We've given them the tools

"We've given them the tools." It gets said in steering committees with a kind of finality, as though the sentence closes the matter, and on paper it's usually true. The licences are bought, the rollout is done, the training deck went out. WalkMe's 2026 State of Digital Adoption report puts a number on how differently the people using those tools see it, and the number is sixty-seven percentage points.

Technology

A laptop on a boardroom table showing a Smartsheet portfolio dashboard with intake, approvals, project timeline, resource heat map and audit trail, while four colleagues talk in the background.

What we build in Smartsheet, and what we ask before we build it

When someone gets in touch about Smartsheet the request is usually quite specific; a dashboard, or a spreadsheet that's grown past what a spreadsheet can carry, or a view of everything that's running that nobody can produce without a fortnight's notice. We can build any of it. Here's what that work actually looks like, and the question we ask before we start.

People

The belief comes first. The performance follows.

Most organisations spend enormous energy managing targets, KPIs, and performance reviews - and very little time on the thing that's actually doing most of the driving. Nick Mackeson-Smith, founder of Five NZ, makes the case that performance follows belief, not the other way around, and that the most powerful lever in any performance culture sits at the very start of the values-to-outcomes chain, not the end. Drawing on the values-to-outcomes model - and on watching his sons Ethan and Harry prepare for their football season - Nick explores why teams get stuck, how belief and performance can fall dangerously out of sync, and what organisations can actually do to surface and shift the mindsets that sit underneath their results. If your organisation has the strategy, the people, and the targets in place but still isn't performing at its best, this is worth a read.

Culture

The Gap Between What We Say and What We Do

I was sitting in a boardroom a few months ago, watching a leadership team talk with real pride about their culture. They used all the right words, and they meant every one of them. Then I spent two days walking the floors, and what I saw was different. Not dramatically different, but quietly and persistently misaligned in ways that nobody seemed to notice. That gap between intention and action is where most culture work needs to start.

Strategy & Leadership

Stop Counting Blades of Grass

Someone asks you for a report. You go off, pull the data, build the slides, present the findings. They say that's not what I meant. Most reporting nightmares start the same way - someone asks a question without knowing what they'll do with the answer. Here are four questions that change everything.

People

The leadership readiness gap

Organisational change is outpacing leadership capacity, and most boards aren't measuring the gap. With 72% of leaders admitting they're not fully prepared for what's next, the question isn't whether to invest in people development, but whether your approach is actually working. We explore why traditional leadership programmes fall short, the four questions every board should be asking, and what it takes to build leadership capability that's wired into your strategy.

Nick Mackeson-Smith