Performance

Optimise ways of working to remove friction and lift results.

Performance
Why this matters

High performance isn't about working harder — it's about working smarter. Too often, organisations accept friction, misalignment, and legacy processes as 'just how things are.' We don't.

At Five, we help teams see their operating rhythms clearly, identify what's slowing them down, and design better ways of working. From Agile adoption to executive coaching, our performance work is grounded in real behaviour change — not theory.

When teams are set up to succeed, results compound. Projects land on time, collaboration improves, and people feel the difference in their day-to-day work. That's the kind of performance improvement that lasts.

Our team

Meet the Fivers who specialise in this area.

Racheal Reeves

Chief Creative and Behavioural Strategist

James Kitney

Chief Strategy and Transformation Catalyst

Anna Kingston

Performance Coach

Nick Mackeson-Smith

Chief Curiosity Officer, Founder and Director

Sally Schmall

Head of Executive Leadership Development

Jess Keenan

Senior Experience Designer

Services we offer in this area

AI Compass

Performance
Every organisation knows AI will reshape how they operate, but the challenge is not awareness, it is knowing where you stand today and what to prioritise next. AI Compass gives leadership teams a clear, measurable view of readiness across strategy, performance, culture, people, and technology. We capture perspectives from every layer, surface the gaps that traditional approaches miss, and translate findings into a prioritised, board-ready roadmap your team can own, execute, and track over time.

UX standards and design systems

Technology
Design consistent, scalable digital experiences that align to your strategy — through UX standards and design systems that make your technology work harder for your people.

AI Strategy & Enablement

Strategy & Leadership
AI is transforming the way businesses operate, but knowing where to start can be overwhelming. We help organisations explore how AI can support their teams, identify the most impactful opportunities, and develop a strategic roadmap for successful adoption. Our approach includes upskilling people, creating a deployment plan, and fostering engagement across the organisation.

Ways of working and agile

Performance
Embrace organisational agility and drive long term transformation

Performance Advisory & Coaching

Performance
Unlock the potential of your teams with performance coaching that drives success.

EX and CX Mapping

Performance
Engaged and empowered employees play a vital role in delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Discovery

Performance
Gain a complete understanding of how your business operates, identify points of friction and opportunities for improvement.

Related articles

Paula Riano

KPIs for AI: What metrics actually matter? (Hint: It’s not "number of prompts written")

Measuring AI impact by prompts written misses the entire point. Globally, the C-suite conversation has shifted. We're moving past deployment figures to concrete results: increased revenue, reduced costs, and enhanced satisfaction for customers and employees. This isn't just about doing AI, it's about AI doing something meaningful. I've consistently observed that for New Zealand organisations, especially, ethical integration is a non-negotiable KPI. Trust and compliance are fundamental for long-term adoption and success in our market. True value often comes from augmenting human capabilities, streamlining workflows and empowering teams. We need to assess how AI elevates our people, not merely how many tasks it automates. Pragmatic leaders understand that AI investments must directly align with strategic business metrics.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Clarity counts - why goals and measures matter

With everything that's going on aroun them, it's easy for teams to lose sight of what success really looks like. Clear goals and meaningful measures matter more than ever. It isn't just about tracking performance, but about creating focus, building alignment and supporting learning. You will find practical advice on how leaders and teams can build clarity around outcomes, make progress visible and create a shared understanding of what good looks like. Whether you use OKRs, KPIs or something simpler, this piece will help you make measurement meaningful in real organisational life.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

You can do anything, but not everything all at once: how to be smarter with your yes

The pressure to “do more with less” is unrelenting. But overcommitting time, people, and budget leads to burnout, poor delivery, and declining quality. In this article, we explore two powerful perspectives: how leaders can make better strategic choices using the iron triangle of time, cost and scope — and how teams can protect quality and wellbeing by shifting from automatic “yes” to more thoughtful responses like “yes, if” and “yes, when.”

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Getting agile right

There are so many aspects to agile, and it’s really important to understand what they are all about and why each of them are necessary. Some are structural, or procedural - things like having a very disciplined cadence of times when teams come together, or having really well defined set of objectives and expected results within a defined period of time. The structure allows teams to build upon their work in a repeatable and incremental way, and means that massive programmes of work can be broken down into much smaller and more manageable chunks.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Achieve anything

Many people go through life not knowing what they want or what success looks like to them. Sadder than that, many people go through life working to someone else’s goal, to fulfil someone else’s dream. That’s ok, if you are a “go-with-the-flow kind of person”, but not ok if you actually want to be in control of your own destiny. Once you’ve managed to find your goal, there still is a heck of a lot of work to do to actually make it happen. As with most things, our mind gets in the way and creates barriers to our success - it’s a mechanism designed to protect us and keep us safe, but annoyingly, it also prevents us from taking bigger risks and making bigger leaps. It puts the brakes on us choosing hard over easy, risk over safety, and effort over ease. This safety mechanism can manifest itself as lots of things (fear, blame, avoidance, excuses, and many more).

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

To stack or not to stack…

Being able to separate the task from your immediate personal ownership (and a feeling of obligation) is a great way to see where choice exists and to open up a whole new world of possibility.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Do something you love

When it comes to career advice, I often hear people say “do something you love”, or “follow your dreams”. That might sound a little cliché, (and more like one of those quotes you see on a background of pristine mountains and trees in an Instagram post) as opposed to actual solid career advice. Here’s why it’s actually great advice.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

The hybrid working revolution

Employees have embraced new technologies, new tools, and new ways of thinking. Employees have developed new mechanisms for social support and connection, and experimented with new ways of collaborating. Organisations who have historically railed against flexible or remote working have had no choice but to embrace these new ways of working, or face the prospect of little to no work being done, and limited business being able to take place. It’s disruption at it’s finest, and within disruption comes the opportunity to grow something new - something better - something more appropriate for the world we live in today.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

How to help others to stop ‘reloading’ in conversations

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and had the feeling that the other person isn’t actually listening to a word you are saying? They are patiently waiting for you to stop saying your piece, and then — BLAM! — they say their piece. This is much less of a conversation - let alone a kōrero - and much more like a game of tag.

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Racheal Reeves

Everything you do isn’t going to bring joy to the customer, some things just have to get done.

When we break down daily tasks into their essence they generally fall into two buckets — work for the business or work in the business.This is why being customer-centric can be incredibly hard for people in complex organisations. When we look at the root cause of our confusion we find its foundations sit in the understanding of what is for the business yet we normally focus on what is in the business by focusing on serving our stakeholders, colleagues and higher-ups instead of our customers because our boss pays us and holds the strings to our next promotion.

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Racheal Reeves

Why are you really doing it?

As a designer in a world of non-designers, I get people asking me to help with their presentations. They want me to help arrange the information beautifully on the slide or create a beautiful image.The first thing I ask them is “why are you doing this presentation?” and they answer, “They (the audience) need to know about [insert topic]”.Nine times out of ten the answer is either “they need to know ‘’ or “they should know”. Unfortunately, adults have free-will and limited capacity of caring on any given day. So why should they use their free-will and precious caring capacity on you?“Because it’s important” - quote from every person doing a presentation ever.Before you respond “because it’s important” ask yourself — who is it important to and why?

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Why giving feedback is ALWAYS the right thing to do

Bottom line is this. If you can see something, and other people can’t (or won’t) see it, then it’s always the right thing to call it out. Politely. With care. With love. With respect. The intention of giving feedback must always be that you care about the other person; That you care about better outcomes for you, them, the organisation, and everyone around them.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

One on one conversations that spark joy

One on ones don’t need to be a chore. I often hear from leaders that they struggle to get themselves motivated to have the repetitive weekly or monthly 1:1 conversation with their teams… and worse still, it feels like they are compelled to have them. I’ve been asked by leaders for templates for great 1:1s… and been shown templates for conversation flows that provide a rigid structure and boundaries for the conversation.

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Nick Mackeson-Smith

Take empowerment back

The critique of empowerment has become deafening, and it’s frustrating. 

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