Corporate anthropology, made measurable
Frederic Merlin
Organizational consultant
Restructuring for the AI era
I redesign the structure a company runs on, and read the people who have to carry it: growth, succession, turnaround, and now the AI transition. Based in Ghent, at work anywhere.
Find your way in
What are you here for? Pick your door.
Work with me
Consulting
I work with the people who run a company through the growth, restructures, successions, and turnarounds they cannot steer from the inside. The pattern is always the same. Strategy sets the direction. Structure decides whether the company can actually walk it. And people decide whether the structure lives or stays a drawing.
So the work runs in that order: I diagnose how the organisation actually works today, redesign the structure around the strategy, and read the people who will make it work. Lately one question sits on top of almost every engagement: what does AI change for us, and who should carry it? That is restructuring for the AI era. Same discipline, new era.
How far I go is the client's choice. Some take the report and run the change themselves. Some want me alongside while they make the moves. Some have me lead the transition.
Every engagement is instrumented with The Sociographer, declared upfront.
About
The method, and the man behind it
I read the soil people grow in, and I measure it.
Walk into almost any company and you will hear the same sentence: we have a people problem. After fifteen-plus years inside leadership teams, I have stopped believing it. The person who looks like the problem is usually the clearest reading you have of the structure around them.
Move a struggling manager into a role the structure actually supports, and the problem tends to leave with them. Leave a good one in the wrong place and you watch them wilt. So I do the anthropologist's work first. I read the organisation people actually live in, not the one drawn on the org chart. Then I do the part that discipline usually leaves out. I measure it.
How I got here
I am the second of four children, and for a long time I was the one who stood between my parents and kept the peace. That is probably where this started: watching how people actually work, years before I had words for it.
Work took me into sales across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, then onto factory floors in Asia and into turnarounds where the numbers were the easy part. The lesson that stuck came far from home, when I was sure my job was to be the smartest person in the room. It was not. It was to find what each person was good at and build around that. Most of what I do now grew from that.
Another country, another floor, this time in America, and a warehouse manager taught me the rest. Ask a man to count the stock and you get a wall. Tell him you have a problem and ask for his help, and you get a person. I have led with the second version ever since.
Academically I am an economist. Through a life of paying attention I have become a practical psychologist. The crossing of the two is where my nature sits. No organisation runs on strategy alone, and none runs on good people alone; it needs a pragmatic direction and a team that genuinely fits it. So I work by asking until something true surfaces, helping decide, then steering only where it is needed. True conversation is my strength. A little non-conformism is my attitude.
A client once asked where the urge to take a company apart and understand it came from. I had to think, then remembered my master's thesis, twenty years earlier: a system for reading a whole organisation. I had been doing this all along without noticing.
Most problems are soil, not people.
Give the same seed two different soils and you get two different plants. People work the same way. Most of what gets filed as a performance problem is a person planted where they cannot root. The job is to read the soil, name what it is doing to the people standing in it, and change the conditions. The 9outcomes framework is how I turn that reading into something concrete.
How I make it measurable
Reading the soil is the anthropologist's half. The other half is the part most of that work skips: I score it. Every reading becomes a health profile on the same scale, so you can compare it and watch it move. Three readings, one method.
Organisation Health Profile
the whole company, read across strategy, organisation, and people.
Manager Health Profile
one manager: are they clear, are they capable, are they landing results.
Personal Health Profile
the person, through The Tree Test, a short self-report that reads what someone is and whether the soil fits.
The first two grow out of my 9outcomes framework. The third runs on The Sociographer, the instrument I built.
People have a name for this kind of work. They call it corporate anthropology: reading the lived culture of an organisation, not the one on the org chart. I came to it from the inside, from years in the rooms where these problems live, and built my own instruments to measure what it sees. So I use the name as a description, not a title I was handed.
- reading real organisations
- 15+ yrsreading real organisations
- employees, from growing firms to business units
- 15–200+employees, from growing firms to business units
- dimensions behind every reading
- 9dimensions behind every reading
Book me to speak
Speaking
I give a leadership audience one idea they can use on Monday: the team you manage is mostly a product of the structure you put it in. Change the structure and the people change with it.
For CEO and leadership audiences, entrepreneurs' networks, and conferences that prefer substance to theatre, in Belgium and across borders.
The human layer
As AI takes the codifiable work, human qualities become the differentiator. What that means for how you build a team.
The team you actually have
What breaks when a company grows from 15 to 50, and again from 200 to 400, and how to fix the structure instead of the people.
Why your best engineer makes a hard manager
The first-manager trap, and the structural design that prevents it.
Planted or buried
The keynote version of the book. People don't fail. They get planted in the wrong soil.
Tell me about your event.
Learn from me
Teaching
I teach strategic, structural organisation development: how a business is actually built, where it can be simpler, and how the person running it leads. One place I do this is inside Boost my business, the growth track for entrepreneurs at Syntra (BE), where my module runs twelve hours in the classroom across three sessions. I also teach it directly, for teams and entrepreneurs who want it on their own terms.
Even as a one-person business, you are your most important process.
We look at how your organisation runs today, where it can be simpler, and how you lead it. The same structural lens I bring to a leadership team, scaled to the room in front of me.
Want this for your team, or for yourself? Mail me.
The instrument
TheSociographerSociometry is a hundred years old. Jacob Moreno worked out how to draw the invisible lines in a group: who turns to whom, and who is left at the edges. For a century that map could show you the lines, but never what was travelling along them, or who the people at the ends of them really were.
The Tree Test changes that. Lay it over the map and the lines fill with people: you see what each one actually is, and whether the soil around them is feeding them or starving them. That is modern sociometry, the relationships and the people in them measured together for the first time.
The book
Planted or Buried
A short parable about being planted where you cannot grow, and the long way round to the soil that is yours. It begins with a tree that everyone agreed was a disappointment.
Read more about the bookGet the first chapter when it lands.
I am writing it now. Leave your email and you will hear from me when the launch list opens, and not before.
What people say
Read by the people who hired me
The ship was steered by two captains. Frederic delivered a clear report that laid the company's risks and pain points bare. He raised difficult things in a soft, moderating way while making crystal clear what was at stake, and he taught me to stay close to myself, as a person and as a CEO.
His strongly developed human compass and emotional intelligence is without question Frederic's greatest asset. He listens without judgment, enriches intuition with courage, and grounds his advice in psychological insight. No one-size-fits-all. He looks at the full potential of a business in all its dimensions.
As a production manager, Frederic challenged me because he saw my potential. His guidance and feedback were decisive in growing to the next level.
Contact
Get in touch.
Consulting, a talk, the course, or something that doesn't fit a box yet. Tell me what you're working on and I'll reply myself.
Or write to me directly at frederic@fredericmerlin.com.