Professional expertise in human behaviour, and the far less orderly experience of being human.

Joe Combrink is a trained psychologist, author and internationally experienced adviser on human behaviour, leadership, culture and organisational transformation.

For more than two decades, he has helped leaders, teams and organisations turn purpose into performance, reimagining how work gets done and building the conditions in which people can thrive and organisations can perform sustainably.

His career has taken him across Southern Africa, Asia Pacific and Australia, in an unusually diverse range of industries: mining and resources, management consulting, technology, infrastructure, healthcare, government, education, utilities and green energy.

Joe holds a Master’s degree in Organisational Psychology. His expertise lies in organisational health, leadership, culture, talent and large-scale transformation. His work has stretched from the boardrooms of ASX, JSE, LSE and NYSE listed companies to government institutions and not-for-profits, from executive teams to frontline operations, giving him a rare perspective on human behaviour across cultures, professions and levels of organisational life.

Psychology, strategy and execution

At the heart of his approach is bringing together psychology, strategy and execution. His work combines behavioural science with the realities of organisations: competing priorities, entrenched habits, imperfect systems, commercial pressure and the complicated business of getting human beings to move together.

Why he writes

That experience has given Joe more than a career. It has given him twenty-five years of observations of what shapes human beings: how we respond to pressure, construct identity, exercise choice, pursue achievement, influence one another, adapt to change, and sometimes become trapped by the very systems we create.

His own experiences of ambition, achievement, marriage, fatherhood, loss, uncertainty and significant personal change forced him to turn the lens inward and examine his own life with the same curiosity he had spent years bringing to people and organisations. His writing emerges from the collision of those two worlds.