Founder & CEO · The Hive Change Consultancy
I help stretched leadership teams turn strategic goals into aligned performance — without burnout, bloat, or a Big Four price tag.
The STORM Process®
Pax8 · GTM Summit
GTM Summit 2020
About
Andrew Tilling is the Founder & CEO of The Hive Change Consultancy — a strategy rollout and execution partner that helps senior leadership teams close the gap between strategic intent and operational reality.
He embeds alongside leadership teams as a fractional facilitative leader, working on the problem most organisations struggle to name: execution doesn't fail because the strategy is wrong — it fails because coordination doesn't scale beyond the leadership layer.
His proprietary STORM Process® provides the operating system for closing that gap. FIRE Huddles sustain momentum. And a suite of proprietary frameworks — including DRIVE, STARS, STRIVE, and the SERVICE Mindset — give teams the tools to stop talking about change and start delivering it.
The Person
Before The Hive, there was a stage.
Andrew started directing shows at 14. By 18 he was working professionally — performing as an actor for seven years while leading a youth theatre of 400 students at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. Some days he delivered four workshops before lunch. That is where he crafted his art: the ability to create an experience that moves people, in real time, in a room.
What he learned there is the foundation of everything he has built since: that a group of people with questionable talent, no budget, and a borrowed rehearsal space can — under the right leadership — produce something that brings an audience to its feet.
Then he entered the corporate world. What he found there stopped him cold. Organisations with every resource imaginable — money, skilled people, technology, time — consistently unable to organise themselves toward a shared goal. Dysfunction as the default. Meetings that produce more meetings. Strategy that fades before it lands.
The contrast with the theatre was impossible to ignore. A group of underpaid actors with nowhere near enough rehearsal time could build something extraordinary in six weeks. A leadership team with a six-figure budget and twelve months couldn't align on a shared priority. Something was structurally wrong — and it wasn't the strategy.
That frustration is what built the STORM Process. Alongside his corporate work, Andrew spent years exploring a different question — what does mastery actually look like from the inside? That journey took him through Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, across India and beyond, and eventually to capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian dance-fight game he has now practiced for over 20 years. He is a Professor of capoeira and teaches in Parma with his wife, Caterina Violi — Contra-Mestre and co-director of The Hive.
The Hive is how he has brought all of it together: a network of facilitators, coaches, and learning designers providing the right support, at the right moment, to get teams aligned, collaborative, and executing toward the results that matter.
"Knowledge is now cheap. Experience and execution capability are everyone's bottleneck."
Andrew Tilling · Core Philosophy
Experiences & Talks
Andrew speaks to these themes — but what moves the needle is what happens in the room. Whether it's a keynote, a facilitated workshop, or a multi-day leadership programme, the design goal is always the same: your people leave with a tool, a decision, or a commitment they didn't have when they walked in.
Having spent seven years in professional theatre and delivered up to four workshops a day, Andrew brings an uncommon ability to read a room, hold attention on a large stage, and create experiences that produce real, usable output. The format is always a conversation first.
Strategies don't crash — they fade. Andrew unpacks the 9% trust statistic from HBR, explains why execution fails horizontally rather than vertically, and introduces Stakeholder Trajectory Mapping as a diagnostic leaders can run this week.
Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and Transformation Directors navigating strategy rollout
The town hall went well. Everyone nodded. But was that buy-in — or was it politeness? Drawing on Bridges' transition model and Self-Determination Theory, Andrew shows why campfire leadership beats forest-fire launches.
Ideal for HR, People, and OD leaders responsible for culture and change
Alignment is not coordination. Using Gleicher's change equation and Woolley's collective intelligence research, Andrew explains why execution is a social system — and why shared wins matter more than shared slide decks.
Ideal for Operations and strategy teams frustrated by slow cross-functional execution
Change fatigue is not resistance — it's a signal the system is leaking energy. Drawing on Maslach's burnout research and Gartner's change saturation data, Andrew reframes fatigue as diagnostic data and shows how to restore energy through alignment.
Ideal for Leadership development programmes, L&D audiences, HR conferences
A personal leadership story connecting 20 years of Afro-Brazilian martial arts practice to the realities of running a business under uncertainty. Covers negotiation, improvisation, reading the room, and why the best leaders move with intention — not just reaction.
Ideal for All-hands events, leadership offsites, founder & entrepreneur audiences
Topic Areas
Clients & Credibility
The STORM Process® and FIRE Huddle™ frameworks are in active use across client organisations worldwide. Available for keynote, panel, podcast, webinar, and workshop — remote and in-person.
Book Andrew
For speaking enquiries, podcast guest requests, or programme partnerships.
