NexWave CoreShift started in the autumn of 2018 in a rented office on King Street West in Toronto, with one client, a shared printer, and a very clear conviction: that most organisational problems are not strategy problems. They are signal problems. The right information is not reaching the right people at the right time, or it is reaching them wrapped in so much noise that nobody acts on it. Fiona Micklewright had spent over a decade inside large financial services firms watching exactly this happen, and she left to do something about it.
The name of the firm took a while to settle. The early working title was something far more forgettable. What stuck was the idea of a wave that carries a signal outward and a core that shifts when the signal lands. That is the actual work: helping a leadership team receive new information about itself and then genuinely change in response to it, rather than filing the report and carrying on. The first two years were mostly diagnostic work for mid-size professional services firms in Ontario. By 2021 the practice had expanded to include leadership alignment work, and by 2023 clients were coming from British Columbia and Alberta as well.
Fiona Micklewright spent eleven years inside large financial services firms in Toronto before she decided she was more useful on the outside. She had led three enterprise-wide transformation programmes at a mid-size insurance group, the last of which involved restructuring a 200-person operations division over eighteen months. That project taught her more about organisational inertia than any MBA module could. In 2018 she founded NexWave CoreShift to work directly with leadership teams who know something needs to change but are not sure where to start. She reads widely in systems theory, keeps a vegetable garden that she describes as "a useful lesson in patience," and replies to every enquiry herself.