Our Services

At Manawa Kōkopu, we live the innovation life — knowing that while every client, kaupapa, and context is unique, the foundations of our mahi remain constant. We walk alongside organisations and leaders to navigate complexity, refine direction, and design solutions that are bold in vision, values-aligned, and grounded in what works.

We specialise in strategic transformation — enabling irreversible shifts in how organisations value whānau, define success, and enact leadership. This is strategy in service of kaupapa — purposeful, future-focused, and built to endure.

 

Our approach is shaped by three core drivers that guide how we think, collaborate, and create momentum:

Strategy — Bridging insight and vision with action to chart a bold course and strengthen performance.

Synergy — Aligning people, kaupapa, culture, and systems with energy, clarity, and cohesion to enable innovation.

Sustainability — Embedding continuous improvement and delivering outcomes with enduring impact and radiant value.

 

From high-level strategic advice to capability development and operational design, we deliver kaupapa-driven insight, innovation, and improvement that elevate collective success and promote oranga across generations.

Insight

Illuminating Pathways with Purpose

We support organisations to pause, reflect, and reframe challenges through evidence-informed analysis and values-based dialogue.

  • We provide research, analysis, and strategic advice that uncovers root causes, identifies system-level patterns, and highlights opportunities.
  • We offer thought leadership and advice to guide robust thinking processes that integrate systems thinking, inform decisions, and inspire momentum.
  • We promote exploration of the status quo, offering authentic curiosity, helping teams connect decisions to purpose, and align strategy with long-term outcomes and cultural integrity.

Innovation

Cultivating Courage to Create

We support clients to explore bold ideas, co-design meaningful solutions, and lead adaptive change with purpose and confidence.

  • We provide innovation leadership and creative facilitation to support co-design, smart experimentation, and agile thinking.
  • We support the development of new strategies, services, and system responses that are future-focused, culturally grounded, and contextually relevant.
  • We bring fresh energy and structure to idea generation, helping teams move from insight to impact — from conversation to creation.

Improvement

Sustaining Momentum for Impact

Improvement is where transformation takes root. We help organisations build capability, embed quality, and stay aligned with what matters most.

  • We assist with strategic and operational planning that reflect your kaupapa and direction.

  • We offer evaluation, performance, and quality approaches to drive continuous improvement.

  • We facilitate inclusive reflection processes to assess what is working, where to adapt, and how to grow with purpose.

  • We provide practical implementation support and change management to strengthen direction and delivery.

Strategic Consultancy

Strategic Collaboration. Collective Success.

Our core strategic consultancy offering is focused on partnering with kaupapa-driven leaders and organisations to navigate complexity, shape vision, and deliver with integrity.

This is full-scope, high-trust consultancy — tailored to your context, grounded in kaupapa, and responsive to the realities you face. Whether engaging at the executive table, supporting senior leaders, or working alongside delivery teams, we bring strategic clarity, capability, and cohesion across the full spectrum — from system-level strategy to hands-on implementation.

We are invested in supporting the development of well-designed plans — where insight is applied, momentum is built, and delivery is sustained in lived practice.

What Manawa Kōkopu Strategic Consultancy offers and how we work

If you are facing shifting priorities, navigating change, pursuing opportunity, working under time pressure, or needing additional capacity, Manawa Kōkopu moves with you — at your pace — to progress your kaupapa.

What Manawa Kōkopu Strategic Consultancy Brings

  • Deeply embedded — we take time to understand your kaupapa and context

  • Culturally grounded — Te Tiriti o Waitangi, tikanga, and values are not add-ons; they are foundational

  • Strategically agile — balancing clarity of vision with responsiveness to change

  • Delivery-oriented — we stay with you through planning, activation, and real-world implementation

  • Trusted and discreet — offering high-trust support at senior levels and within dynamic systems

  • Flexible in form — available for short-term engagements, long-term contracts, or project-based delivery

How Manawa Kōkopu Strategic Consultancy Supports Leaders and Organisations
  • Develop, refine, and implement kaupapa-aligned strategy
  • Navigate change, growth, or recalibration with coherence and confidence
  • Design fit-for-purpose operating models, frameworks, and work programmes
  • Deliver critical artifacts and documents — including strategic plans, action plans, funding applications, concept and visual design, RFPs, business cases, annual reports, and long-form content requiring clarity, precision, and cultural depth
  • Facilitate high-trust wānanga, leadership sessions, and kaupapa planning
  • Strengthen planning, reporting, and performance systems
  • Provide interim or embedded leadership support — including cover during recruitment transitions or organisational change
  • Increase strategic capacity during high-pressure periods or when internal resources are stretched

Seeking embedded, kaupapa-led strategic support?

Peripheral Strategic Leadership

Peripheral Presence. Central Impact.

GrowthEdge offers high-trust, high-calibre strategic thinking — available by the hour, and paced to your needs.

This is not traditional consultancy. It is strategic leadership at the periphery — the space where pattern recognition, critical insight, and decisive perspective help to shape what comes next.

Not a consultant at the centre.
Not a distant observer.
But a sharp, kaupapa-aligned thought and innovation partner — positioned just beyond the operational flow.
Close enough to understand your context.
Distant enough to offer challenge, clarity, and altitude.

Because often, the most powerful insights emerge from the edge.

What GrowthEdge Peripherial Strategic Leadership offers and how we work
Designed for leaders who value sharp thinking, courageous questions, and well-timed clarity, GrowthEdge provides access to senior-level strategic insight — without the commitment of a full-scope contract or permanent appointment.

What Manawa Kōkopu Offers
  • Precision listening
  • Thinking beyond the obvious
  • Bringing kaupapa to the centre of strategic decision-making
  • Offering challenge, synthesis, and insight in real time

This is strategic consultancy held lightly, delivered with precision — responsive, honest, and aligned with your vision.

What GrowthEdge Brings
  • Flexible access to experienced strategic support — without the overhead of a full-time executive
  • Timely input into decisions, direction, documents, and dilemmas
  • A kaupapa-aligned sounding board to stretch thinking and generate momentum
  • Insight at the edge — where innovation, uncertainty, and opportunity converge

Who This is Designed For
  • Executive and senior leaders navigating complex, kaupapa-led systems
  • Leadership teams seeking regular strategic calibration
  • Programme leads and change managers needing a trusted thinking partner
  • Organisations in transition — growing, recalibrating, or facing complexity

How GrowthEdge Works

You purchase a block of hours per month — 8, 12, 16 or more — and use them flexibly across your needs.

Sessions may include:

  • Strategic wānanga or leadership coaching
  • Document review or decision-making support
  • Advisory input on high-stakes or complex mahi
  • Real-time reflection, reframing, and recalibration

Within those hours, we remain available as an embedded strategic partner — kaupapa-aligned, agile, and invested in your success.

GrowthEdge is where strategic clarity lives — not in the spotlight, but just beyond it.
Thoughtful. Responsive. Unmistakably aligned.

Ready to bring sharper thinking to the edge of your kaupapa?

Kura Poutama – Poutama IQ Ascent Series: Professional Development Pathways

Strategic Insight. Embodied Leadership.

Whether deepening strategic discernment, refining professional presence, or restoring rhythm in leadership expression, each Poutama IQ Ascent Series pathway is designed to meet current realities — and elevate from within.

The three core pathways are:

  • Manu Hōmiromiro: Poutama Insights — Strategic thinking and kaupapa-aligned leadership development
  • Te Puna Kōrero: Poutama Signature — Elevating professional presence and leadership positioning
  • Hā Tārewa: Poutama Flow — Reconnecting rhythm, restoring clarity, and recalibrating practice

Each pathway is distinct, yet interconnected through the shared kaupapa of transformative leadership.

Explore More

In many professional domains, cultural competency remains a threshold concern — often reduced to compliance rather than lived integrity. The Poutama IQ Ascent Series restores cultural intelligence as a relational, embodied, and generative practice — not merely a metric, but a method. It activates cultural competency as an ontological bridge between systems, reaffirming that Te Ao Māori knowledge and leadership hold transformative power for present and future generations.

Situated within the ascending logic of Te Poutama, the series draws on mātauranga Māori, kaupapa design, and lived leadership to guide development that is relational, rigorous, and culturally coherent.

The three Poutama IQ Ascent Series pathways offer culturally grounded, high-trust spaces where Insight Quotient (IQ) and Embodiment Quotient (EQ) are developed as lived, intentional practice.

Begin where the resonance is strongest — or ascend the full arc.

Ka tīmata te māramatanga, ka tupu te auahatanga, ka puāwai te whakapai, nā te ngoi auaha o te mahi ngātahi.

Insight takes seed, innovation grows, and improvement blossoms, nurtured by the creative energy of collaboration.

If you are ready to move from insight to action, reach out to shape something powerful together.

Protecting Our Taonga – Intellectual Property Notice: 

All artwork, visual designs, and written content on this website — including frameworks, tools, workshop materials, written concepts, and whakatauākī — are protected by copyright and remain the intellectual property of Manawa Kōkopu and its collaborators. These taonga are shared with intention and reflect distinct ways of thinking, designing, and engaging that are deeply aligned with purpose and practice. Unauthorised use, reproduction, distribution, or adaptation of any part of this content — including for commercial or training purposes — is strictly prohibited and may constitute a breach of the New Zealand Copyright Act 1994 and applicable intellectual property protections. If you are interested in using or adapting any part of the material, please contact us to discuss appropriate permissions and attribution.