David Foggin
What makes people do their best work? I've chased that question through advertising, consulting, headhunting, an interim managing directorship and a lot of contact-centre floors. Sariio is the answer I kept arriving at: measure how people prefer to work, and build the work around the evidence.
Thirty-five years, four chapters
Culture change, from the founder's chair. I founded Disruption Ltd, a culture-change consultancy, in 1991 and sold the business to TBWA. The client work spanned Mars, the NHS and Butcher's Pet Care on leadership and culture-change programmes, and a year inside Deutsche Bank's acquisition of Bankers Trust - a masterclass in what happens to culture when two organisations collide.
The academic grounding. I studied organisational leadership at Harvard Business School, where John Kotter, author of Leading Change, was my tutor and mentor. His discipline still shapes how I run engagements: diagnose before prescribing, and never mistake activity for adoption.
The instrument. I built the first version of this instrument, Saviio, in 2007. By the time I retired Saviio in 2016, the instrument had run for nine years, across forty organisations and more than twelve thousand people. SAM Headhunting in Copenhagen - now The SAM Group - made Saviio the working tool of its consultants across sixteen countries, translated into eleven languages besides English, and Nigel Frank International has used the approach since 2009 across EMEA, the United States and Asia Pacific. Sariio AI is the instrument rebuilt for this decade: the same preference science, with gated AI commentary on top.
The floors. Between those chapters I did the operational work this industry usually outsources to theory: two years of resourcing and screening for Sitel on the Sage account, the same for Inkfish in Nottingham on American Express and Domestic & General, four years in Cape Town as interim MD for J.F. Hillebrand - I opened the Cape Town office, and most of my work is still there today - and, in 2026, a live outsourced sales pilot in Cape Town as Everflow's strategic on-site representative, working daily beside Shadow Global's leadership.
And one credential that surprises people: a certificate in choreography and contemporary dance teaching, which turns out to share more with running a change programme than either title suggests.
With the Everflow team in Cape Town - March 2026.
The idea the career kept proving
Every chapter taught the same lesson from a different angle. The agency years showed that talented people fail in roles that fight their nature. The headhunting years showed that CVs describe the past and predict very little. And it was contact-centre floors like this one in Cape Town that showed both at industrial scale – and what the pattern costs once attrition passes 30 per cent a year.
You couldn't tell it from the photograph alone, but having worked closely with this team I can: each of them approaches the same goal in their own way. None of that shows on the surface – which is rather the point.
We do our best work when we play to our preferences. Sariio exists to make that visible, one map at a time.
Sariio Limited
Sariio Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 15760535, at Suite 5, 5th Floor, City Reach, 5 Greenwich View Place, London E14 9NN. Platform data is hosted in Frankfurt on European infrastructure, encrypted in transit and at rest - the complete governance position, written for DPOs and procurement teams, is published in the trust & AI governance declaration.
The conversation costs half an hour
If any of this maps onto a problem you're carrying - attrition, engagement, a team that should work and doesn't - tell me about the operation, and I'll give you an honest read on whether I can help.