By Michelle Davies, CEO & Founder of Davies Winyard Associates
October 2026
After nearly 30 years building my People and Change career within management consulting firms, I made a decision that surprised colleagues, friends, and family. I stepped away from my role as a practice leader at an established management consulting firm to build something of my own, Davies Winyard Associates.
It wasn’t because I had stopped enjoying consulting. Quite the opposite. I still love the work, especially the challenge of untangling complex problems. I love walking into a complicated situation, looking beyond the obvious to understand what is really driving it, identifying practical solutions, and working with leaders to put those solutions into action.
What changed was what I wanted from the next chapter of my career.
For much of my career, I had the opportunity to operate entrepreneurially within consulting firms. I built practices, managed and developed staff, oversaw client relationships, sold work, recruited talent, led client delivery, and rolled up my sleeves to do the client engagement work myself.
Eventually, I realized I wanted to take the entrepreneurial part one step further.
I wanted the freedom to choose the challenges I worked on.
There is tremendous value in experience, but there is also a danger in becoming too comfortable with what you already know. Once you have implemented the same type of transformation several times, you know the patterns. You know many of the pitfalls. You can certainly do it again, and do it well, but it may no longer challenge you in quite the same way.
Give me a complicated organizational problem, a transformation that hasn’t been fully defined, a leadership team trying to figure out how to move from strategy to execution, or a business trying to understand the people implications of significant change. Those are the situations I find most interesting and rewarding.
Curiosity has always shaped how I approach my work, and complex challenges are what energize me.
Starting Davies Winyard Associates has given me the opportunity to shape my work around what I value most. It allows me to combine decades of experience in organizational change, strategy, culture, process redesign, transformation, and leadership effectiveness while still seeking out situations and solutions that require me to think differently.
It also gives me the freedom to be selective about where I can add the most value.
This independence changes how I work with clients. I focus on what the situation actually requires, bring in the right expertise when needed, and stay close to the work rather than fitting the problem into a predetermined solution.
Not every engagement is the right engagement. Not every client needs what I do. Part of being a trusted advisor is being willing to say that.
But when there is a difficult problem involving people, organizations, strategy, and change, and the answer isn’t immediately obvious, that’s where I want to be.
After nearly three decades in consulting, I didn’t leave the profession behind.
I simply created the opportunity to practice it differently.