Starting at NZ King Salmon: A First Week That Set the Tone

EDIT: Thanks so much for all the positive feedback on the first blog post. I genuinely enjoyed writing it and had planned to continue the series. Some people have however expressed concerns about me sharing more, so I’ve decided to stop the remaining episodes. My intention was simply to reflect on a really positive period of transformation work and the human connections that made it meaningful. I appreciate everyone who took the time to read and respond, and I’m always happy to share my story and learnings with you in person.

Mid June. That is when I stepped into the role of Transformation Lead at New Zealand King Salmon. I had been brought in to lead the uplift of NZKS’s IT function, grow the team, and build the foundations for the moment a permanent CIO would eventually step in. It was a challenge I genuinely looked forward to. I had never led the full IT function of a food producing and processing organisation before, nor had I ever worked for a South Island company. And as I was told more than once, “People are different down here — nicer,” usually said with a grin by South Islanders themselves.

From the interview process, I already knew a few things. NZKS had recently been through a significant change process, including shifts in leadership and reporting lines for the ICT team. NZKS also had bold ambitions to triple production by 2030 and to implement a new ERP to support that growth. Depending on your appetite for complexity, those elements can either make you hesitate or make you lean in. If you are wired a bit like me, you see them as signals of possibility, not reasons to hold back.

Landing in Nelson

My first arrival into Nelson Airport set the tone for what would become many crossings of the Cook Strait. Sometimes it was on the tiny Sounds Air Cessnas, sometimes on the more familiar Air New Zealand flights. That first morning, I was swept straight into a stream of induction sessions. Health and safety came first, naturally. Then came the people, the Nelson site, the systems, the context. It was a lot, but it was also energising.

By the end of that first week, I had a rough stock-take. Not a polished assessment, but a set of early impressions that would shape the months ahead. It looked something like this:

1. A team that had been through change and needed clarity, stability, and direction.

2. A technology landscape with pockets of strength but also fragility, and a backlog of decisions waiting to be made.

3. A business with big ambitions but limited confidence in whether IT could enable them.

4. A culture that was warm and welcoming in some pockets, yet noticeably cold and unbalanced in others. At times it felt less like one organisation and more like an agglomeration of several.

5. A sense that the transformation was not just about systems or processes, and not just about ICT, but about rebuilding trust and shifting the wider organisation.

Possibility in the Messiness

I have always believed that transformation work is at its most interesting when things are a bit messy. When the organisation is in motion, when people are tired but hopeful, when the future is exciting but not yet clear. NZ King Salmon was exactly in that space.

And that is where this series begins. With the first week, the first impressions, and the early signals of what would become an intense, meaningful, and very human period of work.

In the next post, I will dive into the team. What I found, what surprised me, and how we began rebuilding momentum.