For leaders in Aotearoa.
Your community needs you to lead differently. This is how.
A relational way to lead, grounded in te ao Māori. At its core is Te Pūtake: mauri, whanaungatanga, kaitiakitanga, mana motuhake and tūrangawaewae.
“…not just for New Zealand, but in fact for the world”.
What is Tiriti-dynamic leadership?
Tiriti-dynamic leadership is a relational way of leading in a Tiriti-based Aotearoa New Zealand, grounded in te ao Māori. It treats Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a working model for partnership in all our work, with teams, boards, communities and partners. At its core is Te Pūtake: mauri, whanaungatanga, kaitiakitanga, mana motuhake and tūrangawaewae.
It isn’t only about working with iwi and hapū. It’s about the way we work in a Tiriti-based Aotearoa New Zealand.
Te Pūtake: five concepts at the core.
Five Māori concepts sit at the organising core of the mahi. Not a checklist. The kupu you keep coming back to when the work gets hard.
Mauri, life force
The vitality of tāngata, places, and organisations. What protects it. What depletes it.
Ask yourself What is lifting the energy of our people and partners right now, and what is draining it?
Whanaungatanga, relationships
How we build and sustain genuine connections. Trust before transaction.
Ask yourself Which relationships do we only tend when we need something?
Kaitiakitanga, guardianship
What we hold in trust for those who come next. The long view.
Ask yourself What are we holding in trust, and who will inherit the decisions we make this year?
Mana motuhake, self-determination
Tāngata and hapori lead their own mahi. We walk alongside, not in front.
Ask yourself Which decisions are we making for people who should be making them with us, or without us?
Tūrangawaewae, place-based belonging
Where we stand. What grounds us. The specificity of context.
Ask yourself Do we know who mana whenua are in each place we work, and do they know us?
He awa whiria, the braided rivers approach.
Two streams of knowledge flow alongside each other as equals: tāngata whenua knowledge and tāngata Tiriti knowledge. Tāngata Tiriti are those of us who belong here through Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The streams pool, separate and rejoin. We let the right stream lead at the right moment.
He Awa Whiria was created by the late Professor Angus Macfarlane, alongside Associate Professor Sonja Macfarlane. We use it with acknowledgement and gratitude. He Awa Whiria braids Indigenous and Western knowledge. We apply it to tāngata whenua knowledge and tāngata Tiriti knowledge. Read the open-access book or see how it shapes our kaupapa.
You’ve sensed it. The old way of leading isn’t enough.
The leadership development you’ve done — most of it imported, most of it individual, most of it transactional — got you here. It won’t get your organisation where it needs to go next.
You’re being asked to lead in a Tiriti-based Aotearoa New Zealand: through partnership, through genuine engagement with iwi, hapū and every community you serve, through the kind of complexity that doesn’t reduce to a quarterly metric. The frameworks you’ve been handed weren’t built for any of it.
The leaders we work with are pragmatists. They want to know what to actually do — in their next board paper, their next exec meeting, their next hard conversation. That’s what this is for.
Who this is for.
Senior managers
Carrying Tiriti partnership inside their organisation, often without a map for doing it well.
Executive teams
Trying to lead relationally across complex stakeholder relationships — iwi-Māori partners, hapori, Crown agencies, suppliers.
Boards
Working out what genuine partnership at governance level actually looks like, beyond the cultural acknowledgement at the start of a hui.
Emerging leaders
In the social sector, government agencies, and kaupapa Māori organisations, who’ll be carrying this mahi forward.
If you’ve sensed your current leadership development isn’t giving you what this country needs from you, you’re who we built this for.
What you’ll be doing differently in six months.
You’ll be making decisions inside a clearer frame. Te Tiriti as a working model, not an opening karakia. Whanaungatanga before transaction — in practice, not just on the values poster.
Your exec team will share a common language for the conversations that used to stall. Your board will be asking sharper questions about partnership and accountability. The mahi with iwi and hapū you’ve been finding hard will start to move.
You won’t have certificates. You will have a practice that holds up under pressure.
Programmes we run.
Relational management and leadership development with a kaupapa Māori lens. The mahi takes different shapes, but it’s built on the same things: bicultural reciprocity, cultural safety, and lifting community voices rather than extracting from them.
Tūāpapa
Foundation. For a leadership team, executive group or board. You leave with shared language, sharper questions and a clearer view of what’s next.
Whakapakari
To strengthen. For emerging leaders or a cohort across organisations. Wānanga, peer learning and one-on-one support.
Hīkoi
The journey. For executive teams and senior leaders carrying significant Tiriti partnership responsibility.
We also run board and governance facilitation, in-house programmes for organisations going through change, and stakeholder engagement design for iwi-Māori, hapori and community partnerships. The shape comes from the relationship — and we get to that in the first kōrero, not the proposal.
A rangapū between Hemisphere and Big River Creative.
Two agencies. One shared mahi. We don’t talk about Tiriti-dynamic practice in the abstract — we live it between Hemisphere and Big River Creative, and we bring it to the work we do alongside you.
Te Awanui Reeder, Pae Ārahi. Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngā Pōtiki, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Kahungunu. Founder of Big River Creative.
Dr Tim Antric, Kairātaki. Tangata Tiriti. Managing Director of Hemisphere.
Meet the guides on this journey →
Every relationship starts with kōrero.
No commitment. No pitch. No proposal templates. A conversation about where you are, what you’re navigating, and whether we’re the right people to walk alongside you.
Sometimes that ends with us shaping something together. Sometimes it ends with us pointing you somewhere else. Both are good outcomes.
What leaders ask before getting in touch.
How do I justify this to my board?
Frame it as risk management and capability. The relationships you’re being asked to hold — with iwi, with hapū, with Māori-led entities, with communities your organisation serves — carry real consequence if they go wrong. Tiriti-dynamic leadership is the practice that helps senior leaders hold those relationships well. Most boards understand the cost of getting them wrong; this is the development that reduces that risk.
What’s the time commitment for me personally?
Shaped by the programme. A Tūāpapa wānanga is two days. A Whakapakari cohort runs across three months with monthly sessions. A Hīkoi engagement is twelve months with a rhythm we agree together. We’ll be honest with you about what each one asks — and we won’t propose something that doesn’t fit your capacity.
Is this only for organisations engaging directly with iwi?
No. Tiriti-dynamic leadership applies wherever you’re leading in Aotearoa — with your team, your board, your community partners, your customers. If you’re a senior leader in this country, you’re leading in a Tiriti context whether you’ve named it or not.
How is this different from Te Tiriti training we’ve already done?
Te Tiriti training usually covers history, articles, and obligations. Important groundwork. This is the next layer — how you actually lead differently once you understand the obligations. Practice, not history. We assume you’ve done the foundational mahi.
What if we’re not ready?
Then we have an honest conversation about that. ‘Not ready’ often means ‘haven’t had the right framing yet’. Sometimes it means ‘the timing is wrong’. Sometimes it means ‘this isn’t the right fit’. We’d rather find that out in a thirty-minute kōrero than after a proposal.
What does it cost?
Pricing is shaped by the relationship, not set in advance. We work it through in the first kōrero, once we understand what you’re navigating, and follow up with a written estimate you can take to your board.
Start a kōrero.
If something here lands with you, get in touch. We’d rather have one good conversation than send you a brochure.
An occasional email when we publish something new. How we use your email.