Nigel Dalton

At Thoughtworks, Dalton combines agile and lean management thinking to help organizations increase their speed to market, keep pace with the accelerating rate of technological change, and enable them to grow as purpose-driven, modern businesses. He also advises organizations on how to create resilient, inventive, digital, and human-centric cultures based on data-driven decision-making and operational excellence.

His current role threads together his last two decades of experience. Among other positions, he worked at USA HRtech startup ePredix, which offered online pre-employment assessment and employee development tools; spearheaded the technological elements of book publisher Lonely Planet’s shift to digital publishing and commerce; was CIO and led research and development at global property portal organization REA Group. Currently, he serves as chair of Lean Enterprise Australia, part of the Lean Global Network.

Dalton is working on a book, SuperProductive: Start-up to Scale-up, to be published sometime in 2022-23, that distills his career learning as a social scientist, technologist, inventor, researcher, and startup and corporate executive. He makes the case that flourishing in the current volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) economic environment begins with management that builds resilience, innovation, and operational excellence. He argues that the 2020s echo the challenges of the 1960s, when business met those VUCA times with lean thinking and management — advocating that those systems thinking lessons now need to be applied urgently in the West.

Outside of work, Dalton helps teams at charities to harvest the Web’s benefits. These organizations include Orange Sky Laundry, which offers free mobile laundry service to the homeless, and Australia’s Flying Robot School, an educational initiative encouraging rural public-school students to study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

He grew up in Waikato-Waipa hill country farming district in New Zealand and studied social sciences, earning a bachelor’s degree at Waikato University.