About
I’m Penny Murden, founder of Pixicato.
A career inside complicated things
Nearly three decades of work have spanned production, live events, broadcast, project management, leadership, education, movement and human behaviour.
Some of that work has been enormous: international sport, major public events, live broadcast, television and film, complex productions involving large teams, tight timelines, serious logistics, public scrutiny, security, reputational pressure and very high-profile people where the stakes bring another layer entirely.
Some of it has been much smaller. Tiny teams. Limited budgets. Short lead times. Regional events. Productions that have quietly become much bigger than anybody expected. Situations where there is no enormous machine behind you and the thing still has to work. The scale changes, but the fundamentals of how people, systems, processes, information, decisions and resources interact remain remarkably consistent. What matters is understanding what this particular situation needs, what is supporting the work, what is making it harder, and how the different parts are affecting one another.
Creating the conditions for good work
In complex environments, good delivery is not only about reacting quickly when something goes wrong. It is about creating the conditions for people to get up to speed quickly, make good decisions and produce high-quality work without unnecessary friction or effort.
That requires looking ahead without pretending the future is predictable. What is this decision likely to affect next? What will the team need before they ask for it? Where is a constraint likely to appear? What can be put in place now so the work keeps moving when something unexpected happens?
The goal is not to predict everything. Reality will always throw something in from the side. The job is to create enough structure, communication, authority and support that when something changes, the team can respond without the whole thing becoming harder than it needs to be.
Years of working in high-pressure environments have made me very steady when circumstances change quickly. Rather than adding more noise, I work through what matters, what has changed, what we know, what we need and what the next useful move is.
Good leadership does not mean controlling every detail. It is about being clear where responsibility sits, giving people enough context and authority to do their jobs well, and creating an environment where capable people can actually use their capability.
One of the best pieces of feedback I have had came from a team member who told me he had worked much harder with me than he had with a previous manager, and somehow had a much better experience doing it. That tells me a lot about what good leadership and good systems can make possible.
Curiosity, context and useful questions
Curiosity has shaped a lot of my professional life. It has taken me through project management, education, psychology and human behaviour, strategic coaching, movement, anatomy, neurobiology, business, safety, logistics and a collection of other subjects that were interesting enough for me to want to understand them. Some of that became formal study or qualifications. Some of it simply gave me enough understanding to ask better questions, see how another discipline connects to the work around it, recognise when something does not quite add up, and know when deeper specialist expertise is needed.
Good leadership does not require one person to be the deepest expert in every discipline. It requires enough understanding to create the right conditions for specialists to do their work well, recognise how their work affects the rest of the system, and know when something needs a different kind of expertise.
I do not need to know how to configure Salesforce to recognise that the way a CRM is being used is creating friction elsewhere in a business. I need to understand what it is doing, how people are interacting with it, what it is affecting and whether the useful response is a process change, a behavioural change, a technology change or getting a specialist in to sort the bloody thing out. It also makes me fairly difficult to bullshit.
Seeing the whole ecosystem
Seeing the whole ecosystem means being able to hold the overall shape of something while still seeing the practical detail inside it: the people, processes, tools, environment, information, decisions, customers, communication, money, resources and whatever else is relevant in that particular business, along with the relationships between them.
Those relationships are where a lot of interesting things happen. Something can look perfectly sensible in isolation and create a completely different effect once it meets the rest of the system. A decision that looks cheaper on paper may create more cost, effort or risk somewhere else. A process that works beautifully for one team may make another team’s job significantly harder. A technology problem may actually be an information problem. A people problem may turn out to be a decision-making problem. That is why the loudest problem is not automatically the most important place to look.
Experience has given me a strong sense of when something needs a small adjustment and when it points to something more significant. The useful part is understanding enough of the ecosystem to know the difference, rather than assuming every issue needs a sweeping response or every small problem should stay small.
The humans inside the system
Businesses are not diagrams. They are made up of people with judgement, knowledge, habits, relationships, competing priorities, lives outside work and finite capacity.
I have been through burnout, grief and periods where my own capacity looked very different from what I was used to. That does not give me some magical insight into everybody else’s life, but it does mean I take capacity seriously and understand that humans cannot endlessly compensate for systems or environments that ask too much of them.
How work actually feels and functions for the people doing it matters just as much as how tidy it looks in a process map. People have told me they feel genuinely heard working with me, and that I somehow understand what they are trying to explain even when they have not quite found the words for it themselves.
There is nothing mystical about that. It comes from listening to the obvious things, the less obvious things, what keeps repeating, what does not quite fit and how what someone is describing connects to everything around it.
Outside work
Music was a huge part of my life from a young age, including classical training and studying music education at university. It influences how I notice timing, structure, interpretation, leadership and what changes when the same group of people responds to different conditions.
Movement and physical challenge have also been part of my life for a long time, through Pilates, yoga, ocean swimming, mountain biking, climbing, snowboarding and various adventures that seemed like a perfectly sensible idea at the time. Sailing has become the enduring one, from club and coastal racing to more recent offshore racing. I love the combination of skill, judgement, weather, navigation, equipment, crew, changing conditions and the fact that there is always another layer to understand.
Then there are animals, the ocean, creativity, good humans, laughter and a certain amount of intelligent absurdity. I care deeply about the work I do without believing everything has to become serious in the process.
Building capability, not dependency
Good work should leave people with greater understanding, stronger capability and more confidence in their own decisions, not with another expert permanently wedged into the middle of everything.
The goal is not to become another person the business depends on. Understanding the problem properly may give a client enough to take it forward themselves. They may want support designing what comes next, or it may be useful for me to stay involved through implementation and refinement. The level of involvement depends on what they actually need, with the aim of reaching a point where they can keep moving without me.
A business will not stay static, and neither will the conditions around it. Growth, contraction, new technology, leadership changes, opportunities and life events can all change what the system needs. If something materially changes later, we can look at that version of the business when it exists rather than pretending a solution designed today should remain perfect forever. The aim is to build capability and coherence, not another dependency that only works while I am standing in the middle of it.
Where Integrated System Coherence comes from
ISC is the name I now use for work I have been doing, noticing and refining across very different environments for decades.
Project management taught me to hold structure, priorities, people, resources and outcomes together. Production and live environments taught me what that looks like when the system is moving in real time and there is nowhere to hide from the consequences. Leadership taught me what changes when people have the information, authority and support they need to do good work. Education taught me to think about capability, agency and helping people become less dependent on the person teaching them. Studying human behaviour, movement and the body gave me other ways to understand how people respond to the environments around them, and life itself added a few lessons I probably wouldn’t have volunteered for.
All of it informs how I work now: starting with the business that actually exists, understanding the experience of the people inside it, and looking at how the whole ecosystem is working together. Not because there is one perfect system waiting to be imposed, but because greater coherence between the parts can help the business work better without asking particular humans to personally hold the whole bloody thing together.