About Steve

Dr Steve Barlow, FIML, founded and leads The Change Gym®. He is based on the Gold Coast, Australia, and holds a PhD in change readiness. 

Steve’s work centres on a single idea: organisations adapt best when the architecture of readiness supports movement. For more than two decades, Steve has helped leaders understand how structural, strategic, behavioural, and psychological conditions interact under pressure — and how strengthening those conditions makes change easier, cleaner, and more sustainable.

Steve is the architect of Readiness-Centred Change™, a unified approach that integrates diagnostics, capability pathways, and structural insight into a single organisational infrastructure. His work reframes readiness not as project preparation or motivational uplift, but as system architecture: deliberately shaping conditions that allow people to act with clarity, confidence, integrity, and flow under real constraints.

Across healthcare, government, and complex service environments, Steve has supported organisations facing high‑stakes reform, structural strain, and adaptive pressure. His background includes conducting conflict resolution and anger management programs in a maximum‑security prison, lecturing in postgraduate programs on Leading and Managing Change at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine, and authoring or co‑authoring more than 10 books on organisational change and adaptive capability.

He holds degrees from the Australian Catholic University, Macquarie University, and the University of Sydney, and was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award for his PhD research into change readiness. His work continues to bridge academic rigour with practical system‑level architecture, giving leaders a clear way to diagnose conditions, strengthen coherence, and build enduring adaptive capability across their organisation.