Storypark: Regrouping After Rapid Change to Scale With Confidence
Client: Storypark | Industry: Education Technology (EdTech) | Size: ~100 employees | Location: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Sri Lanka
“Humankind helped us consolidate after a significant period of change, understand what our people and leaders needed, and reset how we operated for the next stage of growth. That gave us the clarity and confidence to re-accelerate with more intention.”
— Jamie MacDonald, CEO, Storypark
The Company
Storypark is a NZ-founded EdTech platform supporting early childhood education centres, teachers, and families to build stronger learning partnerships. Trusted by thousands of educators across Australasia and Canada, Storypark is purpose-led, product-driven, and committed to improving outcomes for children and communities.
The Challenge
Storypark entered a period of significant transformation in quick succession. The company was acquired by Private Equity (PE) firm, Potentia and then completed its first-ever acquisition, integrated a new team in Australia, expanded delivery through an offshore team in Sri Lanka.
Over a short period, the organisation grew by approximately 30–40 percent and shifted from a primarily New Zealand-based business with a small presence in Canada to a more complex, multi-location organisation.
At the same time, Storypark continued to move quickly on product development while navigating leadership changes associated with growth and integration. While this transformation unlocked momentum, the pace and layering of change placed pressure on leaders and teams.
The leadership team recognised that before pursuing further acquisition-led growth, they needed to understand how the change had landed, strengthen leadership alignment, stabilise ways of working, and create clearer operating foundations for the next phase.
Our Approach
Humankind partnered with Storypark as an independent, trusted advisor, working alongside the CEO, SLT, and People Operations Lead through a focused three-month engagement.
Our role was to help the leadership team move from rapid change into deliberate scale, creating the space, insight, and structure needed to re-accelerate with confidence.
We began by listening across the organisation. Through facilitated retrospectives, we created safe forums for people to share what had worked, what had been challenging, and what needed to evolve. These insights gave leaders a clear, organisation-wide view of sentiment following acquisition, integration, and rapid growth.
We then synthesised the key themes and used them to design and facilitate a senior leadership offsite. This helped leaders align on lessons learned, reset expectations around leadership and ways of working, and clarify priorities ahead of the next phase.
Alongside this, we partnered with Storypark’s People Operations Lead to co-create a practical People & Culture roadmap, focused on leadership capability, communication through change, decision clarity, scalable structure, and future acquisition readiness.
Throughout the engagement, Humankind acted as a sounding board, coach, and strategic partner, strengthening internal capability rather than replacing it.
The Outcome
Storypark entered its next growth phase with greater clarity, alignment, and control.
- Clear, shared visibility into organisational sentiment, reducing blind spots following acquisition and rapid change
- Stronger leadership alignment, enabling faster and more consistent decision-making
- Stabilised ways of working across a growing global footprint, lowering friction introduced through rapid integration
- A clear People & Culture roadmap guiding execution over the next 12–18 months
- Reduced execution risk for future acquisitions, with clearer integration and change principles
Why This Partnership Matters to Humankind
This partnership reflects Humankind’s work with organisations navigating growth, change, and complexity.
For Storypark, the value was not only in supporting people through change. It was in helping the leadership team connect people insight, operating rhythm, leadership alignment, and future growth ambition.
It is a strong example of our EX for Organisational Performance approach in action: helping a scaling organisation build the leadership, structure, and ways of working needed to perform sustainably through acquisition-led growth.
