About us
Meet Zora and Wayne
Zora Artis, GAICD, IABC Fellow, SCMP, ACC, FAMI, CPM
Zora helps leaders do the hard work of alignment when the stakes are high and the path is not obvious. As CEO of Artis Advisory and co-founder of Clear Leaders, she coaches, advises, and facilitates C-suite and senior teams through change and complexity – turning competing priorities into clear decisions, stronger cohesion, and coordinated action.
She is one of around 100 professionals worldwide recognised as a Fellow of the International Association of Business Communicators and holds an SCMP, the only ISO-accredited global certification in communication. Zora is also a certified Mirror Mirror™ Alignment practitioner and a strategic advisor to Mirror Mirror.
Wayne Aspland, MAICD, FCSCE
Wayne is a leadership, strategy and change communication professional. He helps organisations and teams realise their potential in today’s new world of work. A world where the opportunities created by AI are balanced against the strain of accelerating change and uncertainty. This is achieved with a focus on enabling AI capability, strategic alignment and communication and change capacity.
Our journey
Clear Leaders is a collaboration between Zora Artis of Artis Advisory and Wayne Aspland. For almost ten years, we have shared a strong belief that alignment is a powerful driver of organisational performance. This commitment to alignment has led to three ground-breaking research reports… most recently From Groupthink to Governance.
Our work together began in 2018, with a shared frustration.
Wayne found that few people understood their company’s strategy. This disconnection was a reality for many organisations: not just in the frontline but among senior and executive leaders as well. It got him wondering. How does an organisation deliver its strategy when nobody understands it?
Zora was seeing the same gap from a different angle. She would work with clients on strategy, positioning and change, then return later to see how it was being translated into action. Too often, what had been agreed at the top hadn’t translated into the decisions being made three levels down.
So in 2018, with the support of IABC, we ran our first global study into strategic alignment and the role of communication and leadership in enabling it. 227 senior communicators responded, from small and medium businesses through to some of the world’s largest corporations.
We returned to the research in 2020… this time to understand what the pandemic and the sudden shift in how people worked had done to alignment inside organisations. We found people pulling together under shared pressure in a way that hadn’t been there before. The question was whether it would last once that pressure eased.
By 2025, when we began our third study, the evidence suggested it hadn’t. Jonathan Trevor’s 2025 research found the same low level of alignment we’d measured back in 2018. Rather than run another quantitative study to reconfirm the problem, we went deeper. We spoke with 55 executive and senior leader interviews to understand why the gap persists. That work led to our 2026 report, From Groupthink to Governance.
Three studies and almost a decade of asking the same question have taught us that alignment isn’t something an organisation arrives at once. It drifts by default. The work is building the capability to keep closing the gap through how leaders lead, teams work, decisions get made and conversations happen.
Partners
This work draws on a small number of partner diagnostics, tools and services to extend what we do. All are measurable and repeatable, giving you evidence of progress over time, beyond a once-off snapshot.
Diagnostics that compare how people in the same team see the work they’re doing together. Pointed at a specific goal, such as a critical strategic initiative, AI adoption, cross-team delivery, an M&A integration, it reveals whether the people responsible have the shared clarity and coordinated action the outcome depends on. Used more broadly, it’s a fast way to see where a team is genuinely aligned or not. We use it at every level from the executive team, functional teams to delivery teams.
Network analysis that maps how well-connected your leaders actually are, and identifies the small group of hidden influencers (the 3%) who disproportionately shape culture and behaviour, across an organisation or a division. It’s particularly relevant for organisations in the middle of change or transformation, when knowing who actually carries influence matters more than who holds the title.
Our third partner helps us bring the right expertise to every engagement. Maestro provides access to a vetted community of fractional, interim and independent experts, giving us the flexibility to bring in the right senior expertise for whatever an engagement needs.
About us: frequently asked questions
Clear Leaders is a research collaboration between Zora Artis of Artis Advisory and Wayne Aspland. Zora and Wayne operate in their own rights, although they will often collaborate on client engagements.
Zora Artis, CEO of Artis Advisory, and Wayne Aspland founded the Clear Leaders research partnership in 2018. It grew out of a shared strategic alignment research program that began in 2018. Zora is a Fellow of the International Association of Business Communicators (one of roughly 100 worldwide) and holds an SCMP, the only ISO-accredited global certification in communication. Wayne is a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (MAICD) and focuses on leadership, strategy and change communication, including AI capability and change capacity.
Zora and Wayne’s alignment work is grounded in three proprietary global research studies conducted by the Clear Leaders research partnership. The research includes in-depth interviews with roughly 90 global leaders and a quantitative study of several hundred respondents. The most recent study, From Groupthink to Governance (2026), draws on 55 senior leader interviews across five continents, in addition to third-party research cited from HBR, Russell Reynolds Associates and Cascade.
Teams that think, work and act better, together. Organisations that Move as One™.