“I joined Group Partners because I saw the power that frameworks have to organize thinking and to break through silos.”
Inside government
Her career began in government systems. From 1995 to 2000 Hazel was a systems design authority at the Ministry of Defence. From 2001 to 2004 she was a service delivery manager at the Cabinet Office.
The systems were large and joined up. By the end of her time in government she was developing system and service oriented architecture that met operational needs across functions. Data modelling and systems design sat at the heart of the work.
She knew the problem from the inside. In her words, she was looking for “another way to wrangle the complex organisations to the floor and deal with their challenges.”
From client to partner
She first met Group Partners across the table. Hazel came to the practice as a client, with challenges much like the ones it was set up to answer. She has called stumbling into Group Partners her first breakthrough.
Then she joined it. She joined in the early 2000s, a year or so after Group Partners began. In 2016 Group Partners described itself as a small virtual team with two lead principals, John and Hazel, who had developed the approach and philosophy behind Structured Visual Thinking.
In 2015 her title was Chief Wizard. She described her part as constantly exploring new territory, and spending much of her time finding fresh ways to make the most of the approach.
The science underneath
Hazel brings the rigour of systems design to visual thinking. Group Partners’ own team page calls her its Framework Science specialist and credits her with developing Framework Science into the backbone of lasting change.
She builds the tools. In the early days the technology the work needed did not exist. So a large part of her focus became creating new tools and their structures for the most complex questions clients bring.
Her work sits in an atlas of science maps. In 2008 a map by John Caswell, Hazel and Ian Francis, 4D. The Structured Visual Approach to Business-Issue Resolution, was published in the fourth iteration of Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, on science maps for economic decision makers. In 2015 MIT Press reproduced it in Katy Börner’s Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone Can Map.
Work in Africa
In February 2016 Hazel was in Cape Town. Group Partners helped visualise a dialogue on governance across the African Union, centred on the architecture that underpins the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance. The AU’s development partner was GIZ. Group Partners’ team page lists African electoral systems among her work.
In March the work moved to Abuja. Group Partners joined a partnership supporting Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in its plan to move farming from subsistence to agribusiness, then in pilot in three states. The event was part stakeholder dialogue and part official launch.
She goes where the detail is. Development agencies and governments produce very large, very detailed documents. Hazel reads them, because that is where the context lives. Then she gives it a form that people from very different backgrounds can use.
The same year she worked with the Waterberg Welfare Society in Limpopo, South Africa, on a repeatable model of what its team had built over many years.
Writing on complexity
Hazel writes to put her thinking in order. On her own site she says she thinks a great deal, and writes when she can wrestle the messiness in her head into some order.
In 2018 she began a Medium series on frameworks. In Frameworks, Context and Treasure Hunts she wrote that frameworks had been at the heart of Group Partners from the birth of the company, and that the practice could at last start to describe the science behind them. ONE: Giving Complexity a Home set out how a framework is designed, starting from the exam question.
She writes about the wider world too. Her pieces for the Medium publication All Things Being Equal cover conservation and rights, among them the wild dogs of the Waterberg.
She believes in the power of data. The patterns and clues inside it are her passion. The aim, in her words, is to find genuine meaning in the mass of information that already exists in a client’s world.
The path
From government systems to the science behind the frameworks.
- 1995 to 2000
Systems design authority at the Ministry of Defence.
- 2001 to 2004
Service delivery manager at the Cabinet Office. Meets Group Partners as a client.
- Early 2000s
Joins Group Partners and works on the development of the practice.
- 2008
Her map with John Caswell and Ian Francis is published in Places & Spaces: Mapping Science.
- 2013
Talks visual thinking with John in a Game-Changer Q&A.
- 2015
Chief Wizard. MIT Press reproduces the 2008 map in the Atlas of Knowledge.
- 2016
Works on programmes in Cape Town and Abuja.
- 2018
Starts writing on the science behind frameworks.
- Now
Partner at Group Partners and its Framework Science specialist.
In her words
“The more they can look at their business as a dynamic system the more they can break down the silos that plague most of them and block genuine collaboration.”
“I’m a true believer in the power of data.”
“Real insights are rarely offered on a plate.”
“Life isn’t generic, it’s filled with different combinations of dynamics.”
Sources
- Hazel Tiffany, LinkedIn profile, public view: roles and dates. uk.linkedin.com/in/hazeltiffany
- Hazel Tiffany, My Work and My Thoughts, her own website. hazeltiffany.net
- Group Partners on Medium, “Who Are Those Guys?”, 28 April 2015. medium.com
- Group Partners on Medium, “Growing Roots in Africa!”, 26 April 2016. medium.com
- Game-Changer, “Q&A: Group Partners on How Visualization Provides Strategic Ways To Solve Business Challenges”, 11 July 2013. game-changer.net
- Miro blog, “Collaborating on visual frameworks. Case study by Group Partners”, 29 November 2016. miro.com
- Katy Börner, Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone Can Map, MIT Press, 2015, page 94 and references. scimaps.org
- Hazel Tiffany on Medium: “Frameworks, Context and Treasure Hunts” and “ONE: Giving Complexity a Home”, 19 August 2018; “Wild Dogs in the Waterberg”, 17 April 2018. medium.com/@tifferly
- Group Partners, “Meet Our Team”, as archived 27 August 2025. web.archive.org