Charleen Johnson

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I’ve always seen people in full colour. Play, for me, was never about escaping the world. It was how I understood it. Curiosity, humour, and connection have always been my way of decoding why humans behave the way they do when life and work get complicated. 

Growing up on Carol Burnett, SCTV, and SNL, I learned early that humour could reveal truth faster than logic ever could. It made the absurd bearable and brought people closer when words ran out.
Humour became my diagnostic tool .

That same whole-human curiosity carried into my professional life. For more than twenty years, I worked with leaders and teams across Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand helping organizations navigate change, develop leaders, and build cultures that didn’t just function, but feel human.

But I kept noticing the same pattern everywhere I went.

The system shrank people.

Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But consistently.

Leaders who cared started acting strangely.
Creatives lost their spark.
Empathic people got quiet.
Brilliant people became small.

Professionalism slowly became a form of shape-shifting.
Only a fraction of the real person was allowed in the room.

Everything in my training, humour, imagination, and lived experience pushed me to help people get those parts of themselves back. And to get mine back too.

Integration has always been the thread.

Bringing the whole person into the conversation.
Helping people see what fragmentation takes.
Helping them find clarity, presence, and steadiness again.

You cannot out-perform exhaustion.
You cannot out-think fragmentation.
You cannot intellectualize your way out of a system that is draining your capacity.

To truly thrive, humans need coherence and clarity.
Not perfection. Not reinvention.
Just a return to the parts of themselves that still work.

Serious play became the foundation of that work.
It sparks curiosity.
It resets the nervous system of modern work.
It brings people back to themselves through presence, connection, and small, intentional practice.

All of this became the foundation for Behaving Badly HQ.

BBHQ is a creative studio, systems observatory, and ongoing social experiment exploring why good humans behave strangely inside modern work.

We investigate the pressures, rituals, performance habits, culture noise, and emotional contortions that bend people out of shape. Then we translate those findings into satire, essays, field reports, stories, and tools through BB Publishing and Behaving Badly Books.

Behaving badly is not rebellion.
It is awareness.

Behaving badly better is choosing actions that reflect who you are, not the system of the moment.
 

Human capacity is becoming the rarest resource in modern life.

AI can process anything.
But it cannot replace clarity, imagination, intuition, humour, relational intelligence, or the grounded presence of a coherent human.

In a world that is accelerating faster than we can adapt, we need practices that help people stay steady inside systems that are not designed for them.
BBHQ’s work helps humans rebuild that internal footing.

Through reflection, clarity, creative practice, and real-world tools, we help people stop shape-shifting and start showing up in ways that feel solid and true.

This is where capacity returns.
Not by trying harder.
By reclaiming the parts of ourselves that work.

That is the work of BBHQ.
And it’s the work I’ve been doing my entire life.