Charleen Johnson MA CEC

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Behaving Badly HQ exists to study what happens when modern work environments place people inside unresolved contradictions. When priorities compete, expectations conflict, and structures don’t hold, people don’t stop caring. They adapt. Those adaptations often look irrational, inefficient, or unprofessional from the outside. Inside the system, they make complete sense.

This work focuses on understanding those patterns, not to judge, but to see what conditions produce them, and what it takes to restore clarity, capacity, and choice.

The BBHQ Manifesto is here.  

I’ve always paid close attention to how people behave when things get complicated.

Long before I had formal training, curiosity and humour were how I made sense of pressure, contradiction, and human response. I learned early that humour often reveals truth faster than logic alone. It softens what’s hard, exposes what’s absurd, and creates connection when language starts to fail. That lens followed me into my professional life. 

For more than two decades, I worked with leaders and teams across Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, supporting change, culture, and leadership development inside systems moving faster than any human nervous system was designed to handle.

Everywhere I went, I noticed the same pattern. The system didn’t break people on purpose. It narrowed them by design. Leaders who cared became guarded. Creative people lost their spark.
Empathic people went quiet. Professionalism turned into careful performance. Only a fraction of the real person was allowed into the room.

I wasn’t immune to this myself. I experienced it firsthand as a senior leader inside complex, fast-moving organizations, trying to make sense of constant shifts in expectations, strategy, and direction while holding onto clarity, judgment, and a sense of self. I often wish I had the tools I now share with others.

My background in developmental psychology, systems thinking, integral theory, and expressive arts–based learning gave me language for what I was observing beneath the surface.

The architecture of work was changing faster than the scaffolding humans relied on to stay oriented.
People weren’t failing. The conditions around them were exceeding their capacity.

You can’t out-think fragmentation. You can’t out-perform exhaustion. And you can’t stay whole inside systems that no longer help you orient to yourself.

People don’t need constant reinvention or endless optimization. They need coherence. Enough clarity to choose how they adapt, rather than reacting on autopilot. That realization reshaped my work.

Serious play is the foundation of my work. Not play as distraction, but as a disciplined blend of humour, reflection, presence, and creative practice. It is the kind of play that restores orientation under pressure. The kind that settles the nervous system, interrupts autopilot responses, and helps people regain internal footing when the ground feels unstable.

This approach reconnects people to a grounded sense of self inside environments that quietly ask them to fragment. It gives them back access to judgment, meaning, and choice, even when conditions are complex or constrained.

At the heart of my work is restoring the conditions that allow people to stay whole inside demanding systems. So joy, meaning, and connection are not quietly stripped away. So people can contribute fully without losing themselves. So work does not require shrinking in order to survive.

Ultimately, this work is about helping people live and work with greater coherence, dignity, and humanity, even inside complexity.