Going deep below the surface…Our Origin Story.

Claudie
Sep 30, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Oct 22, 2025

Every company begins with a story

Surface Deep wasn’t born from a spreadsheet or a market gap. It began as a philosophy—a belief that leaders and teams must go below the surface to unlock their deepest potential.

Surface Deep is led by Claudie Plen-McCormack and Mia Serra, old school friends, who found one day as they walked along a riverbank with Mia’s dog, Emily, that as veterans of corporate life and experienced international strategists and consultants…they shared a passion for building more connected organisations, cultures and communities. However they also discovered a shared history of exhaustion, trying to balance ambition and successful careers with caring responsibilities, overwhelm, neurodiversity and ultimately burnout. Mia has a background in tech start-ups, blue-chip corporations and mission-led brands. Claudie, in big tech, media, communications, and the creative industries. They created Surface Deep to help organisations build Deep Inclusive cultures, prioritising people alongside performance.

In a world that rewards speed over reflection and appearances over substance, they wanted to build something different. Surface Deep is both a philosophy and a business dedicated to reshaping how leaders lead, how teams work together, and how organisations grow.

From Philosophy to Practice

At the heart of Surface Deep is a simple principle:

What lies beneath shapes what we see and experience

Just like the roots of a tree, the unseen layers—values, trust, diversity of thought, emotional depth—give strength to organisations.

What We Stand For

Psychological safety as a strategic advantage
Human-first leadership that doesn’t compromise performance
Brave conversations over comfortable silence
Systems thinking over surface-level fixes
Inclusion and cultural intelligence as core to strong organisations
Continuous learning as a leadership imperative
Purpose-driven passion underpinning everything

Why Work With Us Now?

Organisations are navigating disruption, hybrid work, social change, and rapid technological transformation. Old playbooks aren’t enough.

Superficial inclusion is being called out. Shallow culture initiatives are failing to retain talent. People want workplaces where they can bring their whole selves.

Surface Deep exists to meet that moment in two specific ways.

Deep Inclusive Leadership

Traditional leadership models—command-and-control, servant leadership, charismatic leadership…don’t fully meet today’s challenges.

Our answer is Deep Inclusive Leadership.

This approach invites leaders to look past surface-level inclusion (quotas, tokenism, one-off initiatives) and instead embrace practices that are deeply inclusive:

✅ Valuing diverse perspectives. ✅ Balancing decisiveness with humility. ✅ Treating inclusion as a daily practice, not a project. ✅ Creating space for curiosity, contradiction, and growth.

Deep Inclusive Leaders unlock trust, creativity, innovation and resilience—the cornerstones of sustainable success.

Open Programmes launch in November 2025, in addition to bespoke programmes designed for our client organisations.

Deep Inclusive Teams

Philosophy alone isn’t enough. Change happens in the day-to-day of teams.

That’s why we created Deep Inclusive Teams—a structured program that transforms groups of individuals into resilient, collaborative, high-performing units.

Unlike traditional team-building, this program weaves depth and inclusion into the DNA of how teams work. Outcomes include:

✨ Psychological safety that lasts ✨ Harnessing diversity of thought for innovation ✨ Turning conflict into a creative force ✨ Building authentic, not performative, bonds

It’s not just collaboration. It’s co-creation.

We deliver 1-2 day Deep Inclusive Teams programmes for teams of more than 6 people, for organisations with more than 50 people. Contact us for more information and pricing or book a discovery call.