At a Glance
- Three tests. Nine years. One finding. Life Styles Inventory + Leadership Circle 360 + ADVanced Insights cognitive profile all confirm: systems thinker, complexity distiller (Human Synergistics, 2017; Leadership Circle, 2025; Innermetrix, 2026).
- Five major engagements. $70M merger. 2 to 17 clinics. 87% file processing automation. Full digital transformation of three top-tier law firms.
- From cure to prevention. Always called in after the damage. Sova is the prevention layer.
- Shortlisted, ETIH Innovation Awards 2026, EdTech Start-Up of the Year, against 140+ global entries (ETIH, 2026).
Three Tests. Nine Years. One Finding.
Anyone can claim a superpower on LinkedIn. So I have sat through three independent professional assessments over the last nine years. Different methodologies. Different sample groups. Different decades. Same theme every time.
2026. Independent cognitive analysis.
The ADVanced Insights Profile (Innermetrix) scored my natural talents across 70+ cognitive attributes against benchmark data (Innermetrix, 2026). My top eight scores, all out of 10:
Eight different traits. One profile. Systems thinker. Complexity distiller.
2025. Twelve colleagues. Global Fortune 500 norm group.
A year earlier, the Leadership Circle Profile, a 360 used by Fortune 500 organisations and benchmarked against a global norm group, combined my own self-evaluation with feedback from twelve colleagues, peers and direct reports (Leadership Circle, 2025). The verbatim feedback:
"Jane is a great systems thinker."
"Incredible vision for the systems she creates, methodical and rigorous."
"Able to take a complex messy system and define a new streamlined version. Particular skill for absorbing and interpreting large amounts of data and processes."
"Understands how everything fits together and what the desired outcomes are."
Direct reports placed me at the 72nd to 75th percentile globally on Systems Thinking and Systems Awareness.
2017. Eleven colleagues. Norming sample of 14,000.
And eight years before that, the Life Styles Inventory (Human Synergistics) collected descriptions of me from eleven Mercy Health colleagues, compared against a global norming sample of 14,000 people (Human Synergistics, 2017). Compared to the typical person in that 14,000-strong sample, my colleagues rated me:
Each percentage is how much higher my colleague-rated score was than the global average on that item.
Goes to the heart of the matter. Thinks ahead. Communicates ideas easily. Creative and original thinker. The same distillation profile, in eleven colleagues' words, nine years before this blog was written.
Three tests. Three methodologies. Nine years apart. One consistent profile. I see a messy whole, find the pattern, and rebuild it cleaner.
The Track Record
Cognitive profiles only matter if you use them on something real. I have. At scale. In some of the most regulated and complex environments in the country.
| Years | Organisation | Headline Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-25 | Moores | Designed and got Board approval for multi-year digital transformation. Citrix to Azure migration. Five-product legal tech stack replaced. Governance and change frameworks embedded. |
| 2021-23 | Lander & Rogers | Rebuilt the firm's highest-revenue practice group. 87% file processing automation. 46% less file work. 48% admin reduction, team upskilled and kept. |
| 2019-21 | MinterEllison | Stood up a brand-new business unit. Workflow system delivered in 9 months. Took $1.2M out of WIP. Cut paper usage 76%. |
| 2018-19 | Mercy Health | Merged two healthcare organisations in 8 months. $70M revenue, 8,500 clients, 800 direct care staff, 15 offices. Migrated 9,000 records. Redesigned 300+ operational documents. |
| 2016 | Apunipima | Built the operational template that scaled the largest Indigenous-controlled health org in QLD from 2 to 17 clinics. Two boards accepted the strategy without amendments. |
Different industries. Different scales. Same job: walk into a tangled system, see the shape of it, build the streamlined version, hand it back in a form people can actually use.
From Cure To Prevention
Twenty years of fixing other people's broken systems. One pattern I could not unsee.
I was always called in after the mess. After the merger no one planned properly. After the workflow had been bolted together for a decade. After the burnout had already cost the firm two of its best people. The cost was already paid. I was a very expensive band-aid.
I spent nearly twenty years cleaning up systems after they broke. I built Sova because I would rather help founders before they break.
Jane Korneyko, Founder, Sova
The Australian startup numbers say the leverage is here. Almost 6 in 10 new businesses fail within three years (ABS, 2024-25). 70% of failed venture-backed companies ran out of capital, 43% missed product-market fit, 19% died from bad unit economics (CB Insights, 2026). The frameworks that prevent every one of those failures already exist. The door is gatekept tight. Antler Australia takes fewer than 1 in 10 applicants (Antler Australia). Y Combinator just hit a record-low 0.6% (YC, 2025). Of the $5.4 billion raised in 2025, the top 20 deals took 58% (Cut Through Venture, 2025). Australia has 480+ startup programs, and not one uses the same starting check.
That gap is the same one I had been closing inside firms for two decades. Just with the timing flipped. Cure to prevention.
That Is Why I Built Sova
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Governance, Purpose, Strategy, Performance, Finance, Marketing, People, Process, Technology. Same nine elements global business excellence frameworks have used since the 1980s.
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4,700+ working hyperlinks to source research, frameworks and Australian programs. 1,124 tool and framework recommendations across Product, DeepTech and Service business types, matched to your stage and weakest element. Every assertion cited from 80+ published sources: HBR, McKinsey, CB Insights, Startup Genome, GEM. No vibes.
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So You Can Trust It
- Three independent assessments over nine years say I see systems and distil them. Different methodologies. Same finding every time.
- Five major engagements over nearly two decades prove I do this for a living, in regulated, complex environments.
- Shortlisted, EdTech Start-Up of the Year, ETIH Innovation Awards 2026, against 140+ global entries (ETIH, 2026).
- I get to build it and keep running it. Nothing watered down. If research says something works, it goes in. If it is a fad, it does not.
That is who I am. That is what I do. That is why you can trust it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should I trust the founder of Sova?
Nearly twenty years of formal transformation experience inside Australian hospitals, law firms and professional services. Led a $70 million healthcare merger, a national Indigenous health expansion (2 to 17 clinics), and full digital transformations of multiple top-tier firms. Three independent professional assessments over nine years (Life Styles Inventory, Leadership Circle 360, ADVanced Insights cognitive profile) corroborate the same pattern: a systems thinker who distils complexity into clarity. Sova applies that same skill to the Australian startup ecosystem (Human Synergistics, 2017; Leadership Circle, 2025; Innermetrix, 2026).
What is the Leadership Circle Profile and the ADVanced Insights Profile?
Three different tests. The Life Styles Inventory (Human Synergistics, 2017) collected descriptions of me from eleven Mercy Health colleagues against a 14,000-person global norming sample. The Leadership Circle Profile (2025) is a 360 used by Fortune 500 organisations that combined my self-evaluation with feedback from twelve colleagues, peers and direct reports. The ADVanced Insights Profile (Innermetrix, 2026) is a cognitive and decision-making analysis scoring natural talents across more than seventy attributes including Systems Judgment, Integrative Ability and Conceptual Thinking. All three are externally administered and benchmarked against global norm groups, rather than scored by me alone (Human Synergistics, 2017; Leadership Circle, 2025; Innermetrix, 2026).
Why did you leave corporate to build a startup?
After almost two decades I noticed a pattern. I was always being called in after the mess. After the merger no one planned properly. After the workflow had been bolted together for a decade. After the partners had ignored the warning signs for three years. By the time I arrived, the cost had already been paid in money, in burnt-out staff, and in clients who had been given a worse experience than they deserved. Startups are where the prevention happens. The leverage is much greater. So I left to build the prevention layer.
What does "distilling complexity into clarity" actually mean for Sova?
Australian founders face 480+ programs, hundreds of frameworks and methodologies, and contradictory advice from books, podcasts and mentors. Distilling complexity means taking that mess and turning it into one diagnostic, nine connected business elements, and one ranked list of what to fix first. It is the same process I used to merge two health organisations in eight months and migrate a 100-year-old law firm to a new tech stack. Now applied to the constraints of a solo founder.
Is the work self-reported, or independently verified?
The transformation track record is publicly verifiable through prior employer attribution and award nominations (ALPMA Excellence in Technology and Innovation, ETIH Innovation Awards 2026 Shortlist). All three professional assessments cited in this article are externally administered and externally scored. The Life Styles Inventory was rated by eleven colleagues against a 14,000-person global norming sample. The Leadership Circle Profile combined my self-evaluation with twelve colleagues, peers and direct reports against a global norm group, with the verbatim findings I cite coming from the colleague view, not mine. The ADVanced Insights Profile is benchmarked against external cognitive norms. Sova's evidence base itself is built on 350+ research findings from 80+ published sources and is cited throughout the platform.
Sources (accessed April 2026)
- Human Synergistics: Life Styles Inventory (LSI 1 self-description and LSI 2 description-by-others, 14,000-person global norming sample)
- Leadership Circle Profile: 360-degree leadership assessment methodology and global norm group
- Innermetrix: ADVanced Insights Profile (cognitive and decision-making analysis)
- Australian Bureau of Statistics: Counts of Australian Businesses, Including Entries and Exits 2024-25
- CB Insights: Top Reasons Startups Fail (2026)
- EdTech Innovation Hub: ETIH Innovation Awards 2026 Shortlist (Sova, EdTech Start-Up of the Year)
- NIST: Baldrige Excellence Framework (1987)
- EFQM Excellence Model (1988)
- ISO 9001 Quality Management Standard
- Sova: Why I Built Sova
- Sova: AI Is Creating More Founders. The Ecosystem Is Already Struggling.