I work with founders, CEOs, and senior teams at moments of significant change — when the next step is clear in outline, but not in shape. Most of that work happens in conversation.
My background is in systems theory and family-of-origin work, brought into organisational settings. In practice that means I spend as much time listening for what is between people — between a founder and their board, between a CEO and the part of the company she no longer runs directly — as for what is being said about any one of them.
Most of the leaders I work with arrive carrying a decision they are not yet able to make. My role is not to make it for them. It is to help the system around them become clearer, so that the decision becomes possible.
The company has gone from ten to eighty, and the founder no longer recognises the shape of her own days. The work now is organisational, but the instincts that got her here are not.
The CEO knows, months before admitting it, that the role was wrong, or the person was wrong, or both. The question is less how to end it than how to understand what the system was trying to say.
A founder stepping away, a CEO being asked to. Boards often want a decision faster than the people in it can honestly make one. We slow that down.
Not in the sense of conflict — in the sense of careful politeness, which is often the harder kind of silence. I spend time with the team together, and with each member alone.
"The organisation is a living thing, and most of its problems are conversations that never happened. My work is to make those conversations possible, not to have them for you."
Most of my engagements begin with a single conversation, of no commitment on either side, to see whether I am the right person for what you are carrying. If we continue, we usually work together for between three and twelve months — sometimes on a weekly cadence, sometimes on a rhythm that matches the inflection of the work.
I work with individuals, with pairs (often a CEO and their chair, or two co-founders), and with full leadership teams. Whichever the configuration, the work is systemic — which is to say, we are always paying attention to the whole, even when we are talking about a part of it.