I solve real problems. The kind that hurt. Training systems that don’t exist, teams that can’t align on what they’re building, processes that only work because one person holds them in their head, energy bleeding out everywhere through conflicts that repeat and systems that fight themselves.
Part of what makes me useful is that I’m deeply lazy. I hate wasted effort with a passion. Watching people spin cycles on the wrong problem, brilliant strategies dying in implementation, meetings that could have been emails that shouldn’t have happened at all — that friction drives me insane. So I pour friction on the friction until it either clarifies or stops.
When you bring me a problem, I solve it. Not with a presentation about solving it, I actually solve it. Hands in the details, working with your people, handling the real material. And in doing that small concrete thing, I learn your actual system. How decisions really get made. Where knowledge lives and where it leaks. What people aren’t saying in meetings. The gap between what your culture rewards and what it claims to reward.
Once I can see that, I know where the leverage is. The handful of interventions that would create most of the change you’ve been trying to force through effort and good intentions and initiatives that don’t land. That’s the real value — not the entry problem but what becomes visible once I’m inside.
How I see things
I’ve spent twenty years building ventures with increasing impact focus. Started with a strategic advertising agency, moved into healthy fast food, then went deep on integral leadership development (half a PhD before circumstances and the financial crisis made me choose between finishing it and keeping two other ventures alive). Got trained and certified in 3 Principles and Sedona Method. Taught meditation in the Faiyu tradition. Built regenerative infrastructure and ventures across Portugal, France, Netherlands, and Scandinavia.
What that journey created is pattern recognition that works across very different contexts. I see organisations the way you’d see code if you’d written enough of it — where are the dependencies, what’s coupled too tight, what breaks if you change this, where’s the actual load-bearing structure. But I also see the human layer: the fears driving decisions, the identity structures masquerading as strategy, what the culture actually optimises for versus what it says it optimises for.
Most people do one or the other. Systems thinking or human development. I don’t separate them because they’re not separate in reality, and pretending they are is how most change initiatives die.
If you want to see how I think, read The Two-Step Path to Non-Duality — it’s twenty years of consciousness work distilled to two moves. Not business writing, but it’ll show you what happens when I look at something carefully. If it resonates we’ll probably work well together. If it doesn’t we probably won’t, and that’s useful information either way.
How we work together
First conversation — an hour, maybe less. You tell me what you’re dealing with, I ask questions you probably haven’t been asked, I tell you what I see. No pitch, no process, just a straight read. At minimum you walk away with some clarity on where the real friction lives. At best I spot something concrete I can solve quickly and we go from there.
Focused intervention — two to four weeks. I take that entry problem and I solve it, and in solving it I learn how your system actually works. What’s structural, what’s cultural, where the weight is. You get the problem fixed plus a clear map of where the next moves are. Then you decide what happens next.
Embedded work — several months. For when the problem isn’t lack of ideas but that nobody’s connecting strategy to culture to execution. I work inside the system with your team, we build the structures that make the transition real, then we hand them over so your people own them and can evolve them without me.
Building something together — longer arc, real partnership. A venture, a platform, an infrastructure project. I join as co-builder with skin in the game. For people who want someone who stays in the room when it gets hard.
I work with AI as an actual collaboration partner, which changes what’s possible in a short engagement. Not as a gimmick but as a way to deliver senior strategic thinking with production capacity that used to require an entire team. It’s part of how I work now.
Background
Bilingual English and German (French and Dutch enough to get by). Based in the Netherlands. Founded elegant.earth as an ecosystem for bioregional regeneration, venture building, and systemic capital. The range isn’t scatter, it’s what lets me see connections that specialists miss. And increasingly it’s what the moment requires.
If something here lands, let’s talk. First conversation is free, takes an hour, that’s enough to know if this makes sense.