I build collaboration where it is hardest, and I coach the people carrying it.

For more than twenty years I have worked on a single problem in many forms: how people who see the world differently manage to build something together. Most of that problem lives inside one person, the leader who has to hold their own conviction while genuinely taking in someone else’s, and keep their nerve while doing it.

That work has taken me to more than thirty countries, designing and running transformation and collaboration processes in Ukraine, Cambodia, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Bangladesh, Honduras, and the Western Balkans, among others. The work brought ministries, private companies, chambers of commerce, academia, press, non-governmental organizations, and other institutions into the same room to build something none of them could build alone.

Rarely do involved stakeholders oppose the larger goal. The more frequent difficulty is that interests do not align on their own, and neither does anything else. Personal, institutional, sectoral, national, and regional stakes pull in different directions. So do assumptions about how change actually happens, and about how work is properly done, how decisions get made, what counts as commitment, what respect looks like, how much gets said and how much is left understood. None of these converge by good intention. Someone has to build the structure in which collaboration can thrive.

Designing that structure is only half of it. The other half is coaching the leaders who have to carry it: sitting with the person standing at the intersection of competing actors, helping them read the room, hold their position without hardening, manage relationships they cannot command, and make the next decision when the right answer is not available. I design those processes with leaders, and then I help them lead them.

That is the same work I do now with executives. The context has changed. The problem has not.

Where the approach comes from

Before this, and alongside it, I spent years in the arts. Acting on stage and in film, voice acting, directing theater and film, producing films, and teaching improvisational theater. This was not a detour. Improvisation is the discipline of listening closely enough to build on what another person has actually offered rather than what you expected. Directing is the work of getting a group of strong personalities to make one thing together.

Storytelling is also central to working with individuals and teams. Every leader is operating inside a story about what is happening: what kind of situation they find themselves in, what it demands of them, what is possible from here. That story is usually invisible to the person inside it, and it quietly governs what they can see and what they will attempt. The first move is recognizing that you are in a story. The second is discovering that you can author from inside it, that the story is still being written and you hold a pen. Most people find they have more authorship available than they assumed. The same is true of a team, and of an organization.

It is also where the joy comes from. Serious work does not have to be joyless, and the people who do their best work are usually the ones enjoying it.

How I work

Much of my work is one to one with senior leaders, in long relationships, on the questions they cannot put to anyone else inside their own organization. The rest is with teams, families, and the systems they operate in. The two are the same work at different scale.

I am co-author of Leading Transformative Change Collectively, published by Routledge, on how collective leadership actually functions.

I coach and consult in English, Spanish, French, and German. Working in someone’s own language is not a convenience. It is the difference between what people can say and what they mean.

I will not tell you what you want to hear. Growth requires meeting resistance rather than routing around it, and the most useful thing I can offer is honest attention to what is actually happening, including the parts that are uncomfortable to name. I take responsibility for my clients’ success.