I work as a Dialogue Facilitator, Organisation Development Consultant and Executive Coach, accessing more than 40 years’ worldwide experience to support peoples’ inherent desire to cooperate while connecting meaningfully. Clients appreciate my propensity to sense and pose the poignant Questions that permit them to diagnose and focus on their key challenges quickly.

Today, I work primarily as …

• a Facilitator for Organisation Culture Change Initiatives;
• an Executive Coach supporting leaders gain clarity and orientation in the frequently disorientating whirlwind of professional life;
• a Mediator for Executive, Management and Project Teams whose initiatives have lost their way and quickly need to get back on track.

The learnings from these experiences across multiple sectors of the business and organisational world, while living the change that has defined my life on four continents, inform my work in organisations. These learnings include …

• People WANT TO contribute. They are looking for opportunities to engage positively with their work, their environment, each other.
• Most All organisations contain massive untapped potential … resources which they are frequently unaware of.
• Difference is a natural resource.

I have also learned that …

• Organisations are living organisms … complex, interconnected, interrelated.
• Working with organisations and communities, indeed, society as machines to be manipulated is probably the biggest cause of the psychological and environmental destruction prevalent in today’s world.
• Change is ubiquitous.
• Culture is a dynamic phenomenon … continuously evolving.
• Paradox pervades life … providing wonderful expansive opportunities.
• Adherence to borders, conventions, standards mislead us towards the belief that they are real … all are constructs, therefore artificial.
• ‘Understanding’ and ‘Knowing’ are temporary phenomena … and often illusions.
• Finding the appropriate Questions to ask for organisation challenges is far more difficult than the search for ‘solutions’.
• We are always learning, frequently unaware that we are doing so.

With a clear focus on clients’ real Business Questions, I integrate these learnings with principles from Bohmian Dialogue, Personal Stories, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and Living Systems Thinking, to create and hold the space that enables people across hierarchies, functions and backgrounds to align, engage and cultivate healthy thriving organisations and social systems.

With cultureQs – a unique approach to accelerating change and integration initiatives; and my new book, Dancing with Change: Cultivating Healthy Organisations, many of these learnings are accessible to all.

Change and crossing cultures have been the defining features of my life since childhood. As a tri-national who has lived and worked on 4 continents, including 8 years in Asia, I defy and reject conventional categorisation.

I work in English and German, and currently live in Nuremberg, Germany.

My professional principle … Good Purposeful Work with Good People!

… a borderless world …

Those who have no fence around their land have no enemies.  (Burundi Proverb)

All national borders are artificial: constructs of our minds.
They are designed to forcibly keep people out or in, automatically creating the potential for conflict. The constructs later become physical and/or psychological.

In Healthy Organisations and Societies, people collaborate across administrative and descriptive boundaries. Borders as such become irrelevant.

I explicitly distinguish between borders, designed as barriers; and boundaries that define the playing fields in which we operate and provide necessary structure in organisations.

We exist in relationship …

“Relationship is a process of self-revelation, and without knowing oneself, the ways of one’s own mind and heart, merely to establish an outward order, a system, has very little meaning. So what is important is to understand oneself in relationship with one another.” (J. Krishnamurti)

Clients I have worked with in Europe, Asia, North America and New Zealand include …

AEG; Barbeque Nation; Baxter; Bombardier; Bosch; BP; C&A; Chrysler; DaimlerChrysler Rail Systems (AdTranz); Deutsche Bank; European Commission; E-On; First Data Resources; GfK; Hannover Re; idiscoveri; Infineon; InterHannover; McKinsey; Metro; Mines Advisory Group (MAG); MoneyGram; MTR Hong Kong; Quelle; Ricardo; Shell; Siemens; Société Européenne des Satellites (S.E.S./Astra); Stiftung Entrepreneurship; T-Online; Telefunken; Unicredit

Public Administration: in Nuremberg, Germany; Wellington, New Zealand.
Chambers of Commerce: in London, UK; Nuremberg, Germany
Universities: Berlin, Munich, Passau, Witten-Herdecke, Leiden School of Management