I help leaders and organisations find direction when challenges become complex, contested, or wicked — and move forward together.
Clarity Amid Complexity
What Needs Clarity?
The Situation
What is going on, and where do we want to go?
The Collective
How do we think and work together?
The Person
What does this ask of me?
When thinking together becomes difficult
Complex challenges rarely lack intelligence, expertise, or commitment. More often, people struggle to make sense of the situation together.
Direction amidst Drift
You sense movement, activity, and effort — but no shared direction. Strategy exists, yet alignment does not.
Clarity in Uncertainty
The situation keeps changing. Information grows, but understanding does not.
Leadership under Pressure
Expectations rise while answers remain unclear. Decisions feel consequential and exposed.
Alignment across Fragmentation
Teams care deeply — but see different realities. Conversations circle without convergence.
Dialogue through Disagreement
Perspectives clash or remain unspoken. The real conversation never quite happens.
“Chris’s brilliant facilitation prevented our organisation from falling apart during a very real crisis.”
— Dr. Claudio Lanza, former European Policy Lead, Volt Europa
How Clarity Emerges
My role is to design and guide structured conversations that help people surface what matters, make useful distinctions, and see how things relate.
I listen closely to different perspectives and to what emerges between them. I question, summarise and synthesise as the conversation unfolds. Often, I visualise the thinking in real time, creating a shared thinking surface that we can explore and develop together.
Sometimes something previously unknown emerges. At other times, the elements were already known, but bringing them together reveals the larger whole: its patterns, relationships and implications. The resulting overview and insight are what I mean by clarity. From there, direction and a next move can emerge.
“Very strong in synthesis and next steps.”
— Consultant, prestigious global consultancy firm
What Clarity Enables
Possibilities
See what could be.
Choices
See what matters, what is possible, and what constrains it.
Movement
Find direction, take a next step, and learn from what happens.
Ways to Work Together
Each collaboration starts with understanding the situation together.
Depending on what is needed, our work might take the form of a focused intervention, a development journey, or an ongoing partnership.
Clarity Sessions
For leaders and teams who need to get clear on what is happening and what to do next
Focused workshops and offsites for situations that have become difficult to understand or navigate together. We surface what matters, distinguish the key elements, and clarify how they relate.
The focus might be strategy or vision, roles and responsibilities, alignment, a difficult decision, or a question that has remained unresolved. The aim is to create overview and insight, providing a stronger basis for direction and action.
Leadership Journeys
For leaders who want to grow their capacity to navigate complexity
Rather than resolving one particular challenge, a Leadership Journey focuses on developing how you lead across many of them.
We work with the situations you actually encounter, using them to examine and develop how you think, relate, decide and act when the way forward is not obvious.
Thinking Partnerships
For leaders who want an informed outsider to think alongside them
The people closest to a situation have their own roles, interests and responsibilities within it. This makes some conversations difficult to have with the people around you.
A Thinking Partnership gives you an informed outsider to think with as the situation unfolds. I get to know you and your context, sometimes including the people around you. I can bring my own observations, questions and perspective: close enough to understand, independent enough to see things differently.
Where useful, I can also step into the situation through facilitation or another intervention.
Selected Work & Experience
My work takes different forms in different contexts. Here are three examples of what creating clarity can mean in practice.
Finding out what “they” actually think
Delft University of Technology
Ahead of a university-wide software rollout, the HR team worried about how staff might respond. Rather than speculate about what “they” might think, I proposed two open listening sessions: one for all university staff and one specifically for secretaries.
Critical voices surfaced immediately. After carefully capturing their concerns, I asked the room who shared them. Only a handful of hands went up. The conversation shifted from anticipated resistance to curiosity and practical questions — giving the HR team a much clearer picture of what people actually thought.
Making a complex strategic challenge thinkable
Port of Rotterdam
Port Call Optimisation involves many organisations with different interests, responsibilities, measures and perspectives. Over several months, I worked with the programme team to clarify what they were actually trying to optimise, for whom, and from which perspective.
Through stakeholder interviews and facilitated conversations, I helped the team distinguish key elements and understand how they related. I visualised the emerging thinking in real time, often mapping different dimensions against one another. This created shared language, overview and insight, helping the team ask better questions and build a stronger basis for vision and strategy.
Thinking alongside leaders from outside and inside the situation
Leadership engagements
Several of my longer client relationships have moved between leadership coaching, thinking partnership and facilitation. Because I have also worked within their organisations or professional environments, I sometimes know the people and situations they are talking about first-hand.
That changes the conversation. We can draw not only on the leader's perspective, but also on my own observations and experiences of the people and context involved. I can think alongside them from outside the immediate situation and, when needed, step into it myself through facilitation or another intervention.
“Short, effective workshops without the need for long-term consultancy.
Adding value in organisations where political and social factors play a role.”
— Wouter Buck Head of Customer Digital, Port of Rotterdam
Organisations & contexts
Over the past decade and a half, I have worked across corporate, public, educational, cultural and international contexts.
Writings & Frameworks
Alongside client work, I develop frameworks and writings exploring how leaders and organisations can think more clearly together in complex times.
These reflections explore questions that often emerge in practice — and continue beyond any single project or workshop.
My writing explores how clarity emerges through conversation, reflection, and shared sensemaking.
About
I work at the intersection of leadership, complexity, and collective sensemaking.
My background in business administration, architecture, and philosophy informs an approach that combines analytical, creative, and reflective modes of thinking.
Over the past decade and a half, I have worked internationally with leadership teams, public organisations, universities, and growing companies on challenges involving strategy, leadership, and complex change.
Start a Conversation
Every collaboration starts with a conversation.
If you are facing a complex challenge, exploring a leadership question, or simply wondering whether this kind of work could help, you are welcome to reach out.
We can explore the situation together and see whether working together makes sense.
Sometimes clarity begins simply by talking things through.