The beginning

I ask a lot of questions. Mostly W questions: what, who, when, where, and especially why. Why this, why now, why this way and not another. The answers to the surface questions are usually interesting. The answers to the why questions are where the actual problem lives.

I also listen. Not strategically, not while preparing my response -- actually listen. To what's being said, and to what's being left out. To the thing someone circles around three times without quite landing on. To the moment when someone describes the symptom so vividly that the cause becomes obvious, even though they can't see it yet.

By the end of that first conversation, I can often start to see patterns that are hard to spot from inside the situation.

What happens next

It depends entirely on what's needed. Sometimes it's a short, focused piece of work -- untangling a process, facilitating a room, designing a system that actually works for the people who have to use it. Sometimes it's longer: embedded in a team for weeks or months, holding complexity while it resolves into something workable.

I work best when I can see the whole picture. Context isn't background noise for me -- it's the material. The problem rarely lives where people think it does, and finding where it actually lives requires understanding the surrounding terrain. I'm not the person you call for a narrow brief with no room to move. I'm the person you call when the situation is complex enough that you're not sure what the brief should be.

What I take on

The common thread across everything I work on is the gap -- between how something works and how it needs to work, between what people know and what they need to know, between a plan and the reality of executing it. That gap shows up in product work, in civic data projects, in event production, in organisational design, in situations that don't have a tidy category.

If the problem involves people who aren't connecting, systems that aren't serving the humans they're meant to serve, or complexity that needs to become navigable -- that's probably a conversation worth having.

What I don't

I'm honest about fit. If I'm not the right person for something, I'll tell you -- and I'll usually have a sense of who might be. I don't do decorative consulting: showing up, producing a report, and disappearing. If I'm in, I'm in.

I work best with people who are genuinely trying to solve the problem rather than confirm a decision they've already made. If the brief is fixed and the context is irrelevant, I'm probably not the right fit. If you want someone who will ask uncomfortable questions and actually expect answers, we'll get along fine.