About

I have spent most of the last decade around people who make things. Designers, writers, developers, strategists, photographers, illustrators, chefs, producers, directors and the occasional person who appears to have invented a new job title between breakfast and lunch. My job has usually been different. I work on the conditions around the work.

How it gets understood. How decisions get made. How teams are organised. How a promise becomes a plan. How the numbers connect to the ambition. How people with very different priorities manage to build the same thing. I like the work itself enough to care about all of that.

I grew up around the lakes of the South Cotswolds, in a family with one foot firmly in Ireland. I eventually moved to Ireland, went to Trinity College Dublin, played some rugby, drew some things and surfed badly. After graduating with a terrible haircut, I availed of Ireland's J1 programme, spent a few months in California and then moved to London to work in the creative industries.

I have lived in South London for most of the time since.

I started in project and account management across agency work, learning the mechanics of getting creative and digital projects through real organisations with real clients attached to them. At Colorido, the job widened. I moved from delivery into studio operations, larger client programmes and more of the system around a small founder-led business.

At Carter's, the system became physical. A kitchen, a team, suppliers, service, waste, margin and customers all providing immediate feedback on whether the operating theory was any good. At Hype, the system widened again. I built the Creative Services function, then spent the second half of the role on the wider operating model around it: how work is scoped, planned, resourced and measured across functions.

Different settings. Increasingly the same question:

I listen to how different people describe the same situation. Then I compare those descriptions with the work, the numbers and the system itself. Usually they do not line up perfectly. That gap is useful. It tells you where to look. I map the work. The decisions. The dependencies. The people. The incentives. The places where information changes hands or disappears entirely.

Then I try to get to the shortest useful diagnosis. Not the cleverest answer. Not the largest transformation programme. The smallest intervention that materially improves the system. Then measure it. Then do it again.

My work starts and ends with people. Not because systems are somehow separate from people, but because organisations are largely systems of people trying to coordinate with one another. A technically correct process nobody wants to use is not a good process. A recommendation without authority, sponsorship or incentives behind it is not yet a change.

A team that only succeeds because one heroic person keeps rescuing it has a resilience problem disguised as a great employee. I have become more interested in that part over time. How change is framed. Who needs to believe what. Where power actually sits. Which incentives make the desired behaviour rational. What the organisation says is happening versus what people have learned to do in order to survive it.

I am not a designer or Creative Director. I do draw, paint, cook, make jewellery, build small digital things and care perhaps too much about why something looks or feels the way it does. More importantly, I have spent years close enough to creative work to understand that it is not an interchangeable production unit. Good creative operations requires creative literacy.

You have to understand the consequences of time, budget, feedback, hierarchy, craft, context and judgement. You have to know why "make it pop" is not actually a usable brief. You have to know when efficiency improves the work and when efficiency merely makes mediocre work happen faster. That is one reason I have stayed close to creative businesses even as my interest has widened into the larger systems around them.

I am increasingly interested in organisational systems at a larger scale. How structure, incentives, information, technology and behaviour determine what an organisation is actually capable of doing. That is not a clean break with my previous work. It is the direction the work has already been moving. Colorido was about capacity and founder dependency.

Carter's was about physical systems, ownership and direct consequence. Hype moved from one department into agency-wide operations and organisational diagnosis. The next step is more of that, with a wider system boundary and enough authority to carry the change through.

I hold PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner and AgilePM Practitioner, alongside Change Management Foundation and LSE MBA Essentials. Mostly self-funded. Less for the letters than for a shared vocabulary for how different organisations plan, decide and change.

I draw. Paint occasionally. Cook a lot. Make posters, jewellery and small digital things. I like systems, but I also like things that exist for no particularly defensible commercial reason. Some of them are in the archive.