Working with Organisations

The organisations I work with are rarely broken. More often they are doing serious work under conditions that would strain anyone — underfunded, overstretched, holding contexts heavy with trauma, competing knowledge systems, and real suffering. What tends to be missing is not strategy, or another policy, but the ability to hold difficulty together without fragmenting, to move through conflict without it going underground or detonating, to let people do demanding work without disappearing inside it.

I start from a simple conviction: what an organisation seeks to practise in the world, it has first to be willing to live inside its own walls. The distance between what an organisation says and what it actually is becomes the distance its staff, its partners, and the people it serves feel first. Trauma-informed practice, decolonial commitments, duty of care — these hold only to the degree that they are lived in the ordinary conduct of the place: in how decisions travel, in who gets to speak, in how people are treated when things are hard. Presence, in this sense, is what becomes available when an organisation stops pretending its wounds are not there.

The approach

I don’t bring a single methodology so much as a way of weaving several together. Trauma-informed organisational development sits at the centre — an understanding that institutions, like the people in them, carry stress, rupture, and unprocessed history, and that these live in bodies and rooms as much as in documents. Group-analytic thinking lets me read the life of a team beneath its org chart: the roles people are cast into, the things that cannot be said, the unspoken life of a group that shapes what feels possible. Somatic awareness keeps the work anchored in the nervous system rather than only in ideas. And Nonviolent Communication offers a shared, needs-based language for honesty, disagreement, and repair.

Two further commitments run underneath all of it. The first is decolonial: a steady attention to how power, hierarchy, and inherited assumptions about whose knowledge counts shape an organisation from the inside — and a refusal to treat that as decoration rather than substance, particularly in international work, where those asymmetries are rarely far from the surface. The second is elicitive: a conviction, drawn from popular and critical pedagogy, that the people doing the work are the authors of their own conditions, not the recipients of an outside expert’s design. All of this sits, finally, inside an ecological and political moment — displacement, climate breakdown, the upheaval of land and livelihood — that presses on every organisation whether or not it is named. Held together, this is the approach. Each strand is necessary; none is sufficient on its own. The weaving is the practice.

What the work looks like in practice

I am wary of arriving with a deliverable already in hand. An engagement begins, before anything is named as a product, with a period of listening across the whole system — confidential conversations at every level: field and headquarters, national and international, programme and support. I attend to what is said and, just as carefully, to what is conspicuously not said; to how decisions actually travel rather than how the organogram claims they do; to the rhythm of meetings, the language, the seating, who interrupts whom, who is forever asked to explain themselves and who is never questioned. I use my own body as an instrument too, noticing what my nervous system does in a room, because that is information.

From there I co-design with you a practice rather than a programme. A programme has an end date and a closing report; a practice is something an organisation takes up and keeps doing. I don’t import a framework — I help your existing meetings, decisions, and rhythms work better, so that the right behaviours become easier to repeat. People sustain what they had a hand in making.

In some combination, the work usually rests on a few strands. The first is protected reflective time — regular, held space for people to step back, supervise their work, and attend to how the team is functioning. I treat it as load-bearing rather than a nice-to-have, and it needs holding by someone genuinely skilled in group dynamics, not delegated to a willing but untrained colleague. There is a plain test of whether it has taken root: if it is the first thing cut when a deadline looms, it hasn’t. The second is structural review — the patient examination of the policies and rhythms that produce the felt experience of working somewhere: decision rights, performance management, security and debriefing, how meetings run, salary scales, partnership terms. Structure and culture are one piece of work, and this is where that becomes concrete. The third is trauma awareness across the whole organisation rather than parked with a single wellbeing focal point: education pitched to each role, simple tools for staying steady under stress taught as ordinary workplace skills, and supervision designed for the strain of working with other people’s trauma. A manager’s own state is part of the working environment of everyone they manage, and I work with it accordingly.

Throughout, I work alongside leadership. Culture shifts when leadership shifts — not the talking points, but how senior people hold themselves under pressure, how they share load, what they model when things are hard — and so change holds beyond the engagement.

What it asks

I try to be honest about what this requires, because the work does not begin in earnest until an organisation has chosen it knowingly. It asks for time: the relevant horizon is seasons, not weeks. It asks for money, in the plain sense that protected reflective infrastructure is a budget line rather than a matter of goodwill. And it asks for willingness — leadership going first, structure examined alongside culture, the practice held even when programmatic urgency argues against it. I hold myself to the same standard. My own work is supervised, and I keep the reflective practice I ask of others; I can’t credibly offer what I am not willing to live. That, more than any single method, is what I am actually offering.

If this is close to what your organisation is navigating, I’d welcome a conversation.