Formative Experience
My professional background includes extended periods in world-class performance environments before moving fully into organisational and institutional work.
I include this context here because it has fundamentally shaped my understanding of systems, leadership, and execution under pressure.
Learning from complex performance systems
Working within environments such as Cirque du Soleil and The House of Dancing Water involved operating inside tightly coupled systems where timing, coordination, and failure modes were visible immediately.
These were not creative exercises in isolation.
They were operational systems with real constraints, real dependencies, and real consequences.
What carried forward
What carried forward into my later work was not performance, but an understanding of:
• how systems rehearse and adapt
• how leadership signals shape behavior
• how execution breaks down under scale
• how coherence is maintained under pressure
These insights now inform how I design innovation capability and decision environments in institutional contexts.
