Nobody Plans It This Way.

For a long time I called myself a problem solver.

It felt more honest than any other title I could have put on it. When something isn't working I don't get scared. I relish figuring it out. That's been true from the beginning, before I had the language for it, before I understood it as a skill rather than just the way I've always travelled through both work and life. You just keep saying yes to the interesting problem, keep showing up, keep doing the work.

The word strategy came later. Not from a course or a framework or a job title, but from managing a team, watching myself hold the whole picture while everyone else was focused on their part of it. From developing projects within organisations, finding new arms to grow out of, seeing where the pieces fit and where they don't. I'd been doing it for years without calling it that, across briefs and industries and rooms that had nothing in common except me standing in them trying to work out what was actually needed.

Nobody plans it this way. You don't sit down and decide to spend the next seventeen years moving between industries, countries, languages and disciplines, building something that doesn't have a name until you're halfway through building it. What I know now is that every client teaches me something. Every brief, every industry, every problem I haven't encountered before adds another layer.