As a consultant or facilitator
Solo or with a curated team. Depending on what the work needs, I bring together trusted collaborators across design, facilitation, and subject-matter expertise.
About
Healthy relationships are the precondition for everything: in organisations, in communities, in ourselves. This is the belief at the root of my work. When we design and build things, programmes, services, strategies, organisations, and communities in relational ways, they work better. And when we intentionally and strategically invest in the quality of relationships, something generative happens: healthy relationships that enable many other healthy relationships. And with them, new ways of collaboration and creation emerge.
I've started calling this way of working Relational Design: a practice at the intersection of complexity, creativity, and human connection. One that prioritises collective trust, safety, belonging, shared meaning, and purpose over the reductionist idea that outputs alone are the solution. The mechanistic institutions we've engineered over two centuries are ill-equipped for the complexity we actually face. Investing in the quality of relationships is, I believe, the most effective leverage point we have.
Over ten years at ATOLYE, a strategic design studio, I built ATOLYE Academy from the ground up, designing and directing transformative learning experiences, leadership development programmes, and multi-stakeholder platforms. Working with Dubai Future Foundation, BMW Foundation, UNDP, Turkcell, Expo City Dubai, and many others, I directed programmes like Design Gov (six years, 120+ alumni) and dawn (BMW Foundation's responsible leadership fellowship), delivering over 5,000 hours of facilitation to 500+ leaders across Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East.
I'm now in Amsterdam, building an independent practice, working with leaders and organisations on selected projects where the relational quality of the work is the point.
The work
Most of what we get asked to do in organisations lives on a spectrum: between the two-dimensional outputs everyone asks for, strategies, reports, plans, programmes, solutions, and the human capabilities they depend on, culture, trust, ways of collaborating, and the capacity to hold difference. My practice lives in the space between: designing both together, and moving at the speed of co-ownership. The work produces real outcomes and treats every deliverable as a generative artefact of shared meaning, strengthening how people relate and create together.
What excites me
These are the kinds of opportunities that make me come alive. If your work touches any of these, we should probably talk.
-
Working on vision, strategy, and purpose narratives with leaders — through relational design and participatory processes, where the process of developing the strategy is itself the intervention.
-
Delivering transformative learning, leadership, and team development — fellowships, cohorts, and experiential capability-building grounded in how people actually grow, together.
-
Building multi-stakeholder platforms, participatory processes, and community-powered initiatives — ecosystem building and community design, the facilitation work that requires holding tension, navigating power, and creating genuine co-ownership.
-
Facilitating gatherings, retreats, workshops, and experiences — designing and hosting spaces where something real happens, people leave different from how they arrived.
I am drawn to collaborations where there is a genuine appetite for doing things differently, where community is treated as infrastructure, and where the process itself is part of the transformation.
How to work with me
Embedded in your team
Fractional or project-based. Creative director, project director, senior practitioner, whatever seat the work asks for. I'm comfortable leading a team toward creative excellence or operating as an individual contributor within a larger effort.
One-on-one
Coaching, mentoring, and advising on your relational challenges and projects, from designing and facilitating gatherings to workshops, programmes, retreats, and experiences that shift how people relate to each other.
Writing
I write about what I keep noticing in the work, what we tend to overlook about how people and organisations actually grow, what I'm learning about building a practice from scratch, and what relational design might mean as a concept and a craft.
Let's talk
I'm always interested in conversations with people working on complex challenges, whether you're designing a programme, rethinking how your organisation learns, building a multi-stakeholder platform, or just wanting to think something through together.