Vision and guiding principles

My guiding principle

If you want to build a ship, do not gather people together to collect wood, assign tasks and divide the work, but teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – my guiding principle

That is exactly my aspiration: I combine enterprise architecture management with coaching and consulting in order to build a bridge between technology and humanity. In the digital age it is not only about efficiency and data – above all it is about people being at the centre.

The question I put to every undertaking

Behind every change lies a decision, and behind every decision an assumption about what is supposed to get better. My guiding question is therefore: does this serve people?

That sounds soft, but it is a hard test. A process that becomes leaner on paper while turning three people into servants of a system does not pass it. Software that delivers figures faster while devaluing all the experience someone gathered over twenty years does not pass either. Conversely, changes that cost effort at first often pass this test very well – if afterwards everyone knows what they are responsible for.

What I stand for

• Respect and regard: every person has their own individual personality. I meet it appreciatively and as far as possible without judgement.
• Listening rather than prescribing: I take in what I find, and together with you I recognise potential for development.
• Structure with heart: I combine analytical, structured thinking and pragmatism with empathy and creativity.
• A clear remit and a motivated team: for me these are the most important conditions for successful projects.
• Technology as an enabler: IT should connect and strengthen people, not separate them.

What that means in practice

Values that exist only on a website are worthless. Here is how you can tell whether I keep to them:

• I begin by listening, not with a proposed solution. Anyone who arrives at a company with a finished concept has not understood the organisation, only brought along their own method.
• I work so that you can do without me again. My aim is that your team can carry on by itself afterwards – not that you need me permanently.
• I also decline. If a matter is better placed with someone else, or if I get the impression that a consultancy is only meant to legitimise a decision already taken, I say so.
• My tools transmit nothing. The 60 or so free tools on this website run entirely in your browser and send nothing to me. That is not a technical quirk but the same attitude: your data is none of my business.

My identity as a consultant

I see myself as a bridge-builder between technology and humanity. For me the two are not opposites but partners that strengthen one another.

Building that bridge is not an end in itself. In many companies there are, on one side, people who know exactly how the work runs but have no language for IT – and on the other an IT function that works soundly but never learns what is actually needed day to day. Translating between the two is the most useful part of my work.