I started this work because I handled a bad year badly
In 2013 I was running operations for a regional logistics firm when a warehouse fire took out two thirds of our capacity overnight. We were praised for the recovery. Eleven months later half of my managers had left, and the ones who stayed had stopped telling me things.
I went looking for the research and found surprisingly little. So I collected the stories myself — first as a part-time doctorate, then as four books and a stubborn habit of asking people what month seven felt like.
The work sits in three places now. I write — books and a Sunday letter read by about 34,000 people. I speak, mostly to organisations somewhere in the long middle of something hard. And I run two or three long engagements a year with leadership teams who want the slow version.
I am not a motivational speaker and I try never to tell a room that things happen for a reason. What I offer is more modest: a clear description of the terrain, honest language for it, and practices that hold up under load.
I live in Edinburgh with a bad-tempered lurcher and an unreasonable number of index cards.
- PhD, Organisational Behaviour — Lowry School of Management
- Visiting Fellow, Institute for Public Services (2024–)
- Chartered Fellow, Institute of Operations Leadership
- Trustee, The Ossei Foundation for care workers
- Columnist, The Pellinore Review (2021–2025)
The warehouse fire. Nine days of clarity, eleven months of attrition.
The Recovery Habit published while finishing the doctorate.
First main-stage keynote. Small Brave Things that autumn.
Hold the Line. Eighteen months embedded with managers through an awful winter.
The Steady Middle and a 24-city tour she was told was too ambitious.