My career makes considerably more sense looking backwards than it ever did while I was living it.

 

I started in technology and engineering, moved into advertising and design, crossed into business strategy and consulting,, built businesses of my own, and eventually found myself working in energy and infrastructure. Along the way I’ve worked inside global professional services firms, creative agencies, start-ups and emerging industries.

 

On paper, it can look like a collection of unrelated careers.

 

It wasn’t.

 

Moving between very different worlds taught me something I probably wouldn't have learned by staying inside one of them: different environments teach people to see differently.

 

An engineer, strategist, creative director and entrepreneur can look at exactly the same situation and notice completely different things. Each brings their own experience, assumptions, language and patterns of recognition. What appears obvious from one position can remain almost invisible from another.

 

I became fascinated by that.

 

Not simply creativity or problem solving, but what happens before either of them. What makes us notice something in the first place? Why does one person recognise an opportunity while another walks straight past it? What changes when we move beyond the people, environments and perspectives we already know?

 

Those questions eventually became IAOU: The Perception Arc.

 

IAOU explores how we see through four connected movements: Interest, Attention, Observation and Understanding. Rather than telling people what to think, it examines the conditions that influence what becomes visible to us in the first place.

 

But years spent working with businesses revealed a different problem.

 

Seeing isn't doing.

 

Organisations can understand a problem perfectly well and still fail to change it. Strategies can be agreed upon and never executed. Teams can leave the same meeting with completely different interpretations of what was decided. Insight can exist without movement.

 

That problem led to The RTC Framework: Reframe, Transfer, Commit.

 

RTC is concerned with what happens after something has been recognised. How do we frame the right problem? How does understanding move between people rather than simply information? And how does that shared understanding become commitment and action?

 

So while IAOU and RTC emerged from different questions, they ultimately sit on either side of the same human challenge.

 

IAOU explores how we see. RTC explores what we do with what we see.

 

The books and frameworks are my attempt to make those ideas useful beyond the boardrooms, businesses and situations in which I first encountered them. Some are written for everyday life. Others are designed for organisations. They don't require the same language, audience or application.

 

They do share the same underlying belief.

 

What we see shapes what becomes possible. What we do determines what happens next.