You found your way here because someone you trust said my name, or because you have been reading me from a distance for a while, and the moment has come.
You came here because you have refused to have another year of this.
You go to work to build the future. You find yourself solving yesterday's problems. By the time the fires are out, the work that is actually yours to do is still waiting.
Or you broke through. And found something different on the other side. Nobody tells you that when you break the glass ceiling, some of the shards get stuck in you.
It would be one thing if there were an after. But it's endless.
And through all of it, a piece of work you have been trying to keep alive. You have known what it is to be exactly where you are supposed to be. You miss it. The story you want to shape, not just be in. A very clear sense of what you want to achieve, and not much time left to waste getting there.
Your rational mind has arguments. Your body has been saying something else.
Very rarely is there a room made for the fullness of it.
When Benjamin was given five years to live, I refused to accept that as the ending. Again and again I moved through what felt impossible, across healthcare systems, governments, and medical decisions where the official answer was not the right answer, until new outcomes existed that hadn't existed before.
That taught me something I cannot unknow. The problem is rarely what it looks like on the surface. And the quality of a question can change the direction of a decision.
That is what I bring into this room with you.
In this video, I share the story that shaped how I work with impossible problems.
What is this problem
designed to solve?
For nine years I have sat beside women in significant roles when the problem in front of them is no longer the real problem. I have spent most of my professional life inside the systems you are describing. Two decades on the commercial side of international media, serving the upstream oil and gas industry, inside the machine, not observing it.
I founded Shestainability, co-founded Lean In Equity and Sustainability and the Women Sustainability Power List. I sit on advisory boards in the UK and Nigeria.
I am not describing your world from the outside.
You do not need to know exactly what the work is yet. You may only know that the way you have been meeting the problem is no longer the way you want to meet it.
That is enough.If you want to understand what working together actually looks like, that is what the next page is for.
See the work β