our team

My first job was as a jelly bean machine salesman.

I soon transitioned to a life on the airwaves and found myself running radio stations, production companies, and classified ad platforms. After more than a decade of outside broadcasts, licence wins and mergers I switched to advising people like Haymarket Publishing and Virgin Media on emerging digital opportunities in data and gaming.

For five years I co-directed People Who Do, which was concerned with helping people and teams be more productive and effective using a variety of tools and techniques.

Building that experience with an aptitude for designing practical ways to change things I founded ThenSomehow with Katharine to help universities and educational organisations understand and change their culture to become better places to work.

I work for moments of transformation: those times when a person starts to feel the benefits of the work they did together. Practical and pragmatic I believe there’s always a way.

In my spare time I make cider, help run a scout group and for a while, I kept bees.

Following a career at King’s College London in leadership roles linked to partnership and strategy development; innovation and impact, I now primarily work in School Governance.

I am an experienced Governor having over a 12-year period brought two small rural schools into a successful federation; been appointed as a National Lead Governor by the DfE for 4 years; and been part of 6 successful Ofsted teams.

Like most governors I work in a voluntary capacity, but at ThenSomehow I work also as a consultant with East Sussex County Council working with schools and individuals in tricky situations, helping schools in difficulties, and mentoring other governors through trying times. I also support new governors and Chairs.

This work builds upon the range of skills I gained whilst at King’s: ability to gain trust easily; to bring people together; to challenge and support leaders; to listen.

In addition to this work, I am an artist and teacher. I make and display sculptural ceramic work, and am Chair of Chalk Gallery Lewes. I run workshops for children and adults, most recently at the Sussex Support Centre, for carers and those needing respite. I also work as a Visiting Tutor at West Dean College of Art and Conservation.

I have 3 young children and over the last 16 years have balanced them with work plus additional caring responsibilities. This is an important dimension to who I am and what I do, and as a result I am particularly interested in working with and supporting others who have a similar tricky juggle going on in their lives.

I started my first business when I was 25. It was interior design and we worked in recycled fabrics and transformed pubs into bars. After that I went into TV production, coordinating film shoots all over the globe, mainly for historical documentaries. I did work on one feature film starring Richard Harris which was a drama in itself.

I left TV after discovering how un child friendly it was. I freelanced as a ‘creative consumer’ / idea generator for in innovation and new product development for a while, that was fun. And meanwhile qualified as a yoga instructor.

I started working with Steve and ThenSomehow about 15 years ago, delivering and developing the Working Smarter programme, taking it online, creating new workshops that support creativity and wellbeing at work.

I love this work, it is always such a joy to help people untangle the knots so that they can bring their intelligence and creativity to making it better.

I have a parallel business running art retreats, online art courses and selling my paintings. You can find out more about that side of things here.

In my spare time I love to travel, eat good food in good company and rest.

I have had a varied and eclectic career.

I trained as an accountant with KPMG, but on qualification I left to found my first business – a Brighton-based magazine where I led a team of 20. We became an influential voice for lifestyle and culture in the city, and also ran magazines for Brighton Festival and other local businesses.

Inspired by the internet, I sold the company and founded Nigel’s Eco Store an online retailer selling eco-friendly and purposeful products, with customers that included BT and Uswitch.

We experienced several years of fast growth, won awards, and helped people save energy and live in a more eco friendly way.

After the financial crash in 2008, online retail became a lot tougher and I closed that business in 2015 to found School of the Wild, a project working to reconnect people with the land and each other. As that has grown I have become interested in the point where Nature and meaningful change intersect. Through working with organisations of all shapes and sizes, I have honed my facilitation skills, and I specialise in team coaching and creating an inclusive environment where all voices can be heard and are valued.

During this time, I met Steve and started working with him at ThenSomehow – first to run the website and look after the marketing, and more recently facilitating groups as part of culture change projects with various UK universities.

I work to inspire change and to support others to be the best they can be.

In my spare time I practise yoga and meditation, and I am also a handy forager.

Rather than assuming the apparent is either the issue or solution, I approach each challenge with curiosity. Using rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies, honed from an academic background in social anthropology and advanced research methodologies, I am able to explore the issues from the inside without preconception.

I have considerable experience in project management of employee research, previously overseeing multi-country surveys with tens of thousands of participants. For fifteen years I held senior positions in global market research companies and management consultancies such as The Hay Group, providing strategic guidance to household names, including the BBC, Vodafone, Toyota, and DHL. I then moved into the not-for-profit sector, where I continues to spend time working with some of the country’s leading charities.

My role at ThenSomehow is to identify and explore the resident culture, and to develop benchmarks for the future and for comparison with other organisations within our database. This, while tailoring our methodological approach to the requirements of the client.

I have spent most of my working life supporting people who are trying to change the status quo, in positive ways. Nearly 30 years ago I left my role as a manager in a very large tech company to join a purposeful tech startup. I have been Chair and Director of a purposeful SME, a startup MD, as well as working as a facilitator on many projects, at board and at ground-level.

Today I help people:

• address difficult strategic challenges
• get things done, in the short term
• remove barriers to change and to cooperation
• build collaborations inside and outside their organisations
• deliver successful projects of all kinds

I do this at ThenSomehow by:

• coaching people to learn to lead (and to follow)
• improving team communication
• helping people make decisions, strategise, and most importantly implement their strategy
• facilitating workshops and events (small and large)
• mediating when difficulties arise

When not working (which isn’t very often, because I enjoy it so much), I love walking in the Sussex countryside or spending time with my family.

I’m an award-winning coach and consultant for the digital and creative industries. I help leaders become more successful and fulfilled, by sharing tools to increase confidence and be more authentic.

I bring my insight and experience in tackling systemic inequalities to help ThenSomehow’s clients feel braver about doing the work. I use practical tools to help teams become more aware of their own unconscious bias and cultural conditioning.

I had a successful career in London before moving to Brighton – I project managed the first Channel 5 website when I was 25 years old, managing a team of 20 designers, programmers, and writers.

I run SheSays Brighton events for women in digital and creative industries, I’m a founding member of the Women of Colour Brighton group with over 1,000 members. I’m also a yoga and meditation teacher, a former radio presenter and public speaker.

I was the winner of the Community Hero Award 2022, Mentor/Coach of the Year finalist and Best Networker of the Year runner-up at the Business Women Excellence Awards 2019 and I’m one of Etc magazines’s Top 20 Inspirational Women 2020.

I set up and run my own business, founded a social enterprise and worked at senior levels in international development for over fifteen years.

It was through my work in international development that I was introduced to mentoring and latterly the power of coaching and group facilitation.

I was able to hone these skills with some of the Civil Services’ most senior staff and brought in to help found and create cohesive cultures in new teams and departments.

I have been certified by Oxford Brookes University as a Skills and Performance Coach, am Steve Radcliffe trained (one of Europe’s most successful leadership coaches), and am a Careershifters and Firework advanced certified careers coach.

I thrive on designing new and transformative development programmes that can be delivered both face to face and in on-line environments.

My role at ThenSomehow is to ensure both clients and facilitated group participants enter a transformative experience founded on trust and the right exploratory questions.

I started my career as a graduate trainee for the National Housing Agency in Scotland and spent the first 10 years or so helping to set up and strengthen community led housing associations and advocating for deprived communities. Everywhere I went I heard amazing stories about another Sarah who had been there before me – a proper legend. Anyway the legend had taken a posh job with central government in England and was really shaking things up and when she advertised a role within her team I went for it. We moved everything from Glasgow to the South West of England and I spent a lot of time in the towers of bureaucracy in London as a special adviser being quite disruptive to the system.

Over time I felt at risk of becoming too compliant and my interest shifted from housing and public services to how I could help people be more effective in order to improve lives/deliver better outcomes. I also wanted to work in other sectors so after a few big corporate roles I took a year out and volunteered for a large charity through the Vodafone World of Difference Programme to reground myself away from the fancy job titles and glass offices.

I am now an accredited coach and have spent the last 10 years working with many different organisations to develop their people doing everything from diagnostics, coaching, developing and delivering leadership programmes to operational excellence. I worked with Steve and ThenSomehow on the original pilot for Capacity building and liked it so much I joined the team.

I am a recent convert to yoga (at least 4 hours per week) and do a lot of outdoor swimming (not wild swimming more cheating at in our local lido).

I’ve worked in the health and wellbeing industry stretching over 20 years. Since I was young I’ve developed a love for the human body. My earliest memories are of me looking through my Dad’s anatomy and medical books and being fascinated with the human body. This passion led me to become a Fitness Trainer, Exercise Teacher and Massage Therapist. I successfully grew my business teaching a number of private clients and exercise classes and managing three massage clinics in London. I loved my work, but doing 12+ hour days wasn’t sustainable.

Consequently I experienced two burnout episodes, one of which admitted me to hospital with chronic hypertension and other stress symptoms. Thankfully I recovered.

As a De-stress & Wellness Coach I support overworked business owners and workplace staff to live from a position of calm, peace, balance and spaciousness, so that they can successfully fulfil their purpose without feeling exhausted, chronically stressed or burnt out.

My role at ThenSomehow is to provide practical and proven solutions to reduce stress, prevent burnout, increase calm and harmony for workplace staff.

In my personal time I enjoy being in nature, going on retreats, participating in a community Church, reading books and relaxing.