My Personal Story: Wherever I Go There I Am
There are thin red threads that run through everyone’s lives. The storyline that connects the essentials of a single human heart and soul. The river of life which flows relentlessly onwards towards the ocean of unavoidable death. The dots that join the strands of what you’re good at, what you love, what you do and where you go. It’s difficult to see your own.
One of the most important things you can do when you are at a moment in your life where you might want to ‘reinvent’ yourself, is write down your own story. This, my story, was both prompted by and mirrors, the story of one of the people who brought me home to my own story and is the author of The NeoGeneralist — Kenneth Mikkelsen.
Today I am part philosopher, warrior, gaian advocate, stoic and existentialist. I explore the strategic narratives of our times and seek ways to write new, hopeful stories that take us into a regenerative future.
I was born on the outskirts of Brixton to working class parents as the swinging Sixties dawned. An era of energy and experimentation; boundaries broke down and glass ceilings cracked. In the tight knit community in which I grew up, there were already many different peoples. The Windrush generation came here. Our neighbours were Caribbean, Portuguese, Nigerian, Chinese. They were Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Muslims — and pagan hippies. Racial and religious diversity was a canvas on which my life was painted so I always had a sense of the ‘normalness’ of the melting pot of humanity — of people able to get along without recourse to divisiveness.
It was a neighbourhood that was detached from the global glamour that was emerging in the world. It was content with the daily struggle of putting food on the table and paying the bills. It didn’t ask for greater things. Yet somehow deep down within me there was always the pull of imagination of a wider and more exciting world of possibilities, and a deep sense of rebellion at being contained in the box that was the streets of Stockwell.
When a wise teacher introduced me to the stories of Tolkein and C S Lewis my world exploded into technicolour. I have lived half my life in pursuit of Middle Earth. I added stories of my own. Always deeply attached to nature and the animal kingdom and longing for animals of my own to care for, I created a group of imaginary four-legged friends. Horses of every colour who lived in the back yard and accompanied me on great adventures. Had I been born into a later era, I would probably have been in therapy for many years!
Like so many people, when television came into my life my horizons expanded even further than I could at that time imagine. One of my earliest memories is watching the lunar landing with baited breath, wondering if those bold adventurers would ever return to earth. Trying to imagine what it would feel like to be the first human to set foot on a planet untouched by humankind. Early wildlife documentaries fuelled my love for the animal kingdom and for pioneering exploration. Stories of Joy and George Adamson in Africa, the underwater explorations of Jacques Cousteau tore me between a future in zoology, marine biology and becoming a vet.
At junior school I remember my greatest inspiration as my science teacher. A chain-smoking dame with a patrician heritage, Mrs Hamilton offered me my first glimpses into a world of inventors, makers, and thinkers. People who could design engines, imagine the reasons for the stars, discover penicillin. She inspired me with a lifelong admiration for engineers and their capacity for design thinking. She showed me Stevenson, Marie Curie, Morse and Alexander Graham Bell. But also Newton, Kant, and Darwin. Perhaps I instinctively knew I would never be one of them, yet the fascination for people who could imagine the future through a different perspective would become a lifelong interest for me.
At senior school I first began to realise another quality which has stayed with me; challenger of the status quo. At a nice grammar school for girls in the 70s, questioning the authority, knowledge and competence of teachers wasn’t exactly acceptable. You were expected to keep quiet and learn from your leaders. Unfortunately I was gifted with a quick mind for learning and a mouth that just wouldn’t stay shut. To question and explore is everything but sadly that innate talent was diverted into rebellion because of the suppression of creativity of the school system. Teachers who were not quick off the mark with their Latin syntax would be corrected, the British Constitution teacher who was deeply enthusiastic about the British political system questioned for her support for its archaic rituals. I was labelled ‘supercilious’ and ‘disruptive’.
Unlike my gifted sister, I was never brilliant at any one thing. I was good at everything and interested in almost anything. I was effortlessly top of my class in every single subject in my first year at senior school, as well as almost winning the tennis cup against the seniors and being captain of the netball team. I loved the sciences particularly biology and chemistry, but I was also a good linguist and lover of history. I would delve deeply into new topics, squirrel away the knowledge and move on to the next subject — easily bored by something once I had mastered ‘enough’ knowledge, never quite enthralled enough to stick with any one thing. I validated myself by the speed at which I could understand something and respond — not all that smart with hindsight.
Being good academically as well as at sports earned me the enmity of a group of bullies who ‘sent me to Coventry’ for a whole year. A year of isolation from my classmates as a 12 year old taught me a lot of good things — survival, how to stand alone, courage. It also left me with a passionate sense of social justice for the outcasts, the people who were different from the norm and a strong commitment to eradicating bullying from wherever I found it. I became a quiet champion of the underdog in those early years which would surface later in my career.
When it came to making choices about further academic study I was torn and frustrated. Hemmed in by a then inflexible A level system I had been forced to choose languages over sciences and I wanted to apply to degree courses that my languages didn’t match. I postponed the whole thing and, following a deep rift with my family, packed a bag and set off on a 7 year adventure around the world to design my own learning programme.
Although ‘the gap year’ is now a embedded part of Western culture, I cannot emphasise enough that I have learned more about humankind through travelling solo than in any other part of my life before or since. These travels have continued throughout my life, but those I did when a young naive backpacker stand out as cauldrons of learning.
In France I learned an enormous amount about people management from a short stint as a courier in the travel industry. Helping Brits who had travelled for the first time outside the UK cope with the culture shock of different food, who would gleefully boil themselves with reflective tinfoil and Bergasol, was instructive. Helping young women travelling at 9 months pregnant to give birth, putting out tent and caravan fires, and managing complaints about everything and anything that didn’t work the same way as at ‘home’, was the best grounding in customer-centred service I could ever have. I learned how to be light-heartedly entertaining; to capture and engage the attention of incurious tourists with an elegant story.
In Switzerland I started building business acumen. I got to grips with the challenges of running a business, of managing international imports and exports in the sports industry, and had my first introduction to marketing. I learned that I acted from the heart not the head, and learned I had to curb that tendency in order to succeed in business. I had inadvertently designed a perfect life at the time. Live in an inspirational setting you love: Verbier. Work in a business you are passionate about: skiing, tourism, leisure. Keep hours that allow both work and passion: I clocked off at 12 each day and skied for 3 hours before going back to work. That desire for flexibility has never left me.
Travelling across the Sinai desert with a Bedouin tribe, I learned how to communicate without words. Hitch-hiking throughout the Sinai penninsula when it was still Israel during the Summer of Camp David, I learned about faith and trust and the goodness of honest upright young men. Abandoned at midnight at the crossroads outside Ras Muhammad in my bikini, I considered walking back to the beach at Dahab where I was sleeping, without knowing the way. I was picked up by a jeep of Israeli soldiers. Much could have happened. All that happened was that they took me back to my Israeli friends and gave them a severe dressing down.
My instincts to see and experience as much of nature as I could — from sleeping on the golden sands of Dahab to walking through the canyons of Jordan to sailing along the Upper Nile — exposed me to the pain and rewards of a humble life on the land. Hiking from Cape Town to Cairo hardened my personal resilience, expanded my sense of awe at Mother Nature’s gifts and left me forever in love with the magical peoples of this unbelievable continent. My heart will always sway to the beat of an elephant’s feet on the savannah.
In Sweden I first really found my feet. Working for the Embassy of the Republic of Tanzania, I designed and organised learning tours for the businesses who were investing in Tanzania through the Nordic bilateral aid programmes. I found I was a good ‘door knocker’ and could forge connections around Tanzania’s needs to the Nordic businesses abilities to provide knowledge and assistance. My previous light touch as a host deepened to an ability to morph from one language to another, from one point of view to another, from one business to another and join the dots for the benefit of my host country. I found I was comfortable with the power brokers of the day, able to slip chameleon-like into the unnoticed shadows whenever necessary and without loss of identity or self. I was deliriously happy when visiting projects we had financed and supported; building schools, upgrading agricultural irrigation. Meeting with the people on the ground to whom we were making a difference fulfilled my sense of social justice.
I picked up my education again and first did 3 science A levels in Swedish still with the commitment in my mind I would finally study veterinary science, and then switched to a business degree mid flow — wanting to cement my growing business knowledge so that I could be more effective in my meetings with business leaders. Sadly all things come to an end, and a marriage that was cracking at the seams as the dots were starting to join in my career, heralded a return to the UK.
More by accident than design, I found myself taking a role as an Account Executive in a public relations firm. I had somehow convinced them I knew what a press release was. I had no idea. A fast mouth and a quick mind can get you into a lot of trouble but it can also get you out. Within weeks I realised I had found a playground to which my skills were undoubtedly suited. I could tell a good story. I enjoyed the cut and thrust of working with journalists (before Murdoch spoilt it all) and shaping the strategic narratives of global brands. I enjoyed the need to gather and synthesise knowledge about a market, a culture, a nation or a world, and remodel it into a strategy for the brands I worked for. I could see connections across cultures, industries, ideas and people where others could see none. I found that, if I wasn’t a truly original thinker, I was expansive. Give me a half decent idea and I could make it into a global trend. I could instinctively place a product or brand inside a story that elevated its position, influence and profits. I could easily operate as a natural bridge between two worlds: media and brand, customer and brand, creatives and brand. Always able to see both sides of the coin, always able to negotiate a way forward that worked for all.
But I wasn’t motivated to do it for the IT companies that were my client base. So I quit my role at 27 and set up my own agency, specialising in consumer challenger brands. The small, ambitious, growing brands coming out of America and Australia that wanted a piece of a European market they didn’t quite understand. I did. For 17 years brand communications was my life. From its humble beginnings my company worked for some of the world’s best companies that were already putting purpose ahead of profit, many years before the phrase B Corp would be heard. I learned about the importance of having a mission greater than your own brand from titans like Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia and Jeffrey Swartz at Timberland. I learned how a culture emerges from purpose and passion when combined with sound business strategy, so that impact and growth walk alongside you like a well-trained hound.
The impossible challenge became my favourite hunt, in pursuit of creativity, innovation and excellence. Could we take a car brand from the 7th largest to 3rd behind ‘national’ brands in just 3 years? Could we rescue a failing jeans brand that was so far behind the dominant market leader? Could we help corporate advisory consultancies understand the nuances of the fashion business? Could we change the fortunes of a once proud iconic department store into a mecca for fashionistas and style leaders? Could we help an amateur sports union transition to a professional sport? Could we design a new global ocean challenge? Could we keep a security business out of the media? Although creative, we maintained a rigorous focus on growth and profit, as well as passion and purpose which made us ‘easier’ to hire because we could bridge creative ambition and corporate risk.
Working with some many international brands offered me an amazing opportunity to learn from visionary leaders, but it also fed my continuing desire to travel. Creative photography and film shoots took me to exotic locations from the Daintree rainforest in Australia to the mountains of Montana and the green, green grass of Wyoming. To the sparkling streets of Manhattan, the sleepy villages of Morocco’s Atlas mountains and the windswept coasts of the southern cape in South Africa. I worked with world renowned creative directors, artists, models and photographers and did battle with the individual insecurities of the ‘famous’ while shaping the careers of household names in music, fashion and film. I was, as always, a bridge between worlds, serving, soothing and smoothing over misunderstandings, miscommunications and more often than not, tantrums and tiaras.
At the turn of the new century, I knew I had done it for long enough. I had made enough money for other people. Limits to Growth has appeared on my horizon and I began to be concerned about my own contribution to an unsustainable way of living. My life has always gone in phases of around 15 or so years. I woke up one day and made the decision. I took a year out to fulfil a childhood dream of owning and competing horses.
As ever I immersed myself in new learning to my normal obsessive level, and was quickly on a competitive mission, climbing through the levels of professional eventing. And then a strange thing happened. I found through my equine teachers, that my drive to improve, to win, to achieve was lessened by my love for my four-legged friends. I discovered that the command/control methods of striving for achievement that had served me so well in the corporate world, didn’t quite resonate with a horse. Instead of command and control, I had buck and bolt to deal with. I found I was also afraid. For almost the first time in my life, I could not by my will and knowledge, manipulate the outcome.
I credit my beloved friends who shared my life for the next 15 years with my awakening. It didn’t come all at once. But gradually, they showed me that collaboration was more rewarding than control and competition. By their warmth and willingness, they overturned my fierce competitiveness and focus on performance, and made me a better human. I have taken that critical learning with me into organisational re-design.
Of course I didn’t stop working for more than a year. The corporate world still called at my door, and I enjoyed a new way of working with brands as a problem solver. Instead of solving their business challenges through creative communications, I began to work with the inner company. I shifted my focus to the internal structure, strategy and culture inside brands. At first I was still building skills and knowledge in brand communications, but eventually joining the dots between brand, CSR and the new kid on the block — sustainability.
Working to up-skill creative, retail, marketing, communications professionals inside businesses showed me something I had instinctively started to feel as head of an external agency. In our rush to be brilliant creatives, we left the people behind. We designed brilliant campaigns that made leadership and marketing teams happy, but the people at the coalface were often just left executing a strategy on which they had never been consulted and which didn’t work for them. As I was shifting as a human being, so my working focus shifted from bring external creativity to activating the creativity within individuals, teams and organisational cultures.
A stroke of luck laid me low for two years towards the end of this period with advanced lymphoma. The years of running on adrenalin, relying on my phenomenal energy, added to a genetic predisposition to cancer, coping with the death of my Father and subsequently Mother, caught up with me. It could also have been the endless spraying of the crops on the fruit farm where I lived. At the time it annoyed me, but I never thought I was at risk. It turned out I was wrong.
I describe it as a stroke of luck because for the first time in 25 years, I had to choose not to work. My immune system was so weak I couldn’t be in close proximity of other people. That meant no offices, no planes, trains or gatherings of any kind. I hunkered down with my beloved horses and a few close friends and designed a course of study for myself to keep my mind occupied while my body was ravaged by chemotherapy. I had a chance to lift my head, look around and really think about what was happening on Spaceship Earth and so my own ‘informal PhD’ began.
A remote masters in Psychology was the first step. It opened my world to developmental psychology, spiral dynamics, and integral theory which has continued to fascinate me.
Once free of cancer, I experimented with different career shifts. I spent 18 months in Brussels joining the dots between animal welfare charities and trade negotiators and officials in the EU and WTO. Although I had a detailed brief, it became a role which simply sought to find platforms on which two very different sets of people — one numbers deals and negotiations driven, one value-driven — could have conversations in which they could understand one another. Which later led to successfully securing inclusion of animal welfare goals and issues in key free trade agreements. Another bridge role.
I took an interim role as a university Course Director on a failing degree course that had been without leadership or staff for several years. I found huge joy in working with young aspiring minds. I discovered an unexpected aptitude for designing learning experiences, and for pastoral care and mentoring. I also found deep disappointment at the quality of education as well as concern for a generation that seemed deeply lacking in confidence and resilience.
I was deeply frustrated with the strictures of the academic system, and had entered it at too low a level to be an effective agent for change. I rewrote course content but it would take 3–4 years to validate by which time in our world of rapid change, it would be invalid. I was utterly the wrong person for the command/control management and processes of even a creative university. I resigned and moved on but I have kept my interest in education alive, and have delighted in watching the careers of all the students I remember with fondness, flourish in the outer world.
I continued to ride my beloved horses. When you are frequently outdoors you develop a different relationship with the weather and nature. I became acutely observant of weather patterns over the years. Wetter, warmer. With each year, the river which bordered my farm would flood the adjacent fields a little higher and little longer. In the penultimate year, coming right up to the stabled and house at Christmas, filling them with a few inches of water. A small foretaste of what was to come the following Winter. On Christmas Eve 2014, the river burst her banks dramatically at 4pm in the dark. A wall of water came rushing across the farm towards me and the four horses I was trying to lead to safety. We were engulfed in a flood that swiftly rose to my waistline and above, and didn’t leave for 8 weeks. Although we evacuated the horses, we couldn’t go back. With no secure home, and no friends in the horse world who would help, I made a decision to let my horses go.
I made the national and local news. Within days I was under attack on social media by animal rights activists. Ironic given my previous role. My Twitter feed pinged every minute with some new vicious message. I was deep in grief for the loss of my home and horses and afraid to go out. Within a week the depression I hadn’t even known was lurking, took over completely. Finding yourself under the duvet cover with a bottle of pills is not a pleasant place to be. I survived but I was changed forever by the experience. Mother Nature had spoken as loudly as she could to this one individual. And I had reached the bottom of my vat of personal resilience.
At the bottom of that pit I had no clear sense of direction, so I immersed myself once again in my informal PhD. I explored mindfulness meditation, neuroscience, organisational psychology and design. I discovered ecopsychology and spent time with the wonderful Joanna Macy to learn the Work That Reconnects, and at Schumacher College in Devon to study new economics, indigenous wisdom and ecological design. I dived into systems thinking, gaia theory, and even spent time at Singularity University to place exponential technology in the global picture of the future that was emerging in my mind. I made connections with leading think tanks and change organisations like Forum for the Future, Ellen Macarthur Foundation, The Presencing Institute, The Stockholm Resilience Centre. I watched the UN Sustainable Development Goals emerge as a brilliant but flawed new template on which to build a better future. I mapped tools, models and systems that could support transformation — from Theory U to Agile, Lean, Holacracy, Sociocracy & Self-Management; from Art of Hosting to Appreciative Enquiry and World Cafe to Design Thinking. But most of all I used the years with horses to firm up my understanding of how living systems work through Biomimicry which became my favourite of all studies.
My interest in the future of food which began in Brussels lobbying for animal welfare organisations has blossomed into a deep belief in the importance of regenerative reform. Regenerative agriculture, permaculture, biodiversity collapse, bioregional design have all become obsessive interests. The idea that regenerative design could also be applied to all business systems and the future of work experience for humankind emerged when sharing the stage with one Mike Barry of M&S’s Plan A. He stated that future leaders will come from HR and Sustainability functions, because they are best placed to understand the connection between regenerative People and a regenerative Planet. The ‘front’ and ‘back’ end of business. Or more elegantly put, a deliberately developmental learning culture and managing the upstream impact of business.
In all my journey, there is one particular challenge that has stayed with me. It is the fine balance between serving and staying independent. One becomes an external adviser rather than a corporate employee for a reason. A talent for being a tree-shaker, as Kenneth Mikkelsen describes is ‘hold a flexible position like a tenant with a short-term lease’. I can best serve by swiftly identifying organisational and cultural blocks, helping to shape the new journey, and then allowing an organisation the freedom to move forwards on its own merits.
Personal freedom isn’t an easy path. In a world which values expertise and the deep dive of specialist labels, a specialist/generalist is an anomaly whose services cannot easily be understood or commissioned. Whose wide variety of knowledge and abilities can be perceived as scanty and untrustworthy. It is a path I once strode with confidence, but today with more vulnerability. As the complexity around us increases, so does our appetite for simple solutions.
As an independent I have to make my own path, market my own value and try to create chinks of opportunities in every conversation that may lead to a chance to employ the dots that I have joined in my head to the service of business. I am not automatically included in discussions about global issues, onto the stages or through the doors that a corporate business card might open.
One day I’m a trusted adviser using my knowledge to enrich and broaden strategy and thought leadership, the next I am a facilitator at international conferences, teasing out collective intelligence and imagination into new group action. Another day I have to concentrate on providing more content than a library to demonstrate my potential value and to squeeze through into the openings offered.
My current challenge is to find a useful way to continue to maintain the independence which allows me to continue to absorb valuable learning at the edges of the fires of change that surround us. I know I need to find collaborative partners through whom I can be useful but also showcased. These may be academic partners, consultancies, exhibitions and conference organisers, or business organisations. Above all I need to finish my book as a business card and advertisement to my value.
As I reflect on this brief summary of my personal story — with so much still missing and edited out — I can see the clear red threads which stand out.
The creative director or joiner-of dots.
The connector of people.
The servant, the unseen power behind the throne.
The independent trusted adviser.
The bridge between worlds.
The communicator and interpreter of difference.
The spotter of opportunity.
The future imagineer.
I just lack a title.
And so my ask if you have read this far is just this. What am I?
Thank you in advance for the loan of your imagination.
And my most enormous thanks, and in a way, this homage, goes to purpose, author of The NeoGeneralist. You can find more about both Kenneth and the book by clicking on the image.
It has taken me almost two years to re-read Kenneth’s personal story and to sit down and write my own. He continues to inspire me.
