Team & Organisational Development

Organisational Diagnosis

I assess team structure, communication patterns, decision-making processes, and the informal dynamics that never appear in org charts.

Design

I co-design structural and cultural interventions with your leadership. Nothing is implemented without buy-in from the people who have to live with it.

Facilitation

Workshops, coaching sessions, and structured conversations that actually move things. Facilitated by someone who has built and led scientific teams.

Embedding

New structures and behaviours are documented, practised, and reinforced until they become standard. The goal is lasting change, not a one-off event.

The specific scientific leadership challenge is this: technically excellent people are promoted into management without preparation, and the transition from individual contributor to team builder is almost never explicitly supported. The result is R&D teams that are strong on science and fragile on everything else — decision-making, knowledge transfer, onboarding, communication under pressure.

What an organisational diagnosis actually examines goes well beyond the org chart. It looks at informal decision-making patterns — who gets consulted before decisions land, whose sign-off is required but never written down, where information bottlenecks accumulate, which relationships carry disproportionate load, and where accountability is genuinely ambiguous. The org chart shows the official structure. The diagnosis shows how work actually gets done. The gap between the two is where most problems live.

The engagement is co-designed with scientific leadership rather than delivered to them, because structural changes that are imposed fail. Changes that the people responsible for implementing them helped design have a fundamentally different adoption rate. The role of facilitation here is to make the implicit explicit — to surface the patterns and assumptions that everyone knows but no one has named — and to give leadership the tools to act on what they find.

What this kind of work produces, concretely: cross-functional teams where decisions get made at the right level, where organisational capacity is not concentrated in one person, where knowledge transfer does not depend on that person being available, and where a new team member can reach full effectiveness in weeks rather than months. That last metric is underestimated. It compounds across every hire.

How is this different from standard leadership coaching?

Leadership coaching works with an individual. Organisational development works with the system those individuals operate in. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the lever is different. If the problem is that good people are making poor decisions, coaching addresses the individual. If the problem is that the structure makes good decisions hard to make, coaching alone will not fix it. Most scientific teams need both, in the right sequence.

What does a typical engagement look like in practice?

It usually starts with a diagnosis phase of two to four weeks — conversations with team members, observation of working sessions, and a structured review of how decisions and information actually flow. This produces a clear picture of where the structural and behavioural gaps are. From there, the design and facilitation phase is scoped to the specific findings. Engagements typically run three to six months in total, with a defined set of outputs and a clear end point.

Who is the right client for this service?

Founder-led scientific companies scaling their team for the first time, where the founder is managing people but was never trained to do so. Established SMEs where a team has grown faster than its structures. R&D functions where a key person has left and the team is absorbing the gap badly. In each case the underlying problem is the same: the organisational architecture has not kept pace with the work.

Can this be combined with an interim management engagement?

Yes, and it often is. Interim management addresses a leadership gap for a defined period; organisational development addresses the structural conditions that created the gap or that will affect whoever fills it next. Running them in parallel means the team is not just led through a transition — it comes out of the transition in better structural shape than it went in.