My Quest

My Quest is about the relationship between the individual human being and the organisation as a system and encouraging its integrity. First, by understanding how it works and subsequently by helping individuals, teams and organizations learn, grow and become more effective.

How much can a human being stay connected to his/her uniqueness and full potential and manifest this inside the demanding organisation? How can an organisation with its drive for value creation capitalise both on the alignment between AND on the uniqueness of human beings? How can the individual human being achieve personal goals simultaneously with the organisation generating added value?

To me, it all starts with learning how human beings can remain honest to their authentic self and maintain personal boundaries whilst living their commitment to the organisation they joined. To do this, they need to, first and foremost, understand their inner truth. This search for inner truth is an ever-evolving process, receiving constant attention in my life.

my professional background and training

Born in 1959, my university studies were in Business Economy, combining areas like Marketing, Finance, Organisation Development with Sociology and Organisation Psychology. For 10 years I worked inside big corporations in Human Resources, of which 2 years in Philips Medical Systems and 8 years in various Unilever companies. Age 35, I moved into consulting to spend 100% of my time on my purpose: “building bridges for relations & results”.

This purpose drives my deep curiosity in the underlying dynamics between organisations and human beings. Over the years, I studied and participated in trainings in gestalt-psychology, and became a scholar of neurosciences.

Together it brought me a deep understanding of the roots of behaviour: “why do I do what I do, why do I not do what I want to do, why do I do what I don’t want to do?”.

my PODCAST (FOR direct access, click here )

The more than 35  years of business-consulting-coaching experience has given me extensive insight in what makes people and businesses tick. Many leaders allowed me close to their struggles. And these were rarely about the What: most know what they want to do. Most struggles were I joined them, were about the How. They often answered the How with adjusting the structure, recruiting new people, investing in assets, reallocating budgets. And had a hard time to do the most challenging part of the How: how do I as leader get my people with me, in such a way that they become fully energised and self-propelled in the agreed direction? These questions have been core to my practise over the past more than 25 years. I will explore them fully in my podcast series “Freedom in a Framework - mobilising ownership and commitment of all employees behind a shared vision for its implementation”. If you want to listen, click here, (the podcast is in -for now- Dutch and is for free). If you prefer reading, a new book on the same topic has been published in October 2020 , click here