Forty four cards
For noticing the stories you were handed and choosing truer ones. The most tangible way into the thesis.
Leverage · ParadigmAbout the deck →
Systems change practitioner
I work where the psyche meets the system: what we exile of ourselves to stay acceptable, and how we take it back.
After twenty years designing brands and products, and co-founding an ethical finance company, my focus now is on bringing systems thinking together with the older wisdom of myth, story and rites of passage. I help people and organisations return to wholeness, through integrity between what they value and what they reward, and coherence between how they feel, the stories they tell and the structures around them.
The problem
We are born whole. Then systems teach us which parts of ourselves to exile.
Grief is given a deadline, anger becomes unprofessional, rest has to be earned and need starts to look like weakness. None of it is decided in a single moment. It arrives through stories we inherit long before we can question them, and it is held in place by taboo and stigma until the exiled parts feel less like something we were made to set down and more like the truth about who we are.
The cost shows up as burnout, numbness and the slow loss of feeling like yourself, and we are told it is a personal failing. Myth has always understood it differently. The exiled one is so often carrying exactly what the kingdom needs in order to heal, and the story only turns when they are let back in.
The pattern
The incentives are working
Our economic system and the social constructs around it reward some ways of being and punish others. Those incentives don’t stay at the top. They trickle down through every layer: into the institutions we build, into our relationships, and into how we judge ourselves, until they feel like our own limiting beliefs.
So the exhaustion and the quiet sense of never being enough aren’t personal failings. They’re the system working exactly as designed. What can’t be named can’t be organised around, and silence keeps the loop running.
The name comes from my study of the same title, which began by listening to people who paid the highest price for work they believed in.
The work
One pattern, nested at every scale
The same pattern of exile shows up in a person, in an organisation and in the wider system, so the work meets it at each scale, from the stories one person carries to the incentives a whole economy runs on.
Scale 01A person
Scale 02An organisation
Scale 03The wider system
The Coherence Framework
Makes visible the gap between what an organisation says it values and what its structures actually reward.
Leverage · GoalsThe thesis behind it →
The Incentives Are Working
Conversations with people who paid the highest price for purpose-driven work, and what their stories say about how these systems are designed.
Leverage · Information flowsAbout the study →
The Long Way Back to Myself
Writing about burning out inside purpose, and the slow work of coming home to the parts of me I’d exiled.
Leverage · ParadigmRead more →
More organisational work to come
Story Circles
Circles for women leading purpose-driven work, where what’s been carried quietly gets said out loud and organised around.
Leverage · Information flowsRegister interest →
The thesis
What would let people stay whole inside systems that were built for fragmentation?
Coherence is how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them. Wholeness is nothing essential abandoned to stay acceptable to a system. Integrity is the movement back towards it.
When a tree struggles in poor soil, nobody says it should have tried harder. When a person struggles, we ask what’s wrong with them instead of what conditions produced this.
Leverage points
Where I intervene
Donella Meadows ranked the places to intervene in a system by how much change they can create. Most effort goes into the easiest to adjust and least likely to shift anything. My work sits higher up, where the stories and goals live.
↑ Higher leverageWhere my work sits
ParadigmThe stories a system runs on, and the beliefs it makes feel like identity.The oracle deck · writing
GoalsWhat a system is actually for, beneath what it says it’s for.The Coherence Framework
Self-organisationWho gets to reshape the system, and whether they’re resourced to.Story Circles
Rules and incentivesWhat gets rewarded, and what quietly gets punished.The Coherence Framework
Information flowsWho gets to see, say and count what. Silence is a flow too.The Incentives Are Working · Story Circles
ParametersTargets, budgets, headcount. Where most change effort goes.Not where I work
↓ Lower leverage
Adapted from Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (Sustainability Institute, 1999). Six of her twelve leverage points, simplified and shown in her order.
The map
A map of what was exiled
Forty four parts of being human that systems teach us to exile, across twelve areas of life. Each card will hold stories: mine, other people’s, and work in other mediums.
01Who you are and how you show up
02Money, worth and what you believe you deserve
03Your mind and what you let yourself say
04Home, family and roots
05Creativity, pleasure and play
06Health, the body and daily life
07Relationships and partnership
08Death, transformation and what’s hidden
09Meaning, faith and doubt
10Work, reputation and how you’re seen
11Community and belonging beyond one relationship
12The inner world, and what’s ready to be let go of
Every card has its own page, with the writing filed under it so far.
About
Twenty years across design, product and systems
I grew up in the UK noticing who systems protected and who they used up, long before I had words for it. I studied art and design because it was the first place my mind made sense, and that training still shapes how I see everything.
The next twenty years were a long apprenticeship in how systems get built. I started in brand and advertising, moved to Melbourne, and studied web development for several years alongside full-time work. From there I moved into UX and then product, designing and leading many different products and tools for a communications platform used across many sectors, such as health, transport and government. These ranged from workflow automation and brand and code systems to machine learning and AI generated communications intelligence tools and features. During the pandemic I led the development of contact tracing and crisis communication tools that 22 Australian government departments adopted within just three months.
That project taught me what I’ve built my work around since. Technology is never neutral. It encodes a belief about people, and scale amplifies whatever is already there, the care and the control alike. Over a million people across the country were using tools I’d designed while I was quietly burning out building them, under the urgency the pandemic placed on everyone inside the organisation I was working for. The gap between what a system can see and what it costs the people inside it has stayed with me.
In 2023 I co-founded SIX, an ethical investing platform built to give everyday investors real shareholder power over Australia’s largest companies. By then I had worked across enough sectors to know how integral design research, product thinking and data analysis are to defining a problem properly and proving the value of a solution, and I had learned to think through every part of a business, from its processes and functions to the people working inside it and the people it serves. SIX was a chance to bring all of that together, and to use design, data and systems thinking for empowerment rather than control. It also showed me, from the inside, why changing a system from within is so hard. Purpose-driven organisations still run on the incentives of the economy around them. The most committed people carry the most cost, because their values become the lever. And a system rarely changes its operating model while it’s still being led by that model.
That is the work I do now. I’m a systems change practitioner working where the psyche meets the system, on the conditions that let people stay whole inside organisations and economies that were never designed for it. My Coherence Framework looks at how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them. My study, The Incentives Are Working, documents what purpose-driven work costs the people who do it, and the oracle deck gives anyone a way to start noticing the stories they were handed. Graduating from the Mastery of Systems Leadership programme in July 2026 gave twenty years of practice a rigorous frame and a shared language.
Co-founder, SIXEthical investing with shareholder activism built in, since 2023
National crisis toolsUsed by 22 Australian government departments
Finnie Awards finalistOutstanding FinTech Leader of the Year, 2025
Mastery of Systems LeadershipGraduated July 2026
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