Life taught me through experience.

I didn’t learn what matters most about leadership in a boardroom. I learned it outdoors, in circles of people, and at home.

I started my career with Outward Bound, working with groups and corporate teams in the outdoors. I watched people take on challenges in nature that none of them could have met alone, and I saw what changes when they stop carrying it alone and start carrying it together. That was the spark. My mentors, Luc Hoebeke and Paul Vansina, then taught me the craft of multi-actor collaboration, and I discovered the power of collaboratives: people from different worlds creating what no single organisation can.

Looking back on the last thirty years, I can only be grateful for the richness of what I have been part of: working alongside executive teams, leading transformations that touched tens of thousands of people, pioneering societal change with collectives and cities, and bringing communities of changemakers together. Every one of those experiences made me who I am today.

Yet my greatest teacher has been my relationship: with Judith, and with myself. Between the two of us we raised six children, and we co-founded and carried several ventures side by side. Our daughter needed special care and support throughout her life, and she thrived because a community carried her with us. She recently passed away. Through her, Judith and I learned in the deepest way that no one is meant to carry the heaviest things alone. So when a leader tells me “everything goes through me”, I don’t just understand it. I’ve been there.

Our relationship, and the way we live it, is the test case and the foundation for everything I do. What holds a circle of executives together is what has held Judith and me together for three decades: trust that is earned, honest words spoken with care, and differences that make us stronger instead of further apart. That is why Judith is part of the councils even when she is not in the room. What we practise at home is what I bring to the table, because who you are, who you love and how you lead are not separate questions.

Trained as a psychologist and economist at KU Leuven, I have spent more than thirty years weaving people, organisations and society back together: teaching executive MBA students at Nyenrode for over fifteen years, co-founding six ventures, working with the European Commission, and hosting executive councils internationally and on the West Coast, where I have lived since 2018. Through all of it, the question has stayed the same: how do we build the capacity for what cannot be done in isolation?