Interim leadership on transitions in technology, data and AI. I stand for agile organisations, agile teams and an agile IT landscape. Design thinking is the method underneath all three.
Get the best out of the people I work with, and inspire at every level. Create room to innovate, line people up on the vision, and show a result quickly.
Bold goals, genuinely pursued, delivered in small and fast increments rather than in one long promise. Safety to fail, as long as somebody tried hard and learned from it.
Tackle the challenge with design thinking. A proven, systematic approach to developing products and services around real needs, and it works just as well on an operating model.
Interim only, one mandate at a time. Setting the direction and owning the delivery, with real decision rights and a real budget.
Taking the organisation from A to B. Continuity first, because nothing critical can go dark while it changes. Then how the work flows and who decides. Then the people.
I hand over to a named successor, in post before I leave.
A new organisation, on paper and then in practice. Structure, operating model, decision rights and the metrics it will be held to.
Where a design already exists I do not redraw it. I test it against what I find, adjust what will not hold, and get it running and staffed.
From scratch, with (gen)AI in the core. A function that ships working applications instead of a lab that produces pilots, with governance part of the design.
Built to do it again next year without me, and without a standing bill for external teams.
What it is called matters less. Director Transformation, Director AI & Transformation, Head of Innovation, Director Digital, Value Stream Owner, you name it. The mandate, the decision rights and the budget are the parts that decide whether it works.
I have spent fifteen years making IT landscapes moveable. And I have designed a product end to end with AI, on my own. Together that is the difference between having an opinion about AI and having judgement about it.
Three levels, one job. An operating model with clear decision rights and outcome metrics. Teams that own their product instead of passing it along. And a landscape out of monolith lock-in, onto APIs and microservices, decoupled so a part can be replaced without touching the rest.
Agility is not a framework laid on top of an organisation. It is being able to reverse a decision two years later. Leave out any one of the three levels and you cannot. I led exactly that transition at Woonstad Rotterdam, and scaled agile into IKEA, LEGO, Philips and PAREXEL before that.
AI at scale is the next lock-in, and this one carries geopolitics with it. Models, data and the platforms underneath them sit somewhere, under someone's jurisdiction.
So I look deliberately at what an organisation builds itself and what it buys, at where the data and the models physically sit, and at whether the layer around the model is its own. Model-agnostic by design, so the model underneath stays replaceable. Vendor and geopolitical dependency is an architecture decision, not a procurement detail.
Heat-active aluminium profiles that harvest heat for a water-to-water heat pump. Designed with AI as the working partner: research, variants, drawings, the filing itself. Ten EU designs, available for licence through Kael Holding B.V.
Have a look: thermototems.com
One product, start to finish, on my own. No team to cover the gaps, so every gap showed.
That is a cheap way to learn an expensive lesson. I know which parts of a delivery lifecycle AI genuinely shortens, which parts it only appears to, and where a person still has to sign.
No group-wide rollout ahead of a working example. Adoption comes from pull, not push. You do not buy support with a mandate, you earn it with a result.
Leadership by design. Think big, act small & fast. Innovation by design.
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