I earned my commercial pilot’s licence at 21. Before most people in the room had a graduate job, I knew what it felt like to make a call at altitude with incomplete information. To read the conditions, hold the uncertainty and act anyway.
Then I spent twenty-five years inside the rooms I now advise. Retail, government, financial services, logistics and professional services. Multiple countries. Small firms to global giants. And in every one, I watched the same thing: the muscle I’d built in the cockpit was the one organisations were quietly training out of their leaders.
Early on I learned how much organisations love a fast answer. Clean data, a technical fix, a clear next step. I also learned how often the problem wasn’t technical at all. I’ve been mapping that gap ever since.
Sensemaking gave the pattern a name. The work of Karl Weick, Dave Snowden and even Ron Heifetz showed me that what I’d been doing intuitively since the cockpit had a literature, a lineage and a serious case at the highest levels of organisational life. I wasn’t working from an opinion. I was working in a tradition.
That’s why I built The Sightlines Method. I help leaders recover the art and science of noticing: to hold tension without rushing to resolve it, to stand in the fog and sketch a horizon, to make meaning before movement.
one
I’ve flown the conditions, not theorised about them.
two
I’ve sat inside the rooms I now advise, so I’m translating from the inside, not consulting from the outside.
three
Just enough structure to navigate what feels overwhelming, not so much that it crushes the noticing.
