HeadWindProjects B.V.
Why I Do This Work
The Moment Everything Changed
Early 2025, a serious lung problem arrived as an unexpected teacher.
When you're confronted with possibilities of your own mortality—not that you might leave, but what happens to those you leave behind—the usual career icons (job, money, safety) become background noise. What emerged after 8 months of tumultuous experience—suffering, yes, but also time to introspect, journal, and heal—was clarity:
Personally: Time to further nurture meaningful relationships with family and close friends.
Professionally: Purpose and vision. Focus on people. Recognition that transformation of a professional environment starts with the self.
What was a lengthy period of circumstantially necessary reflection fundamentally reshaped what I do and why I do it... and allowed me to gravitate to a point of knowing who I am and what I strive for.
2025 – the year of the snake – shedding the patterns of the past.
2026 – the year of the horse – striding forward with momentum gathered from what was learned in the process of shedding a skin no longer fit for purpose.
There's a pattern I can't unsee:
We keep automating dysfunction.
Organizations hire superb people, then often bury them in systems designed for compliance, not coordination. They launch "transformation programs" while their governance architecture fights against wannabe distributed decision-making. They invest in smart tech upgrades and AI before understanding how their people actually work together—and taking the time needed to really understand this.
The result? Expensive technology, exhausted teams, and the same problems over and over again... just faster and with greater impact.
I work at the intersection of four domains often treated as separate problems:
- Futures thinking (where this is all heading)
- Organization design & Governance (how people coordinate)
- AI/IT Architecture & Data (what systems enable)
- Neuropsychology & Behavioral Science through a neuro-atypical lens (why change sticks or fails)
- → Workflow Architecture (what work requires)
My conviction: If people are helped to understand themselves and each other better, organizational transformation becomes possible. Not the other way around.
What Shapes My Thinking
19 years in business, 9 of which in transformation, has helped me see that "best practices" often codify what worked somewhere else... for someone else, under different conditions. Although potentially a guide, every collective and individual is different and requires a fresh pair of glasses. My neuroatypical brain—which I've grown to respect for its pattern recognition across domains—helps me pick up on unspoken tensions.
5 years implementing smart logistics solutions at Vattenfall Offshore Wind provided invaluable understanding: sustainable change requires designing systems that translate expert vision into layman's terms, considering interdepartmental needs and the strategic context of the company (3 layers).
But the real breakthrough? Bottom-up co-creation. When those operating new systems actually have a say in how technology evolves to match their views of optimal process, transformation sticks. Secondary and tertiary benefits—like facilitating other departments' usage of data and aligning operational performance with strategic goals (continual improvement under a "full asset control" model)—are discovered together in a fantastic partnership of challenging, reflecting, and trying out.
As an amateur mountain biker, I understand what endurance really means. It's not about pushing through pain—it's about reading your body's signals, pacing for the long game, managing energy, and finding time to recover.
That's the same discipline transformation requires. I see most organizations going for a continual sprint when they need to keep pace.
2025's illness taught me that health—personal (and through this I apply it to organizational)—is the presence of harmonious systems (people primarily) that can inspire reflection and metamorphosis to metabolize difficulties and not fall into the often tempting spiral downwards.
My Philosophy on Transformation
"There is no such thing as transformation failure—only systems not conducive to transformation."
When change initiatives "fail," I don't see failure. I see a system revealing itself in its true colors. The question isn't "Why didn't our people execute?" The question is "What does our system reward, and how does that conflict with what we claim to want?"
This is why I start every engagement the same way: understand how you actually work before designing anything. Data architecture isn't separate from organizational design—it's governance made visible. If your workflows don't encode distributed decision-making, any aspirations toward greater agility will stay... aspirational.
If this resonates—if you're tired of transformation theater and ready to build something that actually works—let's talk.
HeadWindProjects operates as an architectural practice for complex systems—where emerging technologies, governance, and value creation intersect, before systems harden and options narrow.