About Dollis House
I’ve spent my career helping people, teams, and organisations get clear on who they are, why they exist, and what makes them distinctive - and then doing the hard, rewarding work of aligning everything else around that.
That career has taken me around the world. From the British Council to the Foreign Office, from universities to professional bodies, across sectors and continents, the work has always come back to the same question: is this organisation truly being what it set out to be?
I started Dollis House to do that work on a global scale - bringing together a network of brilliant, diverse professionals whose expertise and perspectives combine with mine, and with those of our clients, to improve the quality of thinking and translate it into real change.
I genuinely love what I do.
Why Dollis House?
Near where I live sits the site of Dollis House - a building with a genuinely remarkable past. Gladstone called it the one place that never failed to restore him. Mark Twain thought it close to paradise. Churchill's war cabinet met nearby. For decades it drew people around a shared sense of purpose.
But purpose alone didn't save it. Its role kept changing - pub, tearoom, training centre - without ever quite deciding what it was for, and the funding to match any single vision never held. Fires did the rest. By 2012, it was gone.
It's a fitting metaphor for organisations. A great strategy tells you why you exist. A well-designed operating model tells you how you'll deliver it. But without alignment between the two - and without a culture that actually lives them day to day - you get an unhappy house: impressive on paper, hollow in practice.
Dollis House Consulting and Coaching exists to close that gap - bringing Strategy, Operating Model and Culture into sync, so the ‘house’ and those who live it day to day, thrive.