Our Story

Unfold didn't start as a program.
It started as a question.

A movement that started the way every real one does — small, concrete, and asked together with the people who'd actually have to live with the answer.

This is how it grew from one question into a method, a partnership, and now a community of six different lenses.

before it had a name

"Lead from what's already there."

University

I was appointed lead designer for blended learning — and in parallel, from the ground up, I was building an art school. Two very different worlds, running at the same time, that turned out to teach me the same thing about how people actually learn.

The first time

That's where I used the approach for the first time: starting with one concrete design question, held together by teachers, students and the board — not handed down to them. It created real movement around better learning journeys, for students and for the teachers guiding them.

Then I mentored the management team directly, so the impact didn't end when the project did.

A year later — healthcare

Digital skills, and changing how people worked around a more positive mindset in healthcare — not confined to one department, but movement running through all of them, across the organisation.

Naming it

Somewhere in there, the way of working stopped being something I improvised each time and started being something I could name. I called it Unfold. Its first principle, still true today: lead from what's already there.

Building with others

Method becomes a movement

Unfold didn't stay a solo practice. I partnered with Bernd Gibson, and together we called for co-creators — people willing to sit down and design sessions with us, not for us.

Those sessions were built around three core values:

Belonging - Movement - Meaning

What came out of that work became six phases —

the arc every Unfold journey still moves through:

Land - Sense - Shape - Share - Reflect - Embody

Belonging can't rest on one person's presence alone — so we called for cohosts, each bringing a different lens on the work. Six of them answered.

Two milestones, one year

May 2026

Our first Lab ran — the proof that the method holds, not just in theory but with someone real, in real work.

September 2026

Our first live gathering, in Amsterdam — the first time the movement in one room together.

Alongside our own community, we're building this in partnership with Howspace and Netoo — organisations who share the same instinct: that real change moves through people, not platforms.