How I Work & Study Systems

How I work · Honest disclosure Not what I did. How I think. My case studies show what happened. This page shows how — and why. If you are thinking about working with me, this is the conversation I want to have before anything else. Where I come from I started my working life in an ICU — a nurse in anesthesiology, then a medical student — in environments where wrong methodology does not produce a bad deliverable. It produces harm. You learn that the right diagnosis is worth more than ten confident interventions, and that ambiguity between colleagues costs lives. I have never forgotten that. It is the foundation everything else is built on. I left clinical settings to study Experience Design, not because I was leaving the diagnostic logic behind, but because I recognised the same rigour could be applied to organizations, spaces, and human behaviour at scale. The tools changed. The underlying discipline did not. Why the path looks like this I know what my CV looks like from the outside. Healthcare, design, spatial environments, premium retail, enterprise operations — it does not follow a straight line. That is deliberate, and I want to be direct about why. I did not leave nursing because I failed at it. I left because I recognised that the diagnostic thinking I had developed — observe the system, gather evidence, intervene only after you understand what is actually happening — could create impact beyond one patient at a time. Design was the discipline that let me apply that thinking at organizational scale. Every context since has sharpened the same core capability. At Fraunhofer I saw how an applied research institute frames questions and builds on existing knowledge. At URW I saw the gap between how spaces are designed and how people actually use them. At Grau I spent four years building the infrastructure that made customer experience measurable — feedback systems, journey maps, operational processes — during a generational leadership transition and a pandemic. That was not a short stop. That was the longest I have stayed anywhere, because the problem space never stopped expanding. The MBA is not a pivot. It is the missing piece. I can build research systems. I can diagnose what an organization cannot see about itself. What I could not do was walk into a boardroom and connect that work to the financial and strategic language that determines whether research survives its first budget cycle. Quantic closes that gap. The thread across all of it: I find organizations that cannot see what is actually happening, I make it visible, and I build the systems that keep it visible after I leave. The sectors changed. The capability compounded. If you are looking for someone who spent fifteen years deepening a single specialism — that is not me. If you are looking for someone who can walk into a new context, read it accurately within weeks, and build something that lasts — that is exactly what this path trained me to do. How I learned and where I had been observing long before I knew what to call it. Growing up in a patchwork family, you learn to read rooms — who needs what, what is being said underneath what is being spoken, where the real tension sits. That instinct followed me into hospitals, into design studios, into organizations. Watching adoption gaps. Tracking how people moved through experiences. Reading how decisions actually got made across groups that had never spoken to each other. The vocabulary arrived later. Ethnographic observation. Systems mapping. Behavioral analysis. Participatory design. The formal methods matched instincts I had been practicing since before my first hospital rotation. That order matters. It means I apply methods with judgment rather than procedure — because I learned what happens when you get it wrong in a setting where it matters. How I work and why The most important thing I have learned: name the method, place the work within it, connect it to the business outcome it serves. That chain — method to insight to outcome — is what makes research necessary rather than merely interesting. The driver underneath all of it is the customer. Not the metric, not the brief. The actual human, in their actual situation, doing the actual thing — which is almost always different from what the organization believes. I go into the field. I sit with people. I follow them through their actual day. I am not customer obsessed because it is a principle I follow. I am customer obsessed because I am genuinely curious about what people want, what they settle for, and what they would ask for if they believed someone was listening. If your team is trying to get genuinely closer to the people you serve, that is the work I want to do with you — not as a service function that validates decisions already made, but as a thinking partner while the real questions are still open. What I need Folkwang taught me something beyond methodology. The program was fully autonomous — no hand-holding, no predefined path. You had to make your own mark every day. That was challenging. It was scary. It was not always awesome. But working through that fear — choosing to walk into discomfort instead of away from it — got stuck inside me permanently. I need challenges. I like to go into fear and find new opportunities on the other side. Everything else is boring — and boredom plays into my greatest weakness, which is also my greatest strength: I need new challenges and growth. Give me a problem space that keeps expanding and I will stay for years. Give me a solved problem and I will be restless within months. I need a team that trusts early rather than auditioning slowly, that measures research by what it changes rather than what it produces, and that is willing to hear an uncomfortable finding without shooting the messenger. I am not asking for an easy context. I am asking for an honest one — where research sits close enough to the decision to actually matter. Who I am outside work I cycle seriously and travel systematically — over 100 cities across four continents. When I arrive somewhere new I go to the museums first, because museums are where a society decides what it considers worth keeping. Then I walk for hours without a plan, watching how people move through cities they know versus ones they are navigating for the first time. It is the same question I ask in fieldwork — just without a client attached. The field never closes. I work in two languages and think comfortably in both. That did not happen in a classroom. It happened because I spent years researching and studying design almost entirely in English — reading, writing, presenting, thinking. At some point I stopped noticing when I switched between German and English. It was not a skill I acquired. It became a second nature I grew into. Two cultural registers I move between without losing a step. If you have read this far Let us have a real conversation. This is a two-way decision. I am choosing too. I am not sharing this page everywhere. I am sharing it with teams working on problems that deserve serious research — and where research is close enough to the decision to change something. I would rather spend forty minutes on how we each think about research and culture than two hours on a timeline you have already read. Bring your real questions. I will bring mine. I am based in Cologne, moving deliberately toward Northern Europe — the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia.