A unique yearly reflection
for deep thinkers with big jobs who are navigating
complex challenges.

You might be here because:

• Your work has become more complex and you feel in over your head

• You’ve outgrown your current role but aren’t sure what’s next

• You want to take wiser decisions without oversimplifying the world’s wild reality

• You feel you’re on a growth edge but can’t quite work out how to make sense of it.

The Annual Sense-Making Interview is based on a little-known method called the Subject-Object Interview, or the Growth Edge Interview.

We all know when we need to grown knowledge and skills to get better at the way we do things. You might think of this as horizontal development, where you extend your abilities but the way you make meaning of the world remains pretty much the same.

Personality typologies like MBTI, Enneagram, and so on exist largely as horizontal development.

Various scholar-practitioners such as Robert Kegan, William Torbert, and more recently Jennifer Garvey-Berger have been looking over the past few decades at the patterns of what could be called vertical development, of what happens when we’re in over our heads.

Vertical development is when you slowly expand the very way you exist in the world to be more aware, more able to see and handle the complexity and mess of the world, more likely to effect more systemic change.

Really, it’s about becoming wiser in our perspectives and our actions.

The Annual Sense-Making Interview is an unscripted, collaborative conversation that allows you to see the deep unconscious assumptions that are framing your limits for meaning making . It ultimately allows you to feel into where your next area for fundamental growth might be.

I call it ‘annual’ because becoming more expansive in the way you make meaning is a slow process, so having a specific area of inquiry over all areas of your life for the next year makes sense in terms of your long-term development.

After a year, you can come back and we’ll see what’s shifted, and what’s next for you.

Here are the steps:

1. Prepare: I send you prompts that help us find rich situations for sense-making

2. Interview: we have a 90-minute conversation, where I ask questions which take you beyond the situations you’re describing into the conscious and unconscious lenses you see them through

3. Transcribe: I create a cleaned up transcript with highlighted passages that demonstrate salient parts of your meaning-making system

4. Review: I send you the highlighted transcript with guidance to support your reflection on it

5. Sense-Make Together: we have a 60-minute follow-up conversation where we jointly make sense of your sense making, and feel our way into your vertical growth theme for the year.

I began coaching leaders over twenty years ago, but I have devoted the past 8 years to studying with all of the major scholar-practitioners in this area.

That picture of books above was on day one back in 2018 when I started a six-month self-directed mini-masters into the question ‘How do I nurture more interdependent leaders?’

Since then I have travelled and studied with all five of the authors (plus one not pictured), getting certified to administer and debrief their tools. I ended by studying in 2025 for the very rare certification in Subject-Object Interviewing, (they only train 10–15 people a year it’s so demanding and technical!)

The Annual Sense-Making interview is based on my synthesis of all I’ve learned and provides developmental reflection way beyond standard coaching. However, it shouldn’t conflict with any other coaching you receive, or indeed any other self-reflection methods you find beneficial, but will actually supplement it with a very big picture lens on your development.

Focusing on holding a bigger, deeper, more nuanced worldview is not in the realm of quick fixes, but is about long-term capacity to be a more humane human.

It has to be done in conversation as we need a mirror to see our own thinking.

Being able to perceive your current centre-of-gravity on the spectrum of vertical development is a fine art - hence me spending eight years training!