An organisation is a living system shaped by stories, histories, relationships, and power. To evolve, it needs to be rooted in a shared story, purpose and culture. The core dynamics are often invisible at first glance, so the work I do goes deeper into the causes, where things can actually shift.
The organisations are currently moving through perhaps the biggest disruption we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The rules of the context they’re in are being rewritten daily, the markets are being disrupted, leadership is in upheaval, and people are burnt out. Change fatigue is real. And there is more coming, with no end in sight. Strategies that once worked no longer do - the ground you’re standing on is shifting, and you don’t yet have a new playbook for the age of AI disruption.
Maybe you have also outgrown the story you were built on. Or you are carrying unresolved fractures - mergers, layoffs, wrong strategic moves, lack of trust - all still held in your organisational fabric. Or you are trying to become something genuinely different, and the execution hasn’t caught up with the ambition.
This moment in time asks something of you that you may never have done before. It asks you to let go of the tried and tested - and to do something that requires trust and courage. Unconventional thinking, honesty and relationships that can withstand what’s coming.
Honeybee, Apis mellifera - the bee family I look after in Copenhagen, Denmark
Honeybee sealing the honey with wax to store it
Where you may find yourselves
You know how to build strategies. Your people are capable. You’re operationally sound. And yet - something isn’t moving.
Initiatives launch and quietly lose momentum. Decisions get made and rehashed. Values are on the wall, but there is a gap in actual behaviours. The culture you describe in your employer brand is not the culture people experience on a Tuesday afternoon.
Engagement is falling, or cynicism is rising - sometimes both. Your strongest people are leaving, or staying and quietly withdrawing.
You’ve done the off-sites, the frameworks, the consultants, the restructures. But as soon as you're back to everyday life, the same patterns return, with a different flavour.
Strategy can’t solve this – and neither can AI. You will need to work with culture, relationships, trust and behaviours. All the messy and uncomfortable people things that make up a culture.
And culture is made in the space between what is said and what is done. Between who you say you are and how power actually moves in the room. Every day, in a thousand small moments.
In the age of AI, long-term visibility is a myth - things are moving too fast, and they require a different foundation - one of resilience and agility. Adapting fast when things change.
It’s not something you’ve trained for - yet. So you’re on shifting grounds. I meet you here.
Somewhere between
not anymore
and
not yet.
White-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lucorom) gathering pollen from the Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundofolia) at a garden in Copenhagen, Denmark
What happens in this space
Cultural transformation is a sticky process of re-authoring the story you have been operating from - together. The assumptions about how things work, whose voice gets heard, what gets rewarded and what gets avoided.
This requires more than new structures. It requires the willingness to look honestly at what has been inherited - including the fractures, the silences, and the ways power works. It also requires imagination - shaping a vision of a possible future people feel excited about building. And it requires resilience - the ability to bounce back from adversity and stay creative, responsive and adaptable.
I work with an awareness of the broader systemic patterns in the world, because organisational challenges are inevitably downstream of those. I am also trauma-informed, so I understand power and how it can undermine your best work if left unchecked. This shapes how I read dynamics in the room, how I design spaces, and how I hold conflict - in service of the change you are looking to create.
The work takes many shapes and forms: employee experience, design for ways of working, leadership training, resilience workshops, designing structures and rituals for new culture to take root, strategic foresight for new futures and mobilising your people towards them. To discuss the specific shape of your work, get in touch.
I’m Martina
I grew up in the forest. I loved climbing trees - and mountains. I still do. It's where I feel most at peace.
I am Slovenian and carry our folklore and Slavic myths with me. I have moved countries three times, become a mother twice, and crossed more thresholds than I can count - personal, professional, ancestral.
Twenty years in design and innovation - as a doer, leader and design educator - across industries, companies and cultures - I’ve worked on hundreds of projects, large and small. I’ve been pathfinding through technological and relational shifts - the kinds that challenge what you think you know. This is the experience I bring into the work: bridging the abstraction of a vision and specific details down to a pixel - and everything in between. I know what work looks like at different heights.
I feel most alive in some of the most intense moments of the process. Moments where the collective field needs the most holding to stay with the trouble - just before turning it into something wildly creative and unconventional.
I hold the fire steady as we venture into the unknown. Together we shape the space between not anymore and not yet into now.
How I work with you
I read the organisation as a living system: what it is trying to protect, what it is trying to become, and what is getting in the way. I work with leadership teams, cross-functional groups, and sometimes the whole organisation - depending on where the work needs to be activated.
I hold the fire steady. I walk beside you - not to tell you who to become, but to help you see the intelligence inherent in your system. I look beyond the symptoms and problems on the surface. I look at the cause, at what is trying to emerge, and I help create the conditions for it to build momentum. I am not a typical consultant who brings best practice from the outside. Because best practice is the one that works in your particular context - and the intelligence of that is already present internally. You are the expert in your organisational reality, and that is where the agency lies. I just help you see it, draw it out and embed it across the organisation.
This is not comfortable work. Cultural transformation requires looking at what has been avoided. It requires leadership to go first - in honesty, in responsibility, in modelling what you are asking of everyone else. It’s hard work, and I’m here for it all.
This work is also complex, so I often collaborate with trusted, experienced colleagues in the fields of innovation, organisational development and systemic coaching.
A new possible
Over time, organisations I work with stop describing the culture they want and start living it. They enable it structurally.
The gap between proclaimed values and actual behaviour begins to close - not through enforcement, but through the slow, everyday relational work.
Leaders stop managing symptoms and start addressing causes. The conversations circulating in side corridors start happening in the open.
Retention improves, and people feel the ground under their feet. Their roles and expectations are clear. They know what their workplace stands for, and they can see it in the way decisions are made.
New people join and are met by a culture that knows itself - and can flexibly absorb new perspectives - for a common good.
And the organisation becomes something worth belonging to. Not only in its results, but also in how it treats the people inside it, and what it contributes beyond its own walls.
It becomes a place where people genuinely want to stay - and tell others about it.
I like to say that the culture is humming.
A humming culture is a culture whose signals are visible, audible, felt - and cared for.
Who this is and isn’t for
This is for leaders and culture stewards who know that what they’re navigating isn’t a strategy gap. Who can feel the distance between what the organisation says it is and what it actually is. Who are ready to look at that distance honestly.
This is for organisations willing to bet on relational skills and that know that business success also comes from not optimising certain things.
This is for first-movers who are not afraid to restructure their foundation and ways of working.
This is not for organisations seeking a culture refresh that leaves the power structures untouched.
If you are ready - you’re welcome here.
How the work often unfolds
