Strategy · Change · UK and MENA

Change that
actually
shifts things.

For organisations honest about what is not working. Close diagnostic work. Participatory by design. Remote and internationally mobile.

Organisational Diagnostics · Participatory Research · Service Design · Systems Thinking · Change Architecture · UK & MENA · Design Thinking · Strategy · Organisational Diagnostics · Participatory Research · Service Design · Systems Thinking · Change Architecture · UK & MENA · Design Thinking · Strategy ·

What this practice does

01

Honest diagnosis before borrowed frameworks

Most briefs arrive with a solution attached. The work starts earlier, with what is actually going on.

02

Built with people, not handed to them

The people closest to the problem hold most of the answer. The process surfaces what they know.

03

Strategy for the MENA context

Arabic-speaking. Genuine understanding of how culture and hierarchy shape what is possible.

04

From the deck to the room where it lands

The work is not done until the thinking has translated into decisions people can act on.

The brief usually changes. That is the point.

On diagnosis before prescription

How it works

01

Diagnosis before prescription

Most engagements arrive with a solution already chosen. The work starts earlier. The brief usually changes. That is the point.

02

Built with, not handed to

The people closest to the problem hold most of the answer. The job is to design the process that surfaces it and builds recommendations they can own.

03

From strategy to the room where it lands

A good deck that does not move anyone is not strategy. The work is not done until people have genuinely shifted.

About

Good strategy starts with listening before concluding.

Strategy and change across the UK and MENA. Grounded in organisational diagnostics, service design, and participatory research. Remote and internationally mobile by design.

Sectors include policy, education, international development, and the private sector. Arabic-speaking, with genuine understanding of what change looks like where culture and hierarchy shape what is possible.

The thread running through all of it is empathy as a method. Sitting with a situation before reaching for a solution. Asking who is in the room, who is not, and what that means.

Systems curiosity, design thinking, a genuine interest in how change actually happens in messy human contexts. Fikra exists because those questions matter personally, not just professionally.

Alongside the consulting work: founder of Fikra, a collective thinking space in Peckham, and Senior Lecturer on BA Graphic Design at London College of Contemporary Arts.

Ethos

Good change work creates conditions for the right answer to emerge, with the people who have to live with it part of building it.

Belief in diverse perspectives, design thinking for messy problems, and consulting that leaves organisations more capable, not more dependent.

Who gets included matters. That shows up in how the work is done.

MBA with Distinction

Kingston University · Strategy and Leadership

MA Sustainable Design

University of Brighton · Participatory and decolonising approaches

PgCert Creative Education (in progress)

University for the Creative Arts

RSA Fellow · GUS Fellow

Royal Society of Arts · Global University Systems

Selected Work

Projects that required more than a framework.

Each engagement started with something that could not be named clearly yet.

Client Work

Organisational Transformation · MENA

When a firm knew something was wrong but could not say what.

450-person regional firm. Five systemic vulnerabilities. Three structural interventions adopted by leadership.

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Growth Strategy · London

They asked about AI. The real question was whether they could grow.

Market research across Nigeria and Canada. Strategic roadmap adopted by leadership.

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Service Design · Higher Education · London

Putting a number on what nobody wanted to look at.

£3.16m revenue risk identified. Co-designed student framework adopted across 6,800 students.

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Venture Design · Health Tech · London

Designing a companion for children managing Type 1 diabetes.

End-to-end startup design. Business model, user research, financial modelling, validated.

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Practice and Speaking

GUS Fellowship · London · Ongoing 2025 to 2028

Strengthening innovation capability across a global university network.

A three-year fellowship to build a shared framework for improvement work across the GUS international network. Currently in year one.

GUS Academic Summit · London 2026

Edge Spaces: where learning and innovation actually happen.

A 40-minute workshop on where learning actually happens versus where we plan for it. Designed around structured silence. Delivered to international academics and institutional leaders.

UCA Creative Conference · London 2026

Redefining the pedagogy of error in material and digital environments.

What if we taught students to use error rather than resolve it? Introduced the Error Conversation, a three-stage reflective framework grounded in primary student survey data.

Kingston University MBA · London 2026

From problem to pitch: presenting without hiding behind slides.

Workshop for MBA students on clarity in client presentations. Three-slide constraint, 90-second delivery, no notes. The CPDS growth strategy as live case study.

Organisational Transformation · MENA · 2024 to 2025

When a firm knew something was wrong but could not say what.

Regional Firm (Confidential) · 450 people

Leadership sensed a performance problem they could not name. It turned out to be structural, not managerial.

Over six months, cross-level research ran from junior staff to the CEO. Workshops, communication mapping, and interviews built a picture no single person inside could see. The data pointed to five systemic vulnerabilities built up over years of growth without governance design.

Three structural interventions were adopted by leadership, each with phased plans and internal ownership. Getting honest data meant designing conditions where people felt safe to say what they actually thought.

Org DiagnosticsSystems MappingChange ArchitectureMENA

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Growth Strategy · London · 2024 to 2025

They asked about AI. The real question was whether they could grow.

Centre for Policy and Diplomacy Studies

CPDS came with a brief about AI adoption. The work revealed an organisation trying to figure out whether it could grow, and where. The question was reframed.

Primary research ran across Nigeria and Canada with a dual-channel survey, enumerator team in Abuja, and digital outreach yielding 100+ responses. Combined with competitor benchmarking, stakeholder mapping, and financial modelling.

The output was a dual-track strategic roadmap: Nigeria as a scale market, Canada as a prestige entry point. Leadership adopted it as the basis for expansion planning.

Growth StrategyMarket ResearchFeasibility AnalysisInternational

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Service Design · Higher Education · London · 2023 to 2025

Putting a number on what nobody wanted to look at.

Higher Education Institution (Confidential)

The college had grown from 600 to 6,800 students in a few years. The administrative infrastructure had not kept pace. Leadership called it growing pains. It was structural.

Service journey mapping, staff interviews, and alumni surveys revealed 63% dissatisfied with the digital platform and a team of six trying to support a body many times larger than designed for. The projected revenue risk: £3.16m annually if 5% of students left during the critical 28-day enrollment window.

A co-design process brought students and frontline staff into redesigning support. The student success framework developed from that work was adopted across the institution.

Service DesignRisk AnalysisCo-DesignHigher Education

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Venture Design · Health Tech · London · 2024

Designing a companion for children managing Type 1 diabetes.

Vive · Concept to validated startup

Over 36,000 children under 19 in the UK live with Type 1 diabetes. Available tools are built around data logging, not around the reality of managing a chronic condition at school and in social situations where every meal has consequences.

Vive was designed to fill that gap: an AI-powered app integrating with glucose monitors and insulin pumps, with personalised meal planning, real-time tracking, and a community connecting families across the UK.

The work spanned the full venture design process: customer research, business model, competitive analysis, 12-month financial modelling, and validated assumption testing. Projected profitability by month seven.

Venture DesignHealth TechBusiness ModelUser ResearchFinancial Modelling

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Collective Thinking Space · Peckham, London

Fikra

فكرة Arabic: idea, thought, concept

A space founded in Peckham for people who want to think seriously about how things work, who they serve, and whether they can change. No predetermined answers. Structured dialogue and honest questions.

Each session brings together people from different fields around a single open question. Structured enough to go somewhere, open enough to be surprised.

The first session examined the systems we were born into but rarely stop to question. The second asked: what does success mean today? People from design, finance, education, and community organising. The conversation went places none of us expected.

Fikra is its own thing and a live part of the practice. What emerges here about how people reason together feeds back into everything else.

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