Strategic partner
to CEOs, creatives and founders.
My Approach
Meeting the complexity of your world and ambitions, I work systemically, systematically, and strategically with the challenges and opportunities you face.
"Working with Julian over the past four months has been truly transformative. It was a period of major transition for the company and immense personal pressure for me — and Julian's guidance made all the difference."
Neil Smith, CEO, Mettle
A Systemic Lens
About
Your success is defined by your ability to think creatively, adapt to changing needs, and remain resilient under pressure.
Most leadership development focuses on the classroom - goals, hard skills, mindset, and beliefs.
Breakthrough growth comes from elsewhere — from harnessing the creative and systemic intelligences quietly driving your outcomes, yet invisible in org charts, strategy decks, and surveys.
A creative leadership veteran of 30 years, from 2014 to 2024 I led the growth of the CSR franchise from an eight-person startup to a 200-strong global team, launching the billion-dollar CSR2 and holding full nine-figure P&L responsibility.
Alongside sustained ~30% year-on-year growth to its peak, the work focussed on building a psychologically safe, resilient, and creatively alive culture. The deliberate creation of systemic conditions where collective intelligence, creativity, and energy super-powered strategy — results consistently delivered under pressure, at scale, and in complexity.
All my work centres on building a confidential, trusting partnership — a space where you can think freely, drop the extrinsic pressure to perform, and explore what’s emerging without judgement or agenda.
Coaching, advisory, and consultancy engagements are distinct expressions of this work, grounded in the same experience, extensive training, and field-tested foundations.
Work With Me
Three pathways: all grounded in three decades of creative leadership.
Coaching
15 years of training and accreditation in coaching and human systems change gives me a wide palette to draw from - used selectively in service of your evolving needs:
ICF Executive Coaching explores your priorities and goals both systemically and systematically.
BPS-accredited Psychometrics give you quantifiable insights into your relationship with the self-system-society axis.
Transpersonal Coaching works at greater depth, honouring who you are today, your achievements, whilst developing the you of tomorrow.
Creativity Coaching supports movement past creative blocks, the inner critic, and giving space for the parts of you that know how to imagine, shape, and express.
This work is always bespoke, adapted to your changing needs and goals.
Retained Advisory
Retained advisory partnerships are a longer-term commitment for us both.
I work alongside you, often in the background, as you take on your most important opportunities and challenges.
We move fluidly between advisory, coaching, consultancy, and embedded support as needed — always in service of a clearly defined strategic or operational intent.
Engagements typically combine in-person work, ongoing offline support, and practical project collaboration, with optional workshops or retreats for you, your leadership team, and key stakeholders.
Consultancy
Consultancy engagements focus on a clearly defined organisational initiative or change programme.
We begin by clarifying the underlying challenge, what success would genuinely look like, and the conditions required to deliver it. We then design an approach aligned to your context, constraints, and ambitions.
Drawing on a trusted network of experts, consultants, strategic partners, and coaches, I work with you to assemble and lead the right capability for the engagement — ensuring momentum, coherence, and delivery across its full lifecycle.
New Epoch, New Thinking
Coherent Field: Culture®
Real culture lives in the behaviours and invisible dynamics you co-create with your teams.
As AI scales cognition, teams that co-regulate and co-create under pressure - that can lean into uniquely human ways of thinking - will define the next era of organisational advantage.
Coherent Field: Culture® directly addresses what keeps you awake: building agile, resilient teams that innovate and perform consistently, even in complex times.
Most transformation programs focus on individual skills or top-down change. We train the systemic, embodied, relational intelligences that enable teams to regulate collective states under pressure, co-create breakthrough solutions, and adapt fluidly to volatile conditions.
This is the human advantage AI cannot replicate: the ability to hold complexity and perform as a coherent system when stakes are highest.
Coherent Field: Culture® is a trademarked methodology developed and owned by Julian Widdows.
- Performance
- Creativity
- Innovation
Manifesto
The Coherent Field
“As AI scales cognition, the uniquely human edge is coherence —
presence, relational depth, and the ability to hold paradox.”
The leaders I work with aren’t just managing change — they’re redesigning the systems they lead from the inside out, including themselves.
The next generation of leadership isn’t just technical.
It’s systemic, embodied, and deeply human.
I now partner with CEOs, creatives, and founders facing complexity - scaling teams, sustaining performance under pressure, and building wildly ambitious cultures that deliver consistently.
Start your partnership today
No model matters more than the quality of the relationship. Let’s explore if we’re the right fit - if we’re not, I’ll happily connect you with someone who is.