Zierikzee, Netherlands · Co-founder, soul.com · Creative strategist · Systems thinking · Organisational transformation & community building
I am a co-founder of soul.com, creative strategist and organisational transformation practitioner. My background spans marketing and communication, design and classical music, alongside many years of studying organisations as dynamic and complex systems. A thread running through my work is a fascination with seeing differently — questioning assumptions, finding new ways of representing reality and helping people recognise possibilities that may not initially be visible. I see organisations as potentially powerful spaces for human development and contribution.
I am based in the Netherlands, in the Rotterdam/The Hague area, and work internationally through soul.com. Over many years my work has moved from branding and communication into organisational transformation, community building and capacity development. An early soul.com project, for example, combined discovering the “soul” of a company with translating this into its identity and then accompanying its continuing organisational transformation.
I am particularly interested in transition — what happens when the assumptions and structures that previously helped organisations succeed no longer correspond to the reality they face. Through the current Leading Through Transitions inquiry, I am exploring this directly with leaders working across very different sectors and contexts. Questions of participation, sense-making, organisational design, complexity and the relationship between systems and people are increasingly central to this work.
I bring an unusual combination of creative thinking, systems thinking and organisational practice. I naturally look for patterns and relationships between things that may initially appear disconnected, and I use images, models, language and conversation to make complex ideas more tangible. As a facilitator, I work to create conditions in which people can question assumptions, read their reality more deeply and discover what they can learn from situations — including tension and conflict. Public recommendations for my work particularly highlight this capacity for reframing situations and creating trusting spaces for reflection and learning.
I am exploring what it means for an organisation to become a community capable of shaping itself. Culture, from this perspective, does not reside primarily in values statements: it is created through relationships, decisions, disagreement, responsibility and what people do when under pressure. This raises a deeper question for me about organisational transformation: rather than leaders trying to manage culture and change for everyone else, how can people throughout an organisation develop the capacity to understand and transform the system of which they are part?
Systems thinking · organisational transformation · organisations as communities · creative strategy · visual thinking · culture change · complexity · Leading Through Transitions · participation · sense-making · organisational design · Soul-Driven Leadership · challenging assumptions · finding new ways of seeing reality
Sjoerd Luteyn - Co-founder of soul.com and creative strategist working across organisational transformation, community-building, and cultural change. https://www.linkedin.com/in/luteyn/