Sometimes stepping away from an organisation doesn't suddenly make someone more capable. It simply makes their capability more visible.

There’s something a bit strange about leaving a place you’ve worked in for a long time.

Nothing really changes overnight...

You don’t suddenly become more experienced. The relationships you’ve built don’t appear out of nowhere.

The way you think about problems, or the judgement you’ve developed over time, or even the ideas you’ve been quietly carrying for years - all of that was already there.

It just becomes easier to see from the outside once you’re no longer inside the system. I’ve been thinking about that more in recent years.

Not because I feel the need to explain every step of my career, and not because I want to rewrite anything about the people or organisations I’ve worked with.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

Most of the meaningful work I’ve been part of has only ever happened because of other people.

Good teams, good clients, good operators, good engineers - people who take ideas seriously and help shape them into something real. Nothing of any consequence gets built alone.

But I’ve also come to realise that organisations naturally become the main storyteller of your work while you’re inside them. They hold the brand. They publish the case studies. They define the titles. They shape how things are described.

And when you leave, that story doesn’t stop - it just continues without you in it. Or it does stop, and only the attention to detail people notice...

Your job title and your contribution are not always the same thing

I’ve had a lot of different roles over the years.

Youth development, outdoor education, international education, business development, consulting, sustainability, energy. On paper, they look quite different. But the way I’ve approached them has probably been more consistent than it appears. I’ve always been drawn to the same kind of thing:

people, organisations, and ideas that sit at the edge of something else. Where industries overlap. Where something new might be forming. Where a conversation between two different worlds might actually lead somewhere useful.

Education and tourism. Youth development and international work.

Energy and education. Infrastructure and behaviour. Technology and place.

I’ve never been particularly good at assuming the edge of a job description is also the edge of the opportunity.

That’s been helpful at times.

And, if I’m honest, probably a bit difficult at others too.

Small organisations give you a lot - and also shape you in ways you don’t always notice

Working in smaller organisations has been a big part of my experience. You get close to everything.

Strategy in the morning, client work at lunch, project decisions in the afternoon, and thinking about where things are heading in the evening. That kind of environment teaches you quickly. I’ve learned a lot that way. I’ve been trusted with opportunities I probably wouldn’t have had elsewhere. And I’ve given a lot of myself in return. Both of those things are true at the same time. But small organisations also have natural limits. Not in a negative sense - just in a real one. Every business has its own appetite for risk.

Its own pace. Its own version of what it wants to become. Its own constraints. And at some point, if you’re someone who’s always looking a bit further ahead, you start to notice a quiet question forming: Is what I can see still the same thing the organisation is trying to build? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes it just slowly becomes something slightly different.

Leaving doesn’t really settle anything

One of the harder parts of moving on from a place is realising you no longer control how the story gets told.

I’ve had moments where I’ve heard versions of my work or my decisions that don’t really match my experience of them.

That’s just part of it, I think. My instinct for a long time was to just get on with things. Don’t get involved. Don’t explain too much. Let the work speak for itself. There’s still something in that I respect. But I’ve also learned there’s a difference between staying out of noise and completely stepping out of your own story. At some point, it’s okay to just say things plainly. To acknowledge what you worked on. To be honest about what you were trying to do. To recognise the people you did it with. And to not disappear from your own experience just because you’ve moved on.

What came next wasn’t a sudden shift

From the outside, the last few years might look like a fairly quick change. Independent consulting. Energy projects. Solar and battery work. Strategy across different markets. Work in Australia and Asia. Moving from advising to actually building and investing. But none of that really started when it looked like it did. The thinking behind it has been there for a long time. The relationships were built over years. The experience came from a lot of trial, error, and repetition. And many of the things I’m working on now are just continuations of conversations that started years ago. Leaving didn’t create capability. It just created space. Space to follow things properly. Space to connect ideas that didn’t previously sit together. Space to make decisions and live with them. And space to find out whether the things I believed could be built actually could be. Some of them will work.

Some of them won’t. That’s part of it.

There’s no real reason to play small

This is probably the part I feel most certain about now. I don’t think people are meant to only operate within the boundaries they’ve been given. That doesn’t mean leaving your job.It doesn’t mean starting a company. It doesn’t mean rejecting structure. It just means staying open to the idea that your current environment might not be the full expression of what you’re capable of. There’s no rule that says your biggest contribution has to happen inside the organisation you’re in today. No rule that says you have to stay in the industry you started in. No rule that says an idea has to stay small because it began in a small place. And no rule that says someone else gets to define the limits of your ambition. Sometimes you grow within an environment. Sometimes the environment grows with you. And sometimes you just reach a point where you realise you need to build something different.

That doesn’t take anything away from what came before. If anything, it only exists because of it. I’m still grateful for a lot of the people and organisations that have been part of my path. But I’m also comfortable now saying something I probably wouldn’t have said a few years ago:I’m proud of what I’ve contributed. I’m proud of what I’ve built. I’m proud of the ideas I’ve backed when they weren’t obvious. And I’m genuinely interested in what comes next. Because sometimes leaving an organisation doesn’t suddenly make someone more capable. It just makes their capability more visible.