There are two things most leadership coaches aren’t prepared for: neurodivergent experience, and what’s distinctive about leadership in tech. Turns out they’re often intertwined, and I’ve lived both from the inside.
Nineteen years as a founder, CEO, CTO and Engineering Lead is one kind of preparation, and a late-arriving neurodiversity diagnosis is another. Before I know it I’ve coached 50 people in 7 countries and counting! I’m not sure I’d have planned it this way, but I absolutely love how it’s turning out.
The career bit
As a young founder of a digital agency, I was soon the subject of a warm intervention from my colleagues, in which they let me know that what I said and what I did weren’t always the same things. That call to align my inner world with how others understood me became the cue for a career-long journey of my own coaching, therapy, and self-discovery.
For much of my career, my leadership learning was focused on trying to become a “good” leader. I succeeded at that to some degree, although I found it hard to unfuse myself from the systems in which I found myself. In 2020, during the pandemic, I began to become clearer on my neurodiversity, and decided to stop leading and return freelance contracting.
I started contracting at Octopus Energy/Kraken, a company that deeply values psychological safety, and I used that amazing culture to rework my relationship to leadership. I found that the more comfortable I became with my neurodiversity — and the less I was attached to the idea of being a good leader — the more I became a leader who was needed. People were reflecting to me that my style had become like a coach, so I started enquiring into that more formally.
Kraken trained me across 2024 and 2025 to become a coach. I’ve now coached 53 people there, and currently coach about 20 people regularly. I love coaching more than I love software engineering, and it has become a major new career direction.
Kraken Tech + Octopus Energy
Coach and Software Engineering Lead, 2021–now
I joined the tentacular crew at Kraken (part of Octopus Energy) in 2021, returning to my tech roots and wanting to make a difference to our world’s energy future. I loved the freedom and responsibility balance at Kraken so much that I soon took a full-time position there!
I helped extend the Kraken Customer platform to support its first international energy customers, and mentored people who have gone from strength to strength as leaders in their own right, as Kraken grew from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand people.
I now lead the Asia-Pacific Developer Foundations team as a Kraken Coach and Software Engineering Lead, amplifying colleagues across the company by thinking alongside them, shaping culture by shaping our processes, and keeping the dirt under my fingernails by helping to build the tools that we need.
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Chief Technology Officer, 2017–2020
As CTO, I led a multi-million-dollar renewal of ACMI’s already-advanced use of technology in its museum-making and audience experience design. I architected XOS, an integrated content toolset and Internet-of-things ecosystem, which gives life to The Lens, a physical/online hybrid device given to ACMI’s visitors.
Along the way I:–
grew and managed a team of creative technologists
procured several major technology contracts
oversaw ACMI’s DevSecOps transformation
uplifted technology standards across the organisation
developed a new Internet-of-Things strategy for exhibition tech
streamlined our video digitisation and distribution workflows
helped build corporate and research partnerships
All that good stuff.
The Interaction Consortium
Founder and CEO, 2007–2018
The IC has created best-in-class interactive technology for the cultural, educational and non-profit sectors since I helped found it in 2007.
At IC my team and I created digital platforms, websites, APIs, and other products. I built GLAMkit, a CMS for museums that was used by SFMOMA, the Art Galleries of NSW and SA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive, ACMI amongst others.
The IC helped design, build and launch digital products for ABC, Bendigo Bank, UNSW, private and public sector founders and community organisations.
I am also proud to have been a founding member of the Django Code of Conduct Committee, promoting diversity and inclusion in the Django open source community.
PhD in Creativity and Cognition
Cardiomorphologies, by George Khut and collaborators
My Doctoral thesis focussed on how technologists and non-technologists think, communicate and create tools to support creative collaborations. As part of my research, I collaborated on several internationally-exhibited and peer-reviewed interactive art installations.
There are two things most generalised coaching programmes don’t prepare you for: the territory of neurodivergent experience, and the territory of tech leadership. I know both from the inside.
My approach sits at the intersection of adult development and transformative learning. I draw on constructive-developmental psychology (Wilber’s Integral framework, Spiral Dynamics, STAGES) to understand how leaders make meaning, and where their current meaning-making might be creating the ceiling they’re bumping against. In engineering terms: the mental model you’re running is limiting the features you can add. You can hack the features, or you can refactor the model. I’m interested in the refactor.
My training through the Generating Transformative Change programme grounds all of that in embodied, relational practice rather than theory. My Doctorate in Creativity and Cognition gives me a research orientation towards how people think, create, and co-create together.
Training and credentials
19 years as Engineering Lead, CTO, company founder and director, which means you won’t spend your sessions explaining what a sprint retrospective is.
Master’s degree in Computer Science (first class honours), Loughborough University, UK
Doctorate in Creativity and Cognition, University of Technology, Sydney
Generating Transformative Change programme — deep training in transformative developmental coaching (Pacific Integral)
Kraken coach (2024–2025), with 53 colleagues coached to date
EMCC Individual Accreditation — application in progress
A few things that don’t fit anywhere else
Outside of work, I play piano with enthusiasm of uncertain justification, 3D print things of variable utility, and spend a perhaps disproportionate amount of time with sudokus with unusual rules, and three cats.
My wife is Dr Sarah Ashton, a clinical psychologist who pioneers in sexual health and identity, which means our household contains more frameworks for human behaviour than is probably strictly necessary.
Born in the UK. Living on the ancestral lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and paying my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
