I am a programme director and governance specialist with twenty years in UK defence and critical national infrastructure — and a jeweller who is only at the beginning of learning the craft.

The first part of that sentence is the straightforward one. The programmes I have worked on range from guided weapons and naval platforms to cyber security for the UK’s energy grid. The common thread is not sector but condition: high consequence, multiple stakeholders, genuine complexity, and accountability that cannot be diffused. I have recovered programmes that were twelve months behind schedule. I have designed governance frameworks that outlasted the programmes that created them. I have spent twenty years learning how to make complex organisations actually deliver what they committed to deliver.

The governance dimension — boards, oversight, independent challenge — is where my interest is moving. Programme delivery teaches you what good governance prevents; it also teaches you exactly what questions a non-executive director should be asking that the executive team would rather not answer. I am building towards board-level work in UK defence and critical infrastructure, where the intersection of technical complexity, public accountability, and long-cycle investment is genuinely difficult, and where the governance challenge is not a compliance exercise but a strategic one.

The second part of that opening sentence is the one I find harder to explain, but worth the attempt. I started learning hand engraving and jewellery making — champlevé enamel, stone setting, fabrication in silver and gold — because I needed a discipline that is entirely honest. Metal does not pretend. A line is either clean or it is not. A fired enamel surface either works or it does not, and if it does not work there is no report to write about it. I am a long way from commission standard, and I am in no hurry. The pace is part of the point.

Both of these things — the governance work and the making work — are, I think, about the same underlying interest: what does it mean to build something that actually holds together under real conditions?

If any of that is interesting to you, the contact details are here