Operational resilience and crisis management for regulated firms, from banks and fintechs to healthcare and medical technology. Twenty years inside the machine, including running it at UBS and Barclays.
I write scripts across film, TV, theatre and radio for a living, and make podcasts too. That craft is what turns a compliance exercise into a day your board actually feels, and remembers when the real one comes.
I run crisis simulations for regulated firms and write them with the craft I use across film, TV, theatre and radio, which is why they land and stick when it is real.
Crisis is a story told badly, under pressure, with everyone watching. Fiction is a crisis run beautifully, on purpose. The second craft is what fixes the first.
Designed and facilitated crisis exercises that boards remember. Scenario writing with a dramatist's instincts and a practitioner's scars. Built for PS7/26 incident-reporting readiness and CPS 230 obligations.
The scenarios unfold in real time and through the channels a real crisis actually uses: breaking news, a regulator's letter, a supplier's carefully worded reassurance, the social media pile-on. I write and run cyber incidents, third-party and supplier failures, regulatory deadline crunches, and market-wide disruption, each one built to pressure the decisions a board has to make while everyone is watching.
Interim leadership and independent challenge for regulated industries. Formerly a Managing Director at UBS with global oversight of Business Continuity Management and Crisis Management, and Barclays' Global Head of Business Continuity Management for Investment Banking and Investment Management.
Talks and board sessions on why resilience fails at the level of people and story, not process. Includes the forthcoming book on the heroes and villains no policy ever catches.
The book about the heroes and villains no policy ever catches, drawn from the Severe But Plausible series and written in public as it runs. The first two chapters will be posted here to read before long.
Email me and you will get the opening chapters the moment they land, plus a note when the book itself is out.
Email me for early accessCrisis is a story told badly, under pressure, with everyone watching. Fiction is a crisis run beautifully, on purpose. I am the only person in the UK market visibly selling the second craft to fix the first.
Business storytelling workshops that teach executives what novelists know about tension. Creative projects delivered with the discipline of a bank's change programme. The same instinct that scripts a drama is the one that makes an exercise land in the room.
And it is not only on the page. Two decades of hosting live rooms, from literary residencies to prestigious members' clubs, sit alongside as many years briefing boards at the most senior level, up to and including the UK Joint Intelligence Training Group. A room in crisis does not rattle me, which is rather the point when it is yours.
Narrative structure as a leadership tool: the briefings and exercises people actually feel.
Crisis simulations scripted like drama and run like operations. The format banks ask for twice.
Production discipline and finishing power for writers and creative teams who start more than they ship.
The craft in the exercises is not borrowed, it is made here. Under inkjockey I write for film, TV, theatre and radio, and make the podcasts that keep the instinct sharp. The full creative stable, from Behind the Spine to The Writing Salon, lives on at inkjockey.co.uk.
Essays on story and craft land monthly in the inkjockey Substack. See the full stable at inkjockey.co.uk.
"Our board needs to rehearse its worst day" and "I have a story that will not leave me alone." Both are welcome. Sometimes they are the same email.