Tom Farrand · Human Energy Co
I work with leaders in transition, organisations changing course, and people building something together.
I help leaders explore new territory, decide where to go, and move into it together.
Three ways in
A new role, and no one to think out loud with
A new role, a new mandate, and nobody to think out loud with. I am the person in the room with no agenda except yours, and I will tell you the thing nobody else will.
How it runs: a retained advisory relationship, usually a year or more. I hold three or four at a time.
Stuck, and looking for a new path
The old direction has run out, or a new one is set and nothing is moving behind it. We find the new path, test it properly, and get people moving down it together.
How it runs: explore, decide, move. Below.
Many people building something new together, to accelerate innovation
A coalition, a membership, a movement, an incubator or an accelerator: people and organisations building something none of them could alone. I design it, help run it, and hand it over.
Done before: Good for Nothing · The Wild Network · SPRING · Biotope · The Trampery
The thread through all of it
Every pound is going into the technology. The returns are sitting in the people, and almost nobody is designing for that half.
Performance is people and machines together. I work the human half: the messy, collective, hard-to-copy half.
This is upstream work. It costs less than restructuring and it holds, because nothing is being forced.
“I am incredibly optimistic on your behalf. I think you can do far more than you are going to.”
Not just the conditions. The ideas too.
Getting people into the right state is half of it. The other half is what they work on. I go deep into both sides with you: the people you serve and what they need, the technology that is changing what’s possible, and the living systems everything depends on.
Understand people’s needs and the opportunities around them in depth, before choosing a route. Thirteen years of research and segmentation behind it.
AI pulls answers towards the average. Diverse people pull them apart. The more different the perspectives in the room, the more original what comes out, and the smarter the group gets.
Creativity is making connections between things that seem unconnected. Innovation is part voyeurism, part theft: look over the fence at other fields, borrow what works, and combine it in ways nobody has tried.
Planetary boundaries are the constraint, and nature is the best design teacher we have. Look through four lenses, ecological, social, economic and aesthetic, and move from doing less harm to helping all life thrive.
What actually makes innovation happen
It’s the shape behind every breakthrough I’ve been part of. Then remove the barriers: if people can’t picture it, prototype it; if they don’t believe it, build the evidence; if it can’t be delivered, find another route. Now AI can help those groups make far more of the connections that spark it. More in the essay →
So your people, and the people around them, can work together on genuinely new solutions, not faster versions of the old ones.
How the work runs
Most advisers arrive at the decision and leave soon after. I start earlier, out exploring, and stay for the part where it becomes real. Then I leave it with you.
Go out and look before anyone decides. Build a real range of options and test them against the world, with the people who will have to live with them.
Usually the opening move
Selfridges: around a hundred people out inventing the future of the business
Land on a direction the leadership team will actually carry, and set up the conditions they need to carry it.
Four to twelve weeks · fixed fee
Ellen MacArthur Foundation leadership through a change of CEO · Lake
Build the vehicle and run it alongside your team: a fund, a coalition, a programme, a new way of working. Then hand it over. Leaving well is the stated endgame from day one.
Priced against what is being built, then a monthly retainer
Ecover fund: £500k deployed · SPRING: £13.8m follow-on · Biotope: now run by their own team
Adventures in Flow · an essay, written in public
Most of what we know about flow is about one person, alone, in the zone. Most of the work that matters is done together. This essay is about both, and about what AI is doing to them.
For individuals
A one-day adventure in flow.
Bring the thing you are about to leap into. Twenty people, a sauna and a cold plunge, and small groups helping each other build it. Something physically hard first makes the hard idea look smaller.
First gathering · January 2027 · near Winchester · 20 places
For teams
An experiment in team flow.
Finding flow is a team sport. One real team, one real challenge, one day: struggle, release, flow, recovery. Measured, so you keep what works. Also as a Human × AI Lab.
Talk about a Flow LabThirty years, one thread
Four years with the chief executive: product strategy, the AI question, a pivot to a new business model, and the leadership bench built alongside it.
Steve Borthwick’s coaching group moving up from Leicester into the national side.
Thirty of their brightest and most difficult people, a year, and a regenerative plan for the engineering and energy teams that they built themselves.
The leadership team held together through a change of chief executive.
A fund conceived and run from scratch: open call, 800+ applications, the panel, the awards, £500k deployed.
Innovation and leadership learning with the directors of one of the most innovative companies in the world.
Also Unilever · Selfridges · Boots · The Crown Estate · NatWest · Bank of England · EY · Ørsted · Project Everyone · Girl Effect · Cambridge CISL · Unreasonable · The Trampery · VIB Biotope · EIT Food
All the work, by kind of project →“I went to work today and it was different. The process has made people have more direction, clarity of thought and understanding of what can be achieved.”
“Across three industries and twenty years, a trusted partner in navigating growth and transformation.”
“A rare breed. A deeply human approach together with cold, hard business smarts.”
Before you get in touch
Not a consultancy with a team and a methodology. Not a trainer. Not a coach who only works on you. I take two or three pieces of work at a time, and I am in them properly. That is the whole point, and also the limit.
If there is something you can see and cannot shift, that is the conversation. No pitch, no deck, just half an hour working out whether this is a fit.
tom@humanenergy.co