Zand believes our lives are shaped by the questions we ask. Rooted in his experience growing up in Northern Ireland during ‘the troubles’, two interconnected questions have, and continue, to guide Zand’s work:

(i) How can we cultivate conditions that create and sustain generative spaces of human and ecological resilience and flourishing?

(ii) When ecological, economic, political, and/or cultural pressures intensify on communities, how can we help cultivate conditions that enable people to turn to each other, rather than on each other?

These questions have led him across the world and back again, developing his experience and capabilities in strategic facilitation, sense-making, systems innovation, conflict resolution, leadership development, youth mentorship, learning design, and organisational change. Zand is passionate about leveraging the power of strategic learning to enable teams, organisations and multi-stakeholder partnerships to navigate and address complex challenges. He excels at designing and facilitating participatory sense-making processes that surface strategic insights to inform decision-making, planning and course correction within adaptive management cycles.

Before joining Cultivating Leadership, Zand held roles on the system innovation team at EIT Climate-KIC, where he led the cultivation of the sense-making practice within the organisation’s flagship Deep Demonstration initiatives, as a principal at Roller Strategies, where he facilitated Social Labs in Chicago, Zimbabwe and Oxford, and on the program team of the Masters in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability program at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden where he co-designed and led the Leading in Complexity track of the course. Alongside these roles, he has been running his own process design and facilitation company for over a decade; clients have included the European Forum Alpbach, the Foundation for International Law for the Environment, the Laudes Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, the World Green Building Council, Sophoi, Vienna Impact Hub and the Corrymeela Community, amongst many others.

Zand holds a BSc in Sports Exercise Science from the University of Ulster, where he focused on the development of shared mental models in high-performing teams, and an MSc in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from Blekinge Institute of Technology. He holds a range of training qualifications in group facilitation, process design and conflict resolution.

When he’s not working, you’ll often find Zand cooking with friends, laughing with his family or exploring the cliffs and beaches of his native Ireland with his Golden Retriever, Islay.