A Mid-Life Crisis + The House of Lords = The Praxis Collective...

It was May, 2022. 

I was standing in the Royal Gallery of Westminster Palace, beneath two bronze statues: William the Conqueror and King Alfred. My host, a peer from the House of Lords and a seasoned social entrepreneur, paused in front of them and said quietly: 

“Every time I walk into chambers, I come through here to look at these statues and ask myself which legacy I’m continuing. One of domination. Or one of design. These Kings remind me that leadership is always a choice. It’s my job to understand what the people need.”

That moment in Westminster, standing between two ancient Kings, sparked the reckoning that would inspire The Praxis Collective. 

I had arrived in London carrying the invisible weight of transition. I was approaching 40. My father was dying. I had been working part time while raising my two young sons. My life had once been linear, impressive and legible. Suddenly, none of it was. 

I was moving clumsily between roles (mother, daughter, leader, consultant) but didn’t feel like I was doing any of it well. I felt misaligned with the systems I served, almost dismissed by the very leaders I had raised up and confused by a cultural moment that didn’t seem designed to hold human realities but kept demanding its pound of flesh. 

In the months that followed, I researched William and Alfred and their legacies. Using this learning as a mirror and a map, I began to interrogate every premise I held around leadership, power, value and influence. 

It revealed what I had been sensing for years but didn’t have words for:

Our frameworks are not merely under pressure. They are fundamentally misaligned with what it means to be human.

So much of leadership has become theatre - performative rather than legitimate. Trust has become transactional. Cultural systems, once designed to hold meaning and cohesion, are collapsing under a weight of complexity they were never built to carry.  Post industrial systems of work have collided with digital tech and leeched our bandwidth for community and connection. I speak to executives across sectors who confide that they feel like they're failing.

It occurred to me that we need a reckoning, because our systems have made it near impossible to be human.

I began to hear the same fracture echoed in rooms across the country. Executives describing economic pressure and profit panic that forced them away from values-led leadership. Decision fatigue, guilt and a fear of failure that bordered on despair. Teams silently disengaging. High-functioning leaders with no playbook for the challenges of leading across five generations in a post-pandemic world. The pathologising of Generation Z and AI as the cause of workplace instability and under performance.

The same patterns repeated: incoherence, frustration, disconnection. 

As I shared these insights with leaders, teams and executives across the country, and the frameworks that I believed would scaffold meaningful change, I began to see the same spark light in their eyes. 

The Praxis Collective was birthed to champion and midwife the systemic, cultural and leadership redesign we need to rehumanise our frameworks for power, value and contribution. To help reclaim more of what matters and show that humanising systems of work, value, meaning and contribution is the most economically smart option on the table.