If I had to compress what I do into two verbs, they'd be: connect, and enable.
The core of almost everything I work on revolves around making connections and enabling change through learning. Strip away the job titles and the frameworks and that's what's left — putting the right people in the same room, and giving them a reason and a way to grow together.
I used to think my job was to deliver knowledge. The longer I do this, the more I believe knowledge is the easy part. What's scarce is connection — the trust, the shared language, the network that lets knowledge actually move and turn into change.
A course teaches one person. A community changes a field. I'd rather build the second one.
That belief is why, on 29 August 2019, René Vleesschauwer, Daniël van Loon and I officially founded the Association of Enterprise Architects chapter — not as another certificate to collect, but as a place for practitioners to find each other. It's the same instinct behind the learning communities, the partnerships, and the certifications I help shape: build the connective tissue, and the change tends to follow.
So this is less an essay than a compass note. When I'm unsure whether something is worth doing, I ask: does it connect people who should know each other, and does it enable them to change something that matters? If the answer is yes twice, I usually say yes too.
