Origin

What made me build Project Genetic came from twenty years of direct observation inside institutions where decisions carry real consequences, watching the difference between environments shaped by someone operating from psychological territory they have never examined and environments shaped by someone who genuinely has done that work. People working in those environments felt the distinction long before anyone named it, adjusting what they contributed based on what the psychological state of the person in authority made safe enough to offer, and that adjustment happened quietly and without anyone announcing it, because a team feels who you are before they process anything you say.

My professional life was not planned around leadership, and yet each role moved me deeper into it because of something I understood more clearly than most people around me, which was that the interior state of the person holding authority shapes the working reality of everyone around them more completely than any external factor. For twelve years as Executive Director of Action Against AIDS in Bosnia and Herzegovina, managing a The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria programme under UNDP supervision with a portfolio exceeding USD 70 million while holding Chair and Vice-Chair positions within the Country Coordinating Mechanism, alongside people holding genuine institutional authority, from government ministers to senior agency officials. That work continued as Health and Energy Adviser at the Health and Environment Alliance, coordinating programme delivery across six Western Balkan countries for six years, and has extended into my current role as Programme Director at the Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute alongside a research fellowship at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia.

From an early age, circumstances I did not choose left me entirely responsible for building my own life, and that necessity made psychology a practical tool long before it became a professional interest, because understanding what actually drives human behaviour beneath the explanations we construct for it was the only reliable way I had to navigate what was ahead of me. Decades of sustained reading in neuroscience and psychology running alongside the practical experience of leadership kept confirming what direct observation had already made visible, that the degree of self-knowledge a leader carries into a room determines the psychological environment everyone else in that room inhabits, a finding the research confirms as measurable, not peripheral. Committing to psychotherapy as someone on the receiving end, alongside years of engagement with coaching and mentorship, was how I applied that understanding to my own patterns, because leading from science you have not tested on yourself is a position I was unwilling to hold.

Building this platform came from the conviction that the gap between what people in authority understand about their field and what they understand about themselves is the most consequential problem in leadership today, and that people who genuinely want to close that gap deserve access to the actual science, not distilled inspirational material. The intention here is not to position myself above anyone or to sell a service, but to translate what neuroscience and psychology know about human decision-making into something practitioners can engage with honestly, because the psychological substrate beneath behaviour determines the working environment a leader creates far more than any strategy on paper will ever do.

Part of what I am building is aimed at people coming into careers that may eventually carry them into positions of real authority, because the science that explains how psychology shapes leadership outcomes should be available to someone who is twenty-five and has the intellectual appetite for it, not reserved for those who have already accumulated the credentials that grant admission to formal leadership development. That same conviction applies to anyone already holding responsibility who has never had access to this material in a form serious enough to engage with honestly. Project Genetic is built from the understanding that closing the distance between what a leader knows about their field and what they know about themselves is the most consequential work available to anyone willing to do it, and for me, building the space where that work can happen is the clearest answer to the question of what to do with the time I have been given.