We help organisations recalibrate their compass: aligning ambition with humanity, innovation with care, and progress with respect for people and nature.
Grounded in the present, oriented towards what matters most, we design strategies that give more than they take, because the future depends on where we choose to point North.
North of Now
North of Now is built on the belief that every organisation already carries a compass, but it must be read with care.
In moments of complexity, acceleration, or moral ambiguity, the question is not how fast can we move?
It is: are we still oriented toward what truly matters?
North of Now exists to help leaders recalibrate their compass, to find a North that is ethical, human, regenerative, and built on the understanding that what is good for people and planet is ultimately good for business too.
A compass does not tell you where to go in absolute terms. It responds to the field you are in.
Likewise, strategy cannot be separated from:
At North of Now, we treat strategy as a living compass: one that must be read again and again, adjusted with humility, and guided by values rather than noise.
North is not a fixed endpoint. It is a reference and a shared orientation that allows movement without losing integrity.
The North that guides our work places dignity before efficiency, regeneration before extraction, understanding before judgement, and love as a leadership force.
This is the North that allows organisations to move forward without leaving their humanity behind.
You can only find your way from where you actually are.
“Now” is not a constraint — it is a grounding. It asks leaders to see the present clearly: its wounds and its wisdom, its tensions and its possibilities, its people and their stories.
North of Now holds space between urgency and responsibility, ensuring that strategic decisions are anchored in reality, not abstraction.
North of Now is not a consulting firm handing out directions. It is a studio of calibration.
We work alongside leaders to pause and sense the field — to listen deeply to human and ecological signals, surface misalignments with courage and care, and co-design paths that feel true, not just clever.
The orientation was always yours. We help you learn to trust it.
At North of Now, strategy is an act of care — for people, for communities, for the living systems that sustain economic life. We believe the strongest organisations are those that give back more than they take, see success as shared, and understand that lasting progress depends on trust, dignity, and love.
This is strategy that orients and restores.
Independent Strategic & Social Impact Consultant
Alongside executive advisory, we work as an independent strategic consultant for organizations, foundations, and corporations, drawing on extensive international corporate experience across strategy, transformation, and social impact.
We support organizations in designing and delivering strategies that combine business performance with positive societal impact, particularly in areas such as inclusive business, sustainability, health, and systemic change.
Typical activities include:
We are used to operating in complex, multi-stakeholder environments, bridging corporate objectives with social and human realities, and translating strategy into action.
Strategic Advisor to CEOs & Managing Directors
We work with CEOs and Managing Directors as a trusted strategic sparring partner, supporting them in moments of complexity, transition, and strategic decision-making.
This role is built on confidentiality, independence, and trust.
Rather than an operational or administrative role, this advisory relationship is based on thinking partnership, challenge, and perspective. We help leaders sharpen decisions, test assumptions, strengthen narratives, and integrate the human and cultural dimensions into strategy.
Typical areas of support:
Engagements on request
Beyond ongoing advisory relationships, we accept selected project-based and interim engagements for organisations navigating a specific inflection point, launching a strategic initiative, or needing experienced leadership capacity for a defined period.
These engagements are focused, high-impact, and shaped entirely around what the moment requires.
We also collaborate with consultancy firms and independent practices looking to strengthen the team, bringing specific expertise, language capability, or the particular value of an outside perspective: someone who sees the situation with fresh eyes and offers a second opinion grounded in real strategic experience.
Languages & Cultural Practice
Strategy means something different in Lisbon than it does in Brussels. Leadership conversations carry different weights in Milan than in Antwerp.
We work in Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Italian — across the cultures, registers, and unspoken assumptions each one carries. For international groups, holdings, and organisations operating across borders and communities, this means we can weave without losing the thread: same strategic clarity, adapted to the room it needs to land in.
This is not translation. It is the ability to think, challenge, and build trust from inside a culture, and to hear voices that rarely reach the center of the room.
The word compass is older than navigation. It comes from the Latin com-passus : to step together. Before it ever pointed North, it meant to move through the world in relation to others. To measure not just distance, but direction. To orient, collectively, toward what matters. That original meaning is why we chose it.
Strategy, at its best, is not a tool handed down from above. It is a shared journey where people step together, read the same field, find a direction they can all move toward with integrity and energy.
There is also a more personal reason this symbol sits at the heart of this work.
Years ago, at the close of a particularly complex strategic journey, someone offered their appreciation not with words alone, but with a compass: a small, physical object with a note that read: “You have the knack for always finding a true north when navigating complexity and uncertainty.”
It is the reason this studio exists. And it is the orientation we bring to every engagement.
Katrien Buys
I came to business and strategy through mathematics — a discipline that taught me to look for the pattern beneath the surface, the structure underneath the noise.
But numbers, I discovered, only tell part of the story.
The rest lives in people. In the room where a leadership team has stopped listening to each other. In the organisation that has lost its sense of why. In the leader who knows something is misaligned but cannot yet name it.
I have spent my career at that intersection: rigorous enough to see the system, human enough to feel what it needs.
I work across languages, cultures, and geographies, and I have come to believe that this is not incidental to my practice. Moving between worlds teaches you to hold more than one truth at once. It teaches you to listen before you conclude.
What I bring to every engagement is not a framework or a formula. It is a quality of presence, the ability to challenge without threat, to name what others leave unspoken, and to hold the tension between where an organisation is and where it could be.
I am not interested in incremental improvement. I am interested in real transformation: the kind that leaves people, communities, and systems genuinely better than before.
“Life flourishes where dignity, care, and reciprocity are designed into systems.”
Let’s find your North.
If something in these pages has resonated, we’d like to hear about it.
Tell us a little about where you are and what feels uncertain. That’s enough to begin.