Consulting
When complexity needs clarity — and experience.
Recognisable?
Situations Nexus can help with
These are the kinds of conversations that usually start well before a Terms of Reference exists.
- A programme is delivering outputs, but it is unclear whether meaningful change is happening.
- A strategy looks convincing on paper, but implementation is struggling.
- The context has shifted and a programme needs to adapt.
- Partners agree on objectives but struggle with ownership, roles or accountability.
- Localisation and participation commitments need to become practical ways of working.
- A programme is moving between response, recovery, development, stabilisation or longer-term institutional arrangements.
- Leadership needs experienced programme or advisory capacity for a difficult assignment or transition.
- Decision-makers receive plenty of reports and data but suspect something important is missing.
Localisation in practice
Nexus offers two complementary approaches for helping community knowledge and lived experience influence organisational decisions.
Responsible Recalibration
Responsible Recalibration is a practical approach to localisation within the realities of an existing project.
Every project is built on assumptions: about what people need, how the context works and what will lead to meaningful change. Some assumptions hold. Others prove incomplete—or stop making sense as circumstances change.
Responsible Recalibration helps organisations:
- Identify the assumptions shaping the project.
- Test those assumptions against community perspectives, local knowledge and lived experience.
- Recalibrate the project where the assumptions do not hold.
- Verify the proposed recalibration with the community, confirming that its insights were understood and translated appropriately.
It does not remove the organisation’s original framing or make a project fully locally led. It provides a credible way for local knowledge and lived experience to influence work that already exists.
By returning to the community before changes are finalised, the organisation closes the loop. Misunderstandings can be corrected, people can see how their insights shaped the response and the basis for trust can grow.
Community Insights
Community Insights starts by asking people what matters to them, rather than beginning from an organisation's existing project framework.
Through structured reflective conversations, people describe meaningful moments of change in their own terms: what changed, what made that change possible, what has not worked and what outside organisations may be missing.
The approach can help organisations:
- Hear priorities and experiences that existing programme categories may not capture.
- Recognise locally held knowledge about what enables or obstructs change.
- Identify where community perspectives reinforce or challenge organisational understanding.
- Consider what those insights may mean for future programming.
Community Insights does not replace needs assessment, community engagement or evaluation. It complements them by creating space for a more open form of inquiry before people's experiences are translated into organisational categories.
The approach is currently available for carefully designed exploratory pilots. Participation, consent, safeguarding, validation and the appropriate use of people's contributions would be agreed before any conversations begin.
Capability
Where Nexus tends to be useful
Nexus is available for short- and medium-term advisory, programme and management assignments, including in fragile, crisis and transition contexts.
Programme strategy, design & delivery
Helping translate complex objectives into programmes that can actually be implemented, adapted and evaluated.
Humanitarian–development–peace nexus & transitions
Helping navigate the connections and handovers between humanitarian response, recovery, development, peacebuilding, stabilisation and institutional change.
Local leadership, localisation & partnerships
Helping turn localisation, participation and ownership from principles into workable roles, relationships and accountability.
Organisational learning & change
Connecting evidence, lived experience and reflection with programme adaptation and organisational decisions.
Responsible data & digital practice
Helping organisations use data and digital tools responsibly, protecting people, trust and programme integrity.
Programme quality, accountability & inclusion
Helping organisations look beyond outputs to understand what is changing, for whom, and why — including unintended effects.
Ways of working together
What an engagement can look like in practice.
These are shapes rather than packages. Most assignments are agreed after a conversation about what would genuinely help.
Independent advisory support
A thinking partner for a leader or team carrying a complex decision, with no stake in the outcome other than that it works.
Temporary programme or management capacity
Experienced hands-on capacity for a defined period — holding a programme, portfolio or function together while a gap is bridged.
Strategy-to-implementation review
A structured read of where intent and delivery have separated, and what would have to change for them to meet again.
Programme, partnership or transition diagnostics
A focused look at how a programme, partnership or handover is actually working, including the dynamics nobody has written down.
Facilitated reflection and adaptation
Sessions that help a team say what it already half-knows, then decide what to do about it.
Time-bound transition assignments
Support through a shift in mandate, funding, structure or institutional arrangements, with attention to ownership and continuity.
What becomes possible
Not guarantees. Conditions.
No adviser controls whether a programme succeeds. What good support can do is improve the conditions in which decisions are made.
- Clearer choices
- Stronger programme design
- More workable partnerships
- Earlier identification of problems
- Greater ownership
- Better-informed decisions
- More adaptive implementation
- Stronger connections between strategy and reality
Credibility
More than twenty years of international practice.
Joachim's experience spans humanitarian action, crisis prevention and recovery, development, local governance, programme management, responsible data and digital practice, organisational processes and institutional change — including in fragile contexts.
Experience is evidence for the proposition, not the proposition itself. What matters is whether it is useful to the problem in front of you.
- UNDP
- Netherlands Red Cross
- Habitat for Humanity International
- SNV
Organisations where Joachim has worked. This is professional experience, not a claim of client or endorsement relationships.
Organisational learning
Building trust in everyday leadership
A separate organisation-wide offer: workshops and facilitated reflection for management groups and, where appropriate, wider teams, on trust, listening and psychological safety at work. It is distinct from confidential counselling and is never based on individual confidential conversations.
Learning programme in development
The Courage to Speak. The Willingness to Listen.
Nexus is developing an online learning programme for managers and professionals in humanitarian, development and peacebuilding organisations.
The first priority, Leading Multicultural Teams, explores how culture, hierarchy and everyday leadership affect who speaks, who is heard and how different kinds of knowledge shape decisions. A connected future course, Listening to Communities, would extend the same principles to community feedback and participation.
This is a working concept, shared for discussion and feedback. The training is not yet an available course.
You don't need a complete Terms of Reference. An exploratory conversation is often the most efficient first step.
Have a programme challenge you'd like another perspective on?
Tell me roughly what you are working through. If Nexus is not the right fit, I will say so.