David Hoogland

Fifteen years in brand strategy and new product development, leading his own company and working with Rabobank, Nike, ING, KPN, Erasmus University and hundreds of local and international startups, showed David how organisations approach change and how they go through it. He saw up close, across scales, what change does to leaders, to teams, to individuals and to the culture of an organisation.

That observation led to a different kind of work. Years spent with children, teenagers and families in crisis revealed what the organisational world rarely names: there are parts of transformation you cannot strategise your way through. At certain thresholds it is not frameworks that matter, but the human capacity to stay present with what is actually happening.

A long period of burnout and depression gave him lived experience of how deep transformation goes. From there he studied somatic attachment therapy, depth psychology and community care, and developed The Soul of Change: the full arc of transformation, from crisis or calling, through descent, to return.

His research has since moved toward the institutions people live inside: what they teach people to become, and whether what people learn there can change them in return. RIfT is where that work now lives.