Work with us.
If you're growing fast enough that the organization is starting to strain, and you'd rather fix it now than after it breaks, you're the kind of founder we work best with.
Bjørn Nissen
Bjørn has spent more than 20 years leading organizations through the exact transitions that break most teams, building from scratch, restructuring under pressure, and navigating the cultural complexity that comes with rapid growth. He's led multicultural, distributed teams of up to 300 people across Asia, Africa and Europe, held direct budget responsibility of up to €4 million, and sat on the governance board of an organization with 40,000 employees.
His work has consistently been about the hard middle ground: the moment when an organization needs to redistribute decision-making, integrate different cultures, or rebuild how a team functions without losing momentum. He's initiated regional operating model redesigns, cross-border governance alignments, and built funding models for early-stage organizations with unclear value propositions.
He brings that same ground-level pragmatism to One Notch Up - pattern recognition earned across full cycles of organizational change, not borrowed from a textbook.
Davor Čengija
Davor started as an engineer and it shows, in the best possible way. He approaches organizational problems the way an engineer approaches a system: find where it's breaking, understand why, redesign it.
Over 20 years he has worked across sectors and functions that most organizational consultants never touch simultaneously: IT transformations, agile adoption in HR, marketing and finance, management board coaching after major investments and mergers, and leadership modernization for international sports federations. He supported a $60 million scale-up through the transition from a technology-selling company to a market-driven product organization. He has been inside a company as it grew from 30 to 300 people, building culture and process from the inside while doing the same for clients on the outside. Along the way he built and led a professional coaching team of 12 from scratch.
He holds an ICF PCC credential, ORSC and Co-Active coaching training, and Scrum Alliance certifications.
What he actually does, in his own words: "I optimize leaders' conversations, among themselves and with everybody else."
Stephane Baillie-Gee
Stephane has spent his career working across environments where collaboration doesn't happen by default - European financial institutions, EU bodies, cross-cultural business contexts in France and China, and organizations that described their situation as "basically fine" until someone looked closely.
His particular instinct is for the gap between what a leadership team says is happening and what is actually happening. As a facilitator, coach, and trainer across institutions and industries where political complexity, cultural difference, and entrenched dynamics are the norm, he has developed a precise diagnostic skill: finding where people have stopped genuinely hearing each other, and creating the conditions where that changes.
He has taught MBA programs, directed international publications for the European stock exchange, and coached teams across EU institutions and private companies on two continents.
What he brings to One Notch Up is the capacity to walk into a room where honest conversation has broken down, and rebuild it.
What we bring is earned experience from having been inside organizational transitions long enough to know where they break, and how to stop that from happening.