YOU, US, WORLD

Author Dr. Jacob Naish

Joining ICP Search as an advisor.

I’m proud to have been welcomed so warmly as an advisor to ICP Search from next month. Thank you to all from the ICP world who reached out with kind words. 

Who am I, and why am I joining the team? I’ll try and help readers and friends of ICP understand the answers here. 

My world has been a kind of collision between performance culture in pro football, becoming a scholar, sports technology and the future of work. I trained as a philosopher, but have been doing culture design for performance and development over many years.

The last 7 years at Right to Dream – one of the most innovative holistic performance cultures in pro sport - helped me to see that my unfulfilled, career as a scholar could intersect with the lifeblood of my work over the last 22+ years: football.  This journey took me from how power works in sport, to technology, via fan-culture, to designing for performance where elite athletes (and the people that serve them) thrive holistically. 

I learned that the perceived "high-performance" workplace of professional sport, and the workplace of tech start-ups, agencies, events companies, and corporates share a lot in common. All attempt to bring people together in complicated endeavour with uncertain outcomes. We can understand this process and bring intentionality to it by reckoning with philosophy, neuroscience, perception, culture, and most importantly, feeling. 

My new venture, MIND3D (pronounced ‘minded’), was born from over two decades of navigating these interwoven worlds. It’s my response to the need to go beyond performance, forging deeper connections between us.

Through the launch of MIND3D, I reconnected with Gary Peters , who, although we had lost touch, was still a long-time friend whom I fondly remembered as I once persuaded him in the early 2000s to come to Burkina Faso with me to run leadership programs for grassroots coaches there. He obliged and brought much-needed energy and ideas to the program. 

At ICP Search , I hope to be able to advise on how offerings to clients can be expanded beyond recruitment toward making workplaces more human, more flourishing, better performing, all sustainably.

I look forward to sharing my observations and learnings with you.