Let me start by stating that I think Design Thinking is a misconstrued term as it unfortunately brings connotations to “sleek and pretty” rather than the effective discipline I’ve learned it to be.

Michael is one of the very few leaders I have seen who can make strategic design thinking actually work inside a large organisation. Not as a workshop or a concept, but as a genuine operating capability that changes how decisions get made and how teams see problems and understand them thoroughly before acting. That is rare. Most people who talk about design thinking stay at the surface. Michael goes all the way in.

What sets him apart is the combination of intellectual depth and practical credibility. He operates comfortably at C-suite level on strategy and direction, and in the same week he will roll up his sleeves and work directly with teams on execution.

People trust him because he has done the work himself — at Amazon, at Novo Nordisk, at Ørsted — and they know it.

If you are considering working with Michael, my honest advice is: don’t wait. He is the kind of person who makes organisations better at learning what to execute upon, not just at executing. That capability is hard to find and harder to keep.

Trifork Accelerate was built on strong technical expertise — but we knew that customer centricity and UX did not sit naturally in the way we worked and sold. That was something we wanted to change.

Michael did not come in as an external consultant with a pre-packaged framework. He immersed himself in our context and helped us build those methods into what we were already good at. We worked through projects in insurance, finance and industry — and the ability to put the customer experience at the centre was consistently what set us apart.

That is still something I draw on.