Structure that supports.

Empathy that empowers.

Expertise that enables.

Engineering, IT and Digital organisations face mounting pressures from every angle. Whether bidding for or delivering complex programmes and portfolios, teams must innovate in the face of disruptive technology alongside the challenge of technical debt and legacy systems that demand deep technical judgement and systems mastery. At the same time, they must identify what customers genuinely require for success, clarifying alongside the customer, not just what is needed, but why it matters and how to build shared understanding along the way.

This coupled with demands for faster outcomes, improved cyber posture, zero downtime, and adaptation to constant change, these external strains reveal deeper challenges: frustrated teams with untapped potential, eroded confidence, and difficulty understanding a realistic path to deliver customer needs.

At Forty Two Fold, we don’t offer generic answers. We bring seasoned polymaths and veteran technologists – experienced systems masters with hands‑on engineering expertise and an eye for technical detail. We empower teams from within, creating the conditions for ideas to surface, resilience to grow, and capability to last. Through a range of services across the engineering, IT and digital spectrum, grounded in psychological safety and structured empathy, we help teams align, collaborate openly, and deliver with clarity and momentum – combining empathetic practice with practical engineering rigour.

Our approach

We don’t just work to solve pursuit, programme and delivery challenges, we cultivate the cultural conditions that enable it to deliver. Culture isn’t a backdrop, it’s the power factor. When culture is strong, strategy doesn’t just land, it accelerates.

Through our structured empathy framework, we nurture psychologically safe environments where people feel heard, difficult opinions can be shared, and honest mistakes are not judged. We build trust within and between teams, while actively enabling the tough conversations that are often avoided but essential for progress.

With our unique blend of deep domain knowledge and experience, technical breadth and depth, alongside a methodology and framework grounded in empathy and compassion, we can positively challenge while defusing conflict over difficult decisions. Our approach is always the same: empathetic, independent, and focused on unlocking the potential already within your teams.

The answers are usually there. We provide the challenge, structure, and safe environment to bring them to the surface, helping your organisation not only deliver successfully, but build lasting capability and confidence, through practical, technically informed guidance from experienced practitioners.

This philosophy underpins all of our services.

Our services

Holistic Solutioning

Stronger solutions emerge when people, process and technology are designed as a coherent whole. We bring commercial understanding, technical rigour and purposeful storytelling together to shape integrated solutions that are both practical and compelling. This approach strengthens propositions, clarifies target architectures and creates narratives that unite stakeholders around a shared direction.

Our practitioners work across strategy, design and delivery to connect business intent with operational reality. They help teams define how people will work, how processes will flow and how technology will enable outcomes, ensuring each element reinforces the others. The result is a solution that is joined‑up, feasible and ready to scale.

This integrated way of thinking builds confidence, sharpens decision‑making and supports aligned, effective delivery, enabling organisations to move forward with clarity and conviction.

Structured Reviews

Structured, collaborative reviews that deepen clarity, strengthen solutions, align teams, and build the confidence needed for well‑grounded decisions. We span gate, solution, colour, and external‑perspective challenges, bringing seasoned technical judgement, cross-cutting experience, systems‑level insight, and a psychologically safe environment where assumptions are tested, blind spots or risks surface, and opportunities become clear.

Whether led or support by us, our reviewers blend structured empathy with practical engineering rigour, offering independent challenge across strategy, leadership, culture, and critically the technology that underpins them. Expect constructive tension, forensic attention to architecture, integration, security, and resilience, and a focus on strengthening your team from within.

Pre‑mortems and post‑mortems can extend this support, helping teams anticipate risks early and learn constructively afterwards—embedding continuous improvement into every programme and pursuit.

Collaborative Acceleration

Our facilitation capabilities create clarity, alignment, and momentum. We design structured, empathetic sessions that help teams forge strong strategies, distil compelling communications, shape win themes, or curate discriminating solutions. Our people are remembered for blending cultural sensitivity with practical, technical problem‑solving.

Across programmes and pursuits, we bring teams together to co‑create direction, accelerate decision‑making, and work through the detail that turns intent into action. From orchestrating complex stakeholders to modelling constructive negotiations and nurturing insightful retrospectives, we create the conditions for purposeful progress and shared ownership.

Our focus is always on enabling teams to move faster and more confidently. We don’t add noise, we guide conversations that surface what matters, resolve what’s stuck, and unlock the collective capability already in the room.

Critical Turnaround

Targeted support that guides struggling pursuits and programmes through recovery, reset, repair and clear turnaround. We help teams restore direction, rebuild confidence and re‑establish shared commitment when delivery has stalled or complexity has taken hold.

Our practitioners work alongside your people to diagnose what is blocking progress, stabilise what matters most and create a realistic path back to control. We focus on rebuilding trust, strengthening delivery habits and lifting energy so teams can move forward with clarity and renewed purpose.

This approach creates the conditions for sustained momentum and lasting success, enabling organisations to recover quickly, realign around what matters and deliver with confidence once again.

Trusted Counsel

Seasoned insight shaped by experience, empathy, and technical knowledge creates a trusted space for reflection and growth. Our coaching and mentoring strengthen capability, sharpen judgement, build confidence, and help people and teams become their most effective and impactful selves.

We work directly with your teams and growing leaders as peers; experienced systems thinkers and multi‑discipline technologists who offer a sounding board, practical guidance, and thoughtful challenge. This blend of technical depth and structured empathy helps individuals navigate complexity, refine strategies, and make clearer, more grounded decisions.

Our support builds resilience, deepens collaboration, and strengthens the cultural foundations that enable winning and delivery. The capability developed stays within your organisation, leaving your people more confident, more capable, and better equipped for the future.

Who we are

We are Forty Two Fold, an organisation built from the ground up on a foundation of outstanding culture, ensuring psychological safety to drive high performance and winning outcomes. Many organisations claim to put culture first, but the lived experience often tells a different story. For us, culture is not just about when things go right, but about how people respond when things go wrong and, most importantly, how they act when no one is watching. We are practitioners first; seasoned polymaths and veteran multi‑discipline technologists who pair technical rigour and systems‑level craft with structured empathy, so culture and capability reinforce one another.

Meet our practitioners on our resources page.

A metaphor for exponential possibility. In mathematics, if you could fold a sheet of paper 42 times, its thickness would stretch from Earth to the Moon. 

A trusted collective where individuals are held together by shared purpose, constructive challenge, and psychological safety.

The founders, Sharen and Simon, worked together for many years, winning and delivering major IT, engineering, and digital transformation programmes into the UK public and private sectors. A true meeting of minds, Simon and Sharen both built on their foundations of experience in the high security technical domain with a unique understanding of compassionate leadership.

With high expectations of performance, both share an insatiable drive for team and organisational success, but never at the expense of individual health and wellbeing. Forty Two Fold was built on this joint wealth of experience and an unwavering belief that psychological safety is non‑negotiable. For Sharen and Simon, it is the foundation of both success and wellbeing, and the principle that underpins everything we do.

Sharen has over 25 years of experience in business winning and strategic growth, leading capture and bid operations across the UK public sector and international markets. She has held senior roles which consistently enable organisations to secure major contracts and transform their growth trajectories.

Sharen is recognised not only for her business winning expertise but for her collaborative, compassionate leadership style. She builds trust, fosters positive team cultures, and enables organisations to succeed without compromising individual wellbeing. Her ethos is clear: psychological safety is non negotiable, and it is the foundation of both winning outcomes and sustainable success.

Outside of work, Sharen is deeply committed to causes that reflect her values. She serves as Group Treasurer for Guide Dogs, is Deputy Chair of the APMP Capture Working Group, and is a trustee for her local RSPCA CIO. She is also a keen runner and active in canine sports, including cani-cross and scent work, and is currently training to become a qualified dog trainer

Simon has built a career at the forefront of engineering and technology, with extensive leadership experience across high‑assurance security and safety critical domains. He has led teams delivering first‑of‑type hyperscale cloud components, pioneering innovative uses of AI, transforming mission critical applications to cloud, and creating high assurance environments on public cloud platforms. His work reflects a consistent ability to navigate complexity and deliver clarity across people, process, and technology.

Simon is recognised not only for his technical expertise but for his relentless curiosity and appetite for challenge. He thrives on enabling teams to succeed in demanding environments, ensuring resilience while keeping psychological safety central to performance. For him, success is measured not just in outcomes but in the confidence and wellbeing of the people who achieve them.

Away from work, his passion for technology continues – from experimenting with smart home and eco‑tech innovations to exploring new ways technology can transform everyday life. He is also an active campanologist. You can read his personal ‘User Manual’ on Github.

Connect with us

We would love to talk to you about how we can support you and your teams win business and deliver digital, IT and engineering programmes in a manner which leaves lasting benefits for your teams.

Please email us using info@fortytwofold.com.

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