Hi — I'm Scott. Pleased to meet you.

I start that way deliberately, because we all know that when you engage someone, you introduce yourself. And yet, under pressure, following someone else's rules, trying to be professional, we tend to forget. So that’s what my work is about:

I consult, speak, and train on engagement.

The pattern I find, again and again, is that it's rarely a knowledge problem. People know what's engaging. They just stop doing it. My job is to help them remember, and give them a framework so they never forget again.

My Work

The main things I do are:

• Consult with organisations on employee, customer and community engagement
• Speak at organisation events and conferences — 500+ talks given over 25+ years
• Lecture on post-grad and executive education progmmes
• Train, coach and mantor people on engagement
• Engage for clients, in a mediating and representing capacity

My approach centres on:

• Frameworks as a way to conceptualise engagement
• Adapting those frameworks to the organisation so they become owned
• Engaging people as I teach them engagement — I work extensively on stakeholder buy-in

All delivered through Ampersand Group, which has worked across 230+ organisations in 70+ countries, training more than 15,000 participants.

Clients include:

• International organisations: United Nations, UNICEF, United Nations Office Geneva, United Nations System Staff College, International Organisation for Migration, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, World Health Organisation
• Enterprises: Adobe, Microsoft, Nokia, KPMG, Aegon, Trelleborg Offshore, Radiometer, MET Office, NHS
• Tech companies: giffgaff, Playtech, Nordeus, OpenPhone, Hopin, Scandiweb
• Councils & public sector: Devon & Cornwall Police, Exeter City Council, Plymouth City Council, Isle of Man Public Health
• Education & academia: University of Exeter, University of Plymouth, University of Westminster, Stockholm School of Economics, Kaospilot
• Professional associations: ISACA, IAEE-IMEX, Interaction Design Association, Business Continuity Institute
• NGOs & non-profits: European Patent Office, ASTP Proton, Young Devon, Plymouth Octopus Project

My Story

People have often been intrigued by my story.

I wasn't a naturally engaging child. I was peculiar, honestly — interested in pretty much everything, into most things at one point or another. But what always endured was Lego. That love of building things, of systems, of how pieces fit together, never left me.

Then I got into church. And became, to be honest, a bit religiously obsessed. My nickname at college was Scary Scott.

But I came across an idea about how to engage other people — and I began to practise it. Talking to strangers. Getting to know the barista really well. Engaging with customers in my retail job. Slowly, I found I had a real set of skills for connecting with people. And I began to apply them.

I started a youth event at my church. Before long, hundreds of kids were coming every month. It taught me so much — about community, about movements, about what it takes to build a crowd. And this was 2003: I built an online ticketing system for our events and used Myspace to market ourselves. Social media before social media was a thing.

I was also always a tech obsessive. We used YouTube the moment it launched. I produced our church's TV show, which actually aired on television. I was taking everything I loved — brands, film, communications, technology — and applying it in a context where the stakes were genuinely human.

And alongside all of that, I was learning pastoral care. Being present with people during the hardest moments of their lives. Funerals. Crises. The kind of consistency and humility that no marketing textbook teaches.

Then social media came of age, and I started running business events — Like Minds — which caught the wave at exactly the right moment. For two years I was immersed in the social media culture of London and beyond. People always commented on how the events felt like a community. That wasn't an accident. It was everything I had learned in church, applied to business.

I realised that church and business had far more to teach each other than either side admits.

I went on to lead my own church — which grew fast, with a wonderfully international congregation of all nationalities, ages, and backgrounds. Messy and beautiful.

But I also experienced the dark side of engagement. In the church world I witnessed the abuse of it — the misuse of power, the ways that the very tools of connection can be turned into tools of control. There was a whistleblower situation. And in the middle of it, I crashed — realising the ways I had myself been on the receiving end of that abuse.

I came out of church without the strength to go back. I went on antidepressants, and discovered that I had been living with borderline depression for most of my adult life without ever realising it. People would tell me to just "be happy." Anyone who has experienced depression knows exactly how unhelpful that is.

I tried to find work. I applied for hundreds of roles — shelf stacker, marketing lead, teacher, office work. But it turns out that the only jobs that want a church minister are another church, or counselling. I was stuck.

So I went back to old business contacts and began freelancing — doing whatever I could. It was hard. I wasn't good at selling myself, and I didn't really know how to describe what I did.

Then slowly, I began to see it. All the insights I'd developed. The frameworks I'd built and taught — some of them originally designed as methods for growing our church. They could all be described by one word: engagement.

People told me to forget it. Just help companies sell stuff. But I knew that what I understood about engagement wasn't just for marketing — it was for engaging communities, engaging teams, engaging individuals. The same principles, applied across the full range of human connection.

It was a phone call with my mentor, the acclaimed business author Joe Pine, that changed things. He urged me to write a book with my frameworks. So I did — in one month, I wrote The Shape of Engagement.

I tapped into everything I had learned as a public speaker in church, booked speaking gigs on engagement, and slowly built consulting opportunities around them.

And there it was. I was a speaker, consultant, and author on engagement.

Not because it came naturally. Because I built it — the hard way, on purpose, from the most unlikely set of starting points imaginable.