The difference between a good plan and a great outcome is almost always human.

I’m Vanessa Farquharson. For over 25 years I held senior marketing and communications leadership roles at some of the world’s most recognised organisations, including InterContinental Hotels Group, the BBC and Tourism New Zealand. I led teams and delivered results across cultures, markets and significant budgets.

The strategies worked. But even with the best people in the room, delivery creates friction. Teams lose something in translation under pressure. Leaders make good decisions alone and struggle together. Talented people quietly burn out.

That isn’t a talent problem. It’s an understanding problem, and it can be solved.

So I trained as a certified MBTI® practitioner. I wasn’t leaving my career behind. I was applying the same rigour and insight-led approach to something more fundamental: how people think, decide and communicate.

Viridis Cognitive is the next chapter of Viridis Communications, the consultancy I founded in 2019. If you’d like to explore what this could look like for your organisation, I’d love to hear from you.

  • Investment in understanding how we think isn’t a soft skill. It's a force multiplier for everything else.

  • Understanding how you naturally think, communicate, and make decisions doesn’t just make you a better person — it makes every other skill you have work harder. Leadership, design, sales, negotiation: all of them depend on your ability to read people accurately, including yourself.

  • When you understand your own patterns - and those of the people around you - the gap between intention and impact closes. You stop wondering why a conversation went wrong and start knowing what to do differently.

"Understanding how people think isn't a soft skill. It's the difference that makes every other skill work better."

Vanessa Farquharson, Founder