Marco Noordeloos
Marco Noordeloos spent twenty years as a biologist and senior manager in international research institutions across Asia, Africa and Europe. Since 2015 he has worked full-time as an executive coach and facilitator for academia, international NGOs, UN agencies, and corporate clients globally.
Living on four continents and working across 75+ countries helped him see the limits of his own thinking. Assumptions he didn't realise were assumptions. Letting go of a deeply held perspective proved harder than learning a new one. That journey was often challenging, sometimes embarrassing, as you realize that the version of yourself who held those assumptions was working with less than you thought.
What those years taught him about his own assumptions, The Systemic Self argues about institutions: the way they meet and decide runs on inherited defaults, and different defaults can be built. The personal version of that shift is on his website ; the collective version is in the book.
He writes as a recovering architect: someone who built, for years, the kind of rooms the book diagnoses, and who names his own part in what they cost.
The Systemic Self is published in partnership with WICE. A global consultancy founded in 1989 and rebuilt in 2025 around people the sector's collapse displaced: senior practitioners, many formerly at USAID, now working as a consortium of independent experts. Emily Weeks, who leads WICE, wrote the foreword. WICE consultants read the manuscript before it was finished and said where a reader with their years in the field stopped trusting it. Several passages exist because of them.
The book argues that institutions meet and decide on inherited defaults, and that the defaults can be redesigned. WICE is where that argument gets tested, and the test begins in WICE's own rooms: how it chooses its work, who decides, whose knowledge carries weight, and whether a partner on the ground can change the outcome or is only consulted. A written charter commits the joint work to holding the tension between the way the sector learned to operate and the relational ways of knowing it filed as anecdote, instead of settling it the old way.
The Systemic Self Academy opens in early 2027. It is where practitioners build the craft the book describes, with WICE consultants shaping what it teaches and co-designers, several from Indigenous communities, who can veto its curriculum. The field evidence the book does not yet have will come from WICE's work over the next three to five years and go into a second book, written by the people whose knowledge is at stake. Noordeloos will not be its author. Neither is finished. The first cohort starts in January; the evidence will take years.
