Practitioners who have
done the work.
Illume's faculty are senior practitioners - each with direct experience of the conditions that determine whether inclusion becomes structural or remains aspirational.
Inclusion embedded
through expertise,
not facilitation alone.
The Illume faculty model is built on a deliberate principle: that structural inclusion requires practitioners who understand how organisations actually function — not just how they should. Each faculty member has operated at senior level, navigated complexity, and built the kind of credibility that makes leadership teams listen.
They work directly with our client partners to build capability, establish accountability, and embed the behavioural and systemic conditions that make inclusion durable. This is not about awareness. It is about change that holds.
Raj Jones is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and a qualified coach with over 13 years of experience embedding inclusive, high-performing cultures across global organisations. Her expertise spans learning and development, behavioural change, and leadership capability — with a systems-thinking approach that integrates inclusion directly into governance and operational frameworks.
She has influenced policy at board and government level, led high-performing teams across complex environments, and served on external inclusion advisory boards across sport and business — bringing the same rigour to governance as she does to her facilitation practice.
Sally Spicer is a systems-thinking inclusion strategist, talent adviser, and qualified career coach with over two decades of experience at the intersection of talent, culture, and organisational performance. Her expertise spans workforce design, inclusive recruitment, leadership development, policy design, performance frameworks, and succession planning — giving her an unusually complete view of the structural points at which equity either compounds or fails across the full employee lifecycle.
She has led global inclusion, ESG, and workforce transformation strategies for large, complex organisations, approaching inclusion as a connected system of behaviours, decisions, and structures rather than an isolated initiative — and building the commercial case for why it matters to capability, risk, and long-term resilience.
Sarah Howe brings extensive senior leadership experience across international corporate environments and strategic consultancy, with deep expertise in aligning culture with strategy across highly regulated and complex sectors — including technology, professional services, energy, financial services, and sport.
She has designed and led large-scale cultural change initiatives, advanced inclusion and equity agendas, and driven impactful communications and sustainability efforts at the executive level. She also holds Non-Executive Director and advisory board positions across the sport and governance sectors, bringing the same discipline to board-level accountability as she does to culture transformation.
Dr Nick Basannavar is an adviser, historian, and facilitator with significant experience across corporate, public sector, academic, and creative environments. His practice draws on inclusive leadership, organisational ethics, and historical inquiry to support leaders navigating complex questions of culture, behaviour, power, and institutional integrity. He has authored or co-authored two books on organisational culture and inclusive leadership, and has held a senior Honorary Fellowship in History at a leading UK university.
Known for a facilitation style described as impactful, thoughtful, and quietly radical, he combines rigorous intellectual challenge with deliberate care — creating the conditions for leaders to examine difficult questions honestly and act on what they find.
Grace Mosuro is an organisational development expert, executive coach, and inclusion strategist with over 18 years of experience supporting leaders to build culturally intelligent, high-performing organisations. Her expertise spans leadership development, cultural transformation, psychological safety, and intersectionality — working across financial services, technology, engineering, professional services, and the charity sector.
She combines strategic insight with direct personal experience of navigating complexity, bringing both analytical depth and the kind of credibility that allows her to create the reflective, challenging spaces where leadership teams do their most rigorous and consequential work.
Simon Bennett is an executive coach and senior leader with a practice focused on leadership impact, effectiveness, and sustainable performance. He works with senior leaders to increase their effectiveness at the highest level while maintaining the conditions that allow leaders to sustain performance without compromising judgement or effectiveness over the long term.
His coaching is grounded in the operational realities of leading complex organisations under pressure — built on the principle that transformational change requires leaders to be robustly challenged, and that this only becomes possible when the conditions for psychological safety are established first.
Mie Østergaard is a global inclusion and culture consultant with over 12 years of experience and Co-founder of IMPACT. She has delivered award-winning inclusion programmes across sport, media, and travel — working with some of the most recognisable organisations in those sectors to translate inclusion strategy into institutional practice at scale.
Her practice combines professional expertise with lived experience of intersectionality, bringing a depth of perspective that makes her facilitation both analytically rigorous and personally credible. She works with leaders and organisations to build the structural and cultural conditions that translate inclusion strategy into measurable outcomes.
Shelley Bishton is a multi-award-winning senior leader with over 20 years of experience driving transformation at the intersection of culture and commercial performance. She has built inclusive, future-fit organisations, led national initiatives, developed multi-million-pound partnerships, and delivered culture programmes with measurable impact on representation, retention, and employee engagement across large, complex organisations.
She works with leadership teams as a consultant and speaker — helping them examine the structural and behavioural barriers that constrain both inclusion and performance, and building the capability to address them at the systemic level. She also serves as a trustee of a leading organisation championing opportunities for Black British communities.
Rob Lelliott is a leadership coach and organisational change specialist with over 20 years of experience in financial services. He has led large-scale national teams, partnered with executive leadership to drive cultural transformation, and coached and advised hundreds of leaders on building inclusive, high-performing teams and navigating complex organisational change.
His work sits at the intersection of leadership capability, cultural infrastructure, and sustainable performance — drawing on both operational leadership experience and coaching expertise to equip senior leaders with the clarity and tools to deliver results through their people.
Dr Tola Oloyede is an executive HR director and thought leader in the energy sector, with a background in chemical engineering, a Master's in Organisational Performance, and a Doctorate in Business Administration. She has held senior HR leadership roles across large multinationals — spanning group-level HR, HR transformation, and M&A integration across Europe and Africa — as well as engineering management across international markets.
She has received industry recognition for her leadership in developing local talent and has been recognised among the top 50 exceptional women in the energy sector globally. She sits on the boards of several corporate, philanthropic, and humanitarian organisations, bringing the same rigour to governance as she does to leadership development.
Ade Ahmadu is a strategy and transformation professional with a track record of delivering £10m+ programmes across financial services, pharmaceuticals, and technology. He has held senior transformation roles at FTSE 100 organisations and global consultancies, and brings significant experience from leadership positions in major technology platforms — giving him direct insight into the conditions that determine whether large-scale transformation delivers at the operational level.
He holds an Executive MBA from Warwick Business School — where his dissertation examined the structural barriers preventing Black men from reaching C-suite roles in FTSE companies — and is an accredited career coach with the Association for Coaching. He founded Cerculate in 2021, working with mid-senior and executive professionals on the leadership clarity and positioning required to advance and perform at the highest level.
The right faculty
for the right engagement.
The organisations we work with have already decided that culture is a strategic priority. If yours has too, we should talk.
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