Who?

I'm one half of Mister Fox, the trickster alter ego and Chief Executive Whisker Washer at Dancing Fox, a creative agency and storytelling factory. The other half is my creative partner, Tommy Crawford. We worked together at Greenpeace, where I spent 35 years driving innovation internally and learning how to work the levers of disruptive communications.

In the early days, I did what one does in any charity startup: everything. I was a one-man IT department, a governance architect, a communications director, a deckhand, an action coordinator. I stopped a nuclear weapons test for four days. I hung a banner on the Statue of Liberty. I helped set up offices in Italy and the Soviet Union. I sailed on Greenpeace ships. I saved whales. I built a web activism team in the days before web activism was a thing.

I worked with Tommy and a band of storytelling pirates for nearly three years developing a theory of change for Greenpeace International and an organisational story, crafted on three continents, that got embedded into its ten-year strategy. Tommy and I founded Dancing Fox to share our experience and techniques with other change makers, and to develop a mindbomb or two of our own. We believe in courage and creativity. We believe activism can be more invitational, more joyful, more hope and solutions based. We believe great stories have the power to change the world.

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Things I do

I'm a storyteller. Through my company, Dancing Fox, I'm available to speak about activism, my history with Greenpeace, and story as theory of change. We also provide strategic communications advice, run story workshops, and will lend a hand to anyone in a white hat looking to hack the operating system of the world.

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Here's a little recipe for saving a small planet...

Preserve 2 pristine polar seas
Add equatorial rainforests (intact)
Set aside 2/5ths of the world’s oceans
Sprinkle with reallocated military spending
Whisk in 1 energy revolution
Season with sustainable agriculture
Add fresh, clean drinking water

Let cool.

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And about that illustration...

Iris Maertens painted the picture in the background as a tribute to the original Greenpeace story team. Left to right: Tommy Crawford, Lucy Taylor, Brian Fitzgerald, Amrekha Sharma, and Iris Maertens. It's hard to imagine a finer bunch of book-loving pirate troublemakers. Love 'em all to bits.

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