About
Bad systems make good people behave badly.
The structure is doing more of the work than the person is. So we repair the structure.
More aliveness, and more elegance.
people
companies
regions
people
companies
regions
elegant.work is a transformative venture about aliveness: for people, for the companies they work in, and for the regions around them. A person at work is alive when their attention goes to the work only they can do, in a system that doesn't make good people behave badly. A company is alive when it notices what's going on, decides without friction, learns from what happened and doesn't depend on any one consultant, vendor or AI model, us included. A region is alive when its money, research and new ventures run through structures that don't extract, and that is what elegant.earth and théra are about. théra is a bioregional hub in France that Maria-Elena Daynes started and Carsten helped build. Elegance is the standard at all three: nothing wasted, everything load-bearing, the parts in right relation.
There’s an old joke. Two people standing by a river, someone comes floating past, drowning, screaming. They pull him out. Then another one. Then another. Eventually one of them turns around and starts walking upstream.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m gonna go find out who’s throwing them in.”
So, really, my job description is a joke: to go as far upstream as possible to fix the problem where it originates, instead of spending huge amounts of energy trying to fix downstream effects.
That walk upstream is the whole practice; Home shows how it runs inside a company.
It definitely shouldn't be me because I'm such a great entrepreneur — I'm not. It should be me because I'm a mechanic, someone who tinkers with the machine until it runs.
I can sit in a boardroom in a suit and be taken seriously, and I can sit on the grass with a brilliant regenerative hippy and figure out together what they could bring to a corporate. Both feel I'm somewhat different from them, but close enough to trust.
And as this grows, none of it is supposed to be handled by me. The practice is built so other people can run it.
Carsten ChristianiAn MBA, twenty years of consulting, startups and impact work, and the last decade at the edge of regenerative work where nobody had a budget.
The people you work with
Being an expert in your niche, and seeing the whole system the niche sits in, and having built real things with your own hands, is rare, and it's the combination we hire for. What we share is an interest in building things that are alive: alive companies, alive people. Every one of us builds hands-on with software and AI.
Carsten Christiani
Founder
Upstream diagnosis and systematising work with AI
Takes the problem apart until he sees why it keeps failing, stops the bleeding, then walks upstream to where it starts.
LinkedIn profile of Carsten Christiani
Daniel Zidon
Partner
ERP systems, process documentation, web operations
Reads the client's ERP and its running processes with AI, documents what happens, and keeps the website and data plumbing working.
LinkedIn profile of Daniel ZidonJo Petroni
Partner
AI sense-making and AI workflow building
Runs workshops where a team works out what AI means for its own work, then builds the few AI workflows worth keeping.
LinkedIn profile of Jo Petroni
Victor Vorski
Partner
AI coordination agents and organisation design
Builds AI agents that hold context across teams, match needs to offers and chase commitments, and reorganises who decides what.
LinkedIn profile of Victor VorskiAngus Shaw
Partner
Project delivery and client services with AI
Turns the fix into a delivery plan with owners and dates, drawing on project knowledge from across the business, and keeps it moving until it runs.
LinkedIn profile of Angus Shaw
Krzysztof Karolczak
Partner
Personal AI systems and software development
Builds the founder a personal AI system that carries their context and voice and takes over email, reports and follow-ups.
LinkedIn profile of Krzysztof KarolczakMartin Hohn
Partner
Placemaking and hospitality for regenerative projects
Develops place and hospitality concepts for regenerative projects, and hosts a team for days of sense-making when the work needs time together.
LinkedIn profile of Martin Hohn
Maria-Elena Daynes
Partner
Change management and leadership coaching
Coaches leaders through a change, and knows from taking a bioregional hub from an idea to open doors in a year what it takes to make one real.
LinkedIn profile of Maria-Elena DaynesWe live between Portugal and Poland, and near Boston.
If you are in Europe, one of us can be in the room without a long flight, and our working days overlap from the US east coast to eastern Europe. None of these places is an office. They are where we live. Around us are people we have worked with before, whom we bring in when a problem needs them.
- Boston
- Portugal
- France
- Germany
- Switzerland
- Poland
- Boston
- Portugal
- France
- Germany
- Switzerland
- Poland
How we operate
Two or three people with AI in the stack can do what used to take ten.
AI does the research, the summaries, the documentation and a lot of the coordinating. People do what only people can: read what's actually going on in a system, make the call, and hold the relationship when it gets hard.
There's no office and no pyramid, so there's no overhead looking for work to justify itself.
Who this is for
We're industry-agnostic on purpose. The companies we work with skew entrepreneurial: often founder-led or owner-run, but not only.
A COO whose team keeps solving the same problem in a different form every quarter. A founder who has hired consultants before and the structure still has not changed. A team that knows something is wrong and cannot name what it is.
Who this is not for
Fully commercial is fine, and even preferred. But if you take more value than you create and are proud of that, this won’t work.
Where the money goes
elegant.work is the consulting arm of elegant.earth.
The regenerative and impact space is full of brilliant people with genuine knowledge and real tools who have been bootstrapping for years at grassroots scale, often unpaid. Standard consulting does not have what they know. We bring them into client work alongside seasoned consultants, and both sides get something they cannot find on their own.
Excess profit goes into regenerative work: théra, a bioregional hub Maria-Elena Daynes started in France and Carsten helped build, and a second one now being prepared in Friesland.
The bet is that doing it right is also the most profitable way to do it.