Principals

Experienced judgement makes serious conversations possible.

Bearing & Course Principals are not service-line owners, practice leads or CVs in another form. The point is the judgement: how experienced people read the room, find the real issue, test the assumptions and create confidence around consequential work.

The Principal role

Senior independent practitioners connected by a shared Bearing & Course standard.

Our Principals are senior independent practitioners brought together through Bearing & Course by shared standards of judgement, discretion and accountability.

Each brings their own professional standing and point of view. What connects them is not hierarchy, but the quality of judgement they bring to complex work and the standard they uphold when working with clients through Bearing & Course.

They also shape the wider Practice Community, ensuring specialist capability is brought into the work with context, discipline and clear accountability.

David John

LinkedIn

David works where strategy, governance and delivery need to become an operating model that can hold.

He is often closest to the point where ambition has outgrown the systems, information and accountability around it. His work is shaped by environments where leaders need more than confidence in good people. They need confidence in the way decisions are made, obligations are managed, progress is governed and risk is brought into view.

David brings shape to complex work: what matters, what is unclear, what needs to be owned, and what must be true before an organisation can move forward credibly.

Debbie Marshall

LinkedIn

Debbie knows whether control is real, or simply described.

Her work sits in the discipline of assurance, risk, controls and management systems, with a practical focus on what an organisation can prove. She reads governance arrangements, processes and evidence for what they reveal about how the business actually operates.

Debbie brings rigour without theatre. In environments where scrutiny, certification, client confidence or regulatory confidence matter, she helps turn control from a promise into something leaders can rely on.

Amit Padhiar

LinkedIn

Amit works where data, technology and trust need to become clear executive choices.

He is strongest where organisations are weighing ambition against consequence: what information should be collected, how it should be governed, what systems need to support it, what risks must be managed, and what level of confidence the organisation is ready to sustain.

Amit brings strategic clarity without losing governance discipline. His value sits in helping leaders see the choices beneath digital and data decisions, particularly where privacy, accountability and trust matter.

Andrew Rice

LinkedIn

Andrew works where confidence in people, entities and transactions needs to be designed, evidenced and relied upon.

His work is relevant to organisations operating under legal, regulatory, contractual or reputational scrutiny, where knowing who you are dealing with is not administrative. It is a control point. That may involve customer due diligence, verification, onboarding, access, assurance, escalation or the broader governance required to make trust defensible.

Andrew brings clear judgement to high-consequence trust problems. He helps organisations understand what must be known, what must be proven, and what needs to hold when regulators, partners, clients or counterparties expect confidence by design.

Dhugal Ford

LinkedIn

Dhugal understands the human system that determines whether change actually holds.

His work sits beneath the formal plan: leadership behaviour, alignment, trust, resistance, decision-making and the patterns that shape performance. He is strongest where organisations need people across different roles, teams or locations to adopt a new way of working without losing momentum.

Dhugal brings calm, commercial and deeply human judgement to complex change. He helps make visible what an organisation is really ready for, and what must shift before new obligations, systems or operating models become part of how work is actually done.