Category: Journey

The BilboConsult consulting journey — honest reflections on building something new.

An Unexpected Journey: People Development at the Foot of the Himalayas

It is a curious thing about adventures: they do not arrive as adventures. They arrive as a phone call from a friend — on an April afternoon, on the road between Rovaniemi and Muonio, driving north through Lapland to a conference at Jeris Lakeside Resort.

Ilya called on the 9th of April. His brother Valentin works at a software company in Bhutan, he explained, and there was a team retreat coming up in Paro in May, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They were looking for someone to come and work with the developers on people development and values. Liisa and I listened together, leaning in as the picture took shape. By the time Ilya rang off, we were already half decided.

Anyone who has read Tolkien will recognise this moment. Bilbo Baggins was perfectly happy in his hobbit-hole when adventure came knocking — and perfectly certain he wanted nothing to do with it. I cannot say the same. But the shape is familiar: a door opens without warning, and what lies behind it is far bigger than the ordinary day suggested. That is also, of course, the name of this company. BilboConsult has always carried a quiet promise: the best journeys are the ones you never planned to take.

By May, Liisa and I were at Kichu Resort in Paro, with the Himalayan foothills outside the window, about to deliver BilboConsult’s first international engagement.

Kichu Resort, Paro, Bhutan — May 2026

Who is DTB?

Developer Tools Bhutan is the local entity of FIIT B.V., a Dutch software company. Their product, ComponentOne, is a UI component library used by enterprise development teams at Microsoft, IBM, IKEA, Tesla, Ford, ESPN, and Toshiba. The Paro team of 20–25 Bhutanese developers are technically excellent — and on the cusp of growing to 50 with 15 new joiners arriving imminently.

Managing Director Val gave me creative latitude and genuine trust from our very first conversation. That trust shaped everything that followed.

The Sessions

We designed two 75-minute interactive workshops, built around DTB’s own values and the team’s real challenges.

Session 1 — “The Craft You Make Your Own”: Job Crafting

Drawing on Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton’s research, this session explored three ways any developer can actively reshape their work: through the tasks they take on (task crafting), the relationships they build (relational crafting), and the perspective they bring to it (cognitive crafting). The session built on what DTB’s team had already learned in a 2025 session on clean code — which participants still referenced a year later. The question at its heart: how do you own the quality of your work, regardless of what’s on your ticket?

Each participant left with a signed 30-day commitment card — one concrete thing they would do differently.

Session 2 — “A Team Worth Joining”: Values in Action

DTB has four written core values: Integrity, Innovation, Customer Success, and Community. Beautiful words. But what do they actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon, when you’re debugging at 4pm or welcoming a nervous new colleague on their first day?

Working together, the team surfaced the behavioural expressions of each value — the specific, concrete actions that bring these principles to life in daily work. The most tangible outcome: onboarding material for the 15 incoming developers, written entirely in the team’s own words. Authentic, grounded, theirs.

We also opened a deliberate conversation about artificial intelligence — not as threat or hype, but as an innovation in service of quality, anchored in the values the team had just articulated together.

The Experience

DTB Training Retreat 2026 — Kichu Resort, Paro, Bhutan

I was accompanied by my wife, Eeva-Liisa. Bhutan is not a typical business trip destination, and having her alongside made this a shared adventure as much as a professional engagement.

The country does something to you. The philosophy of Gross National Happiness — measuring progress by the wellbeing of people, not only by economic output — turns out to be a perfect frame for conversations about craft and purpose. The team’s warmth, curiosity, and genuine commitment to each other made every session feel alive.

What I valued most was the people themselves. These were not a team that needed to be built — they were already relational, already committed, already caring about their work. They needed permission and language to name what they were already doing well, and tools to take it intentionally further.

What the Team Said

The anonymous feedback cards from Session 2 told their own story. Participants described the retreat as insightful, exceptional, engaging, inspiring, fulfilling. They asked for more time, longer sessions, and more Q&A. One developer noted that the activities helped them “gain deeper insights into work they had previously considered mundane.” Another reflected on how meaningful it was to speak with international professionals “who were actually present when modern programming was born.”

Val published the team’s own reflection on the retreat — “Cultivating Our Craft: Reflections on the 2026 DTB Training Retreat” — and described the session output as authentic onboarding material born directly from the team’s own words.

Feedback specifically noted my “playful yet concrete activities” — a balance I care about deeply. Learning should be rigorous and enjoyable at the same time.

What This Meant to Me

This was BilboConsult’s first international engagement. But the significance went beyond that milestone.

I have built this practice around a single purpose: to help people and teams develop their best selves — not through frameworks imposed from the outside, but through genuine conversation and discovery. Bhutan gave me the rare gift of living that purpose without compromise. I could focus entirely on people development. I could follow my curiosity across a completely new context. I could work across languages, cultures, and worldviews without once losing the thread of what matters.

And I could do it with Liisa by my side.

The title of this piece borrows from Tolkien — and from the name of this company, which is itself a nod to Bilbo Baggins, the reluctant adventurer who discovers that the journey he did not plan for turns out to be the one that defines him. It really was an unexpected journey. It really was an adventure. And it was one of the most successful and fulfilling things I have done as a consultant.

What’s Next

The relationship with DTB and FIIT continues. As the team grows toward 50, there are conversations about annual retreats, manager onboarding for the new cohort, and deeper work on the human side of software development. I’m looking forward to what comes next.

And I’m grateful to Ilya for the unexpected phone call on an ordinary Finnish evening that started all of this.

BilboConsult helps individuals, teams, and organisations find clarity about who they are and how they work — through facilitation, coaching, and leadership development. If your team is growing and you want to make sure the culture you’re building is worth joining, get in touch.

May 27, 2026
The Intentional Living Engine — Why Your Life Needs an Operating Model

I’ve spent 40 years helping organisations design operating models — the systems, processes, and governance that make things actually work. A few months ago, I started applying the same thinking to my own life. Not because my life was broken, but because I kept noticing a pattern: I’d have a good idea, make some progress, get busy, and then quietly move on to the next thing. The ideas were fine. The follow-through wasn’t.

So I built what I now call an Intentional Living Engine. It’s an operating model for my life.

What I Mean by Operating Model

In IT management, an operating model answers a straightforward question: how does this organisation actually run? What processes exist, what systems support them, how does information flow, and who is responsible for what?

A Personal Operating Model asks the same question about your life. It makes visible the systems you already have — whether you’ve named them or not — and the ones you’re missing. Where does your information live? What happens daily, weekly, monthly to keep things on track? What gets automated, what needs your judgment, and what needs a real conversation?

Most of us have informal versions of this. A calendar. Some to-do lists. Maybe a journal. What I found is that making it explicit and intentional changed how I relate to my own commitments.

Starting with Purpose, Not Tasks

Here’s what I got wrong at first: I started with productivity. Better task management, more automation, smarter inbox processing. And those things matter — but they’re not the point.

The point is purpose.

For me, that purpose is rooted in faith. Living close to God. Being fully present with my wife, my family, my friends. Serving my community. The operating model exists to help me actually do those things consistently — not just think about them or plan to do them.

But the framework works regardless of what your purpose is. The core question the system asks every day is the same: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be?

That’s a different question from “what do I need to get done today?” Productivity systems optimise for throughput — how many tasks can you check off. An Intentional Living Engine optimises for faithfulness — are you living the life you actually want?

What I’ve Built

After a few months of building, testing, and honestly also overbuilding, here’s what I’ve found matters. There are ten dimensions to a Personal Operating Model, and I’ll share the headlines here. I plan to write more about each one.

Vision and purpose come first. Without clarity on what the system is for, it becomes a treadmill. I use a framework of four domains — Contemplation, Constitution, Community, and Craft — with a deliberate priority order. Faith and health before business.

Life architecture means mapping out your areas of responsibility. I have 18, from faith and marriage to business development and household maintenance. Each gets regular attention through a weekly rotation. The upstream priorities get reviewed first. That’s not just organisation — it’s a statement of values encoded in a schedule.

Information architecture is about having one place to look. My Obsidian vault is the index of my life. Not everything lives there, but everything is reachable from there. When I open my daily journal in the morning, I can see and reach every decision that needs my attention. At least, that’s the goal — making the links reliable is still a work in progress.

Process architecture has three layers: a pipeline for mechanical data processing that runs invisibly, a cockpit (the daily journal) that presents information clearly, and a conversation layer — a morning standup with AI that doesn’t just list tasks but asks questions about what matters.

Automation and AI strategy follows a simple principle: use the simplest technology that works. Deterministic scripts for routine processing. A local language model for classification tasks that need more intelligence than regex but less than a full conversation. And a frontier AI for the genuine dialogues — morning reflection, strategic thinking, the conversations where being challenged is the whole point.

Technology choices matter less than you’d think. What matters is that each component has a clear role, and when one piece is unavailable, the whole system degrades gracefully rather than breaking.

Lifecycle tracking means that tasks, opportunities, and commitments each have defined states. The system doesn’t just tell me what’s new — it surfaces what’s stuck, what’s overdue, and what deserves to be celebrated.

Review cadences give the system its rhythm. Daily for orientation. Weekly for feel and direction — how did it go? Monthly for data — what do the numbers say about health, finances, goal progress? Quarterly for strategy — am I doing the right things? Each cadence has a different character, and mixing them up makes them all less useful.

Governance means the system itself gets maintained. Documentation is a first-class output. And there’s a question built into my monthly review that keeps me honest: is the system helping me achieve my goals, or am I just enjoying building it? Because building systems is fun, and that’s a legitimate risk.

Human factors are the most important dimension. If I open the system with curiosity in the morning, it’s working. If I open it with dread, it’s not. Joy matters. The satisfaction of checking things off matters. A system you avoid is worse than no system at all.

What I’ve Learned So Far

Three things stand out.

First, purpose before productivity. Every design decision gets tested against the question: does this help me live faithfully? Not “does this make me more efficient?” Efficiency in service of the wrong things is just faster drifting.

Second, enterprise thinking works at personal scale — if you strip it down. I’m drawing on TOGAF, ITIL, Wardley Mapping, and GTD. Configuration management, capability mapping, service value streams — these are design patterns for complex systems, and your life is a complex system. But you have to be ruthless about what to keep and what to drop. Most enterprise architecture is overhead at a scale of one.

Third, the biggest enemy is the good-idea cycle. New idea, burst of energy, initial progress, life gets busy, new idea replaces old one. The operating model’s job is to break that cycle — not by being rigid, but by making it visible. Here’s where you said you wanted to be. Here’s where you are. Here’s what changed and why. You decide — but with clear sight, not in the fog of busyness.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’m building this for myself, and I’m genuinely enjoying it. But I also notice that the methods and frameworks are not specific to me. The purpose is personal — yours will be different from mine. But the architecture of intentional living is universal.

Over the coming months, I’ll share more about specific components: the daily journal as a life cockpit, the three-tier AI strategy, the review cadence framework, and the design principles that make the difference between a system you love and a system you abandon.

If you’re someone who has plenty of good ideas but struggles to make them stick — or if you’ve tried productivity tools and found them useful but somehow not enough — I think you’ll find something here.

Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant based in Helsinki. He helps organisations with transformation, service integration, and governance — and is currently applying the same thinking to the question of how to live well and intentionally.

Get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or connect on LinkedIn.

May 7, 2026
April, May, and a lot of forward motion

April and May are turning out to be months I’ll remember for a long time. A lot has happened, more is coming, and I’ve been bad at writing about any of it. So here’s the field report.

VikingPLoP. Earlier this month I was in Jerisjärvi presenting my first academic paper — Finding Your First Client: A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups — at VikingPLoP 2026. After 40 years in the industry, writing an academic paper was genuinely new territory, and I found I enjoyed it. The conference itself brought together researchers and practitioners who take the craft of documenting patterns seriously, and the conversations were worth the journey. The paper is available here, and the pattern work will continue — I expect to develop it further in the coming weeks.

Where BilboConsult is heading. The strategy has evolved considerably. AI governance and transformation — helping organisations move from AI adoption to actual AI-driven change — is the work I’m building toward. There’s a framing I came across recently that captures the problem well. George Sivulka, writing in a16z News, puts it this way: “AI just made every individual 10x more productive. No company became 10x more valuable as a result. Where did the productivity go?” That gap — between individual AI productivity and institutional transformation — is where the meaningful work is, and where real value can still be found. Most organisations I talk to are somewhere in the middle of exactly that gap.

What’s ahead in May. The next few weeks are full and exciting. A few days in Lapland with old colleagues to kick things off. Then I’m travelling to deliver a leadership workshop at a company retreat — in Paro, Bhutan, which was something of a surprise development and is obviously super exciting. En route, I’ll be stopping in Delhi for a day on each leg of the journey. Then back to Helsinki in time for a wedding in Tampere and a funeral — May holds both, and that’s just how life is sometimes.

More coming soon. I have a piece in the pipeline on something I’ve been building quietly in the background — something that I think will resonate with more than a few of you.

April 24, 2026
From Reflection to Jerisjärvi — Presenting at VikingPLoP 2026

Six months ago, I had never written an academic paper. I had never presented at a conference. And I had never started a company.

That last one — founding BilboConsult — set the other two in motion. When my long-time friend Stefan Holtel invited me to submit to VikingPLoP, a conference on pattern languages, I hesitated. Pattern languages come from architecture and software engineering — rigorous, structured, peer-reviewed. I come from decades of doing the work, not writing about it.

But I kept a reflection habit throughout the founding process, and the patterns kept surfacing. Problems I recognized. Solutions that worked — or didn’t. Forces pulling in opposite directions. So I started writing.

The paper

“Finding Your First Client: A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups” documents nine patterns across three phases — from establishing your market signal to landing that first paying engagement. At its heart is what I call the Consulting Credibility Bootstrap: the paradox of needing a track record to win clients while having no way to build one without them.

What makes it unusual is that it’s a live field report. I wrote it while living through the patterns, not looking back on them. The paper includes real missteps, real pivots, and honest gaps where the outcome was still unknown at the time of writing.

You can read the conference version here:

Download the paper (PDF)

Gratitude

This paper would not exist without the people who shaped it.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock shepherded the paper through multiple revisions with patience, precision, and a gift for asking the questions I was avoiding. Stefan didn’t just convince me to write it — he walked alongside the entire process, from first outline to final edits.

The sparring partners who stress-tested my thinking throughout the founding journey — Reetta, Teemu, Ville, Marko, Rob, Michael, Olli, Mathias, Mike, Nikke, Toomas, Pauliina, Edwin, and the wider Business Espoo community — will find their fingerprints throughout the patterns. Every honest conversation shaped the framework.

And to everyone who read the peer review version in March and sent feedback: thank you. You made the paper better than I could have alone.

What’s next

This week I’m in Jerisjärvi to present the paper and participate in the writers’ workshops that are central to VikingPLoP. The process doesn’t end with the conference — it’s where the next round of refinement begins.

If the patterns resonate with your own experience of starting something new, I’d love to hear from you.

April 7, 2026
Finding Your First Client — An Academic Paper Born from a Real Consulting Launch
I have never been a very academic person. I haven’t studied at university, and I haven’t published an academic paper before. Then again, until five months ago I also had never started my own company either.

But what I have always done is reflect on what I’m doing — thinking about the methodology, the patterns, and the lessons hidden inside the experience. So when a good friend invited me to join VikingPLoP, a conference on architectural patterns, an idea clicked: what if I turned the lessons from launching BilboConsult into a proper pattern language paper? My learning becoming something other people can use too, and I also dig into the world of academic writing and pattern languages.

From reflection to framework

Pattern languages — a method originating from architecture — describe recurring problems and their solutions as interconnected patterns. Instead of writing a business plan or a how-to guide, I chose to document what I was learning as nine interdependent patterns, each with the forces that pull in different directions, the solution I found, and honest reflection on what worked and what didn’t.

The core problem the paper tackles is the Consulting Credibility Bootstrap: you need a track record to win clients, but you can’t build a track record without clients. That paradox defined my first months as an independent consultant — and it became the thread running through the entire paper.

The nine patterns

Fig. 1: Finding Your First Client — Pattern Language Overview

The paper presents nine patterns organized in three phases:

Establishing Foundations — Signal the Market, Listen to Market Gravity, Narrow Your Beachhead. These form a feedback loop: your signal generates market responses, those responses reveal where your real pull is, and that sharpens your positioning.

Building Evidence — Be Your Own Customer, Harvest Your History, Join Forces, Connect with Brokers. Different strategies for building credibility when you don’t yet have consulting references.

Converting to Revenue — Conduct a Warm Rehearsal, Land the Anchor Deal. Moving from conversations to contracts.

The patterns aren’t a checklist. They work as a toolkit — you weave between them based on your situation.

Signal types and what I learned

Fig. 2: Signal Types and Market Response

One of the most concrete findings: three distinct signal types produced measurably different responses. Authenticity beats self-marketing for building relationships, but mentioning a specific, urgent market problem is what converts attention into potential revenue. Both signal types matter — authenticity opens doors, but the problem-specific hook is what pulls prospects through them.

The journey

BilboConsult journey: October 2025 – March 2026

What makes this paper unusual for the academic world is that it’s a live field report. I’m not looking back on a successful journey — I’m writing from the middle of it. The paper documents real mistakes (like marketing to the wrong beachhead for two months because of confirmation bias), real pivots (narrowing from broad SIAM transformation to AI governance advisory), and patterns where the outcome is still unknown (I haven’t closed my first client yet, and the paper says so).

Why I’m sharing this now

The paper will be presented at VikingPLoP 2026 in April. The conference version deadline is March 26. Before submitting, I want to do something the academic process doesn’t always allow: open the paper to broader peer review.

I’ve been fortunate to work with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock as my shepherd throughout the process. Her feedback has been invaluable. But a paper about consulting practice deserves feedback from other practitioners — people who’ve started practices, navigated the credibility gap, and built client relationships from scratch.

The paper

You can read the full paper here:

Download: Finding Your First Client — A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups (PDF)

Share your perspective — or join the peer review group

The paper includes ten reviewer questions embedded throughout the text, designed to guide feedback on the patterns, the honesty of the narrative, and whether the framework resonates with real experience. But you don’t need to follow those — any perspective is welcome.

If something rings true, tell me. If something feels off, I want to hear that too. A quick comment is just as valuable as a detailed review.

For those who’d like to go deeper, I’m forming a small peer review group of practitioners willing to read the paper and share structured feedback. This isn’t a formal academic review — it’s a conversation between people who’ve navigated similar terrain.

What’s involved:
- Read the paper (~8,000 words, 30-minute read)
- Share your thoughts — on the embedded questions, or in your own way
- Feedback by March 24 (so I can integrate it before the March 26 conference deadline)
- You’ll be acknowledged in the paper’s acknowledgments section
Interested? Send me a message at martin@bilboconsult.com or comment below. I’ll share the paper with commenting access so you can mark up directly.

I’ll also be reaching out to a few trusted sparring partners directly, but the more diverse the perspectives, the stronger the paper becomes. If you’ve started a consulting practice, navigated a career transition into independent work, or simply have a practitioner’s eye for what rings true — I’d value your input.

Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant at BilboConsult OY, Helsinki. He brings four decades of transformation leadership across Cognizant, Tieto, HCL, Nokia, and AXA Tech to help organizations navigate complex IT governance challenges.
March 18, 2026
Starting a New Season

Five months ago I registered BilboConsult as a company. At the time, I thought I was starting a business. I was wrong — or at least, I was thinking too small. What I’m actually doing is starting a new season of my life, and the business is just one part of it.

Let me back up.

I spent over forty years in IT management — at Nokia, Cognizant, Tieto, HCL, AXA Tech, and a handful of others. Big organizations, complex transformations, the kind of work where you spend years learning how to hold things together when everything wants to fall apart. Crisis management, service integration, governance. I got good at it. I loved it.

Then last year, at sixty, I decided to do something I’d always thought about but never quite dared: build something of my own.

The honest version

I could write the polished version of this story — the one where I had a clear vision from day one, executed a brilliant strategy, and here we are. But that’s not what happened.

The first few months of BilboConsult were messy. I built a website. I wrote a go-to-market plan. I networked. I studied frameworks and positioning and all the things you’re supposed to do. Some of it was useful. Much of it was premature. I was moving fast without being clear about where I was actually going.

So in early March, I did what I’d advise any client to do: I stopped, took an honest look at what was working and what wasn’t, and made a deliberate pivot.

What changed

The pivot wasn’t dramatic from the outside, but it was clarifying from the inside. Instead of trying to be everything — fractional CIO, SIAM consultant, transformation advisor — I asked a simpler question: where does my forty years of governance experience meet the most urgent market need right now?

The answer turned out to be AI governance.

Not the technology side of AI — there are plenty of brilliant people working on models and algorithms. But the governance side: risk management, human oversight, documentation, incident response, compliance frameworks. The EU AI Act lands in August, and most organizations are treating it as a technology problem. It’s not. It’s a governance problem. And governance is what I’ve been practicing my entire career.

That realization sharpened everything. The positioning, the partnerships I’m developing, the content I want to create — it all started to align.

What else is growing

But here’s the thing about starting a new season: it’s not only about work.

I’m learning Finnish. Not conversational Finnish picked up over coffee — I’m in an actual classroom, at A1 level, stumbling through verb conjugations alongside people half my age. It’s humbling in the best way. There’s something about being a genuine beginner again that recalibrates your relationship with competence. You can’t hide behind expertise when you can barely order lunch.

I’m also writing an academic paper. It’s for VikingPLoP, a pattern language conference, and it documents patterns for experienced professionals starting a consulting practice. The strange thing about writing an academic paper on your own live experiment is that you can’t hide behind theory — the results are unfolding in real time, and the paper has to be honest about that.

And I’m working with AI in ways I didn’t expect. Not just studying AI governance — actually using AI tools as a daily operating partner. Building systems, writing, thinking, planning. It’s changed how I work, and it’s given me a practitioner’s perspective that most governance consultants don’t have.

Slow is fine

None of this is happening fast. BilboConsult is pre-revenue. The partnerships I’m building are in early conversations. The Finnish course runs through June. The paper isn’t submitted yet.

A few months ago, that slowness would have bothered me. I would have seen it as falling behind. Now I see it differently: things are taking root. The direction is right. The foundations are solid. And I’d rather build something real than rush something hollow.

I named the company after Bilbo Baggins for a reason. Not because of the adventure — because of the unexpected journey. The one where you leave your comfortable life, discover capabilities you didn’t know you had, and come back transformed. The journey matters more than the speed.

What to expect from this space

This is my first post here, but it won’t be the last. I’ll be writing about AI governance — what the EU AI Act actually requires, how existing governance frameworks map to it, and what organizations should be doing now. I’ll share what I’m learning, both professionally and personally. And I’ll be honest about the journey: what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m figuring out along the way.

If you’re navigating a similar transition — whether it’s starting something new, finding your footing after decades in corporate life, or trying to make sense of the AI governance landscape — I’d love to hear from you.

The season is just beginning.

Martin Kallenbach is the founder of BilboConsult, an independent IT management consultancy based in Helsinki, Finland. He brings over forty years of experience in IT governance, service integration, and organizational transformation.

March 11, 2026

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