
Day-to-day pressures and compounding complexity leave little room for strategic thinking. Without dedicated space to step back, it is too easy to get trapped in reacting to the present rather than shaping our future.
This is where imagination comes in.
Founded by Professor Kieran Fenby-Hulse, One Little Spark helps organisations create space for curiosity, reflection and creative thinking, supporting teams to explore new perspectives, work collaboratively, and design the futures they want to shape.
Imagination is often thought to be something abstract or artistic. In reality, it’s one of the most practical capabilities leaders can develop. Imagination enables leaders to:

When imagination is placed at the heart of leadership conversations, teams rediscover energy, clarity, and direction.
One Little Spark works with:
In each case, the goal is the same: to create the conditions where new thinking can emerge.
We support organisations through a range of imaginative interventions. Most of our engagements begin with one of the following:

Living Strategy Workshop: a facilitated session for leadership teams to think differently and develop shared strategic insight. Designed to encourage curiosity, dialogue, and imaginative thinking.
Impact Intervention: a session to reanimate your strategies and ensure your project isn’t just a moment in time, but a living, breathing contribution to your community and place.
Future Leaders Foundry: programmes and sessions designed to cultivate imagination as a leadership capability. Learn practical approaches for navigating complexity, encouraging creativity, and fostering collaborative thinking.
Talks and Keynotes: Provocative and engaging talks and performances that explore imagination in leadership, strategy, and organisational life. Drawing on the energy of cabaret, the disruption of punk, and the rigour of academia, these keynotes spark ideas and confront business-as-usual.


One Little Spark was founded by Professor Kieran Fenby-Hulse, an experienced facilitator, leader, and creative researcher. Kieran’s work focuses on the role imagination plays in leadership, strategy, and collaboration. Drawing on over 20 years experience working with universities, public organisations and civic partnerships, he helps leaders step back from immediate pressures and explore new perspectives.
His approach combines thoughtful facilitation, academic rigour, and a DIY punk ethos. As an LGBTQ+ man and father living on the North Yorkshire coast in Redcar, Kieran’s practice is rooted in the belief that imagination is not just a corporate tool, but a radical, lived practice of world-building from the edges. He creates the space, structure, and support for leaders and teams to step outside, dream differently, and design new futures.
Every organisation’s challenges are different. If you are curious about how imagination could support your team or organisation, let’s have a chat.

Join The Tinderbox, our dispatch on leading imaginative organisations, living imaginative lives, and loving imaginative places.
The Sunday morning read for those ready to build the extraordinary.
Kieran is a very talented facilitator who brings creativity and fun to every interaction. He ran a brilliant session which enabled us to identify ‘golden threads’ of coherence across a complex programme. With Kieran’s guidance, we were able to refine our future strategy to ensure we the whole team was better focused on our shared goals and understood the pathway (and pitfalls) to meeting them.
Sarah Chaytor, Director of Research Policy and Strategy (University College London)
Kieran has a rare and powerful gift: the ability to envision what’s possible and inspire others to believe in it too. If you’re looking for fresh thinking and transformative support, I wholeheartedly recommend getting in touch to see where your imagination can take you!
Dr Helen Moore, Associate Professor (Teesside University)
I commissioned Kieran as the keynote for the Christie NHS Foundation Trust inaugural EDI conference. Kieran’s work in the performance space is truly novel and thought provoking. His cabaret brought to life the very real conundrum between data and lived experience in a way that cannot be ignored. The participants commented on how thought provoking this evidence based performance was and how it made them interrogate opportunities around data and EDI. I would highly recommend Kieran for his unique ability to make complexity accessible.
Dr Kelly Pickard-Smith (University of Exeter)

Join The Tinderbox, our dispatch on leading imaginative organisations, living imaginative lives, and loving imaginative places.
The Sunday morning read for those ready to build the extraordinary.