Skip Bowman

I didn't set out to investigate the energy system. I set out to understand why my bill tripled when my neighbour's didn't.

I'm an organisational psychologist. For twenty-five years I've diagnosed why systems that look functional are actually broken — and why the people inside them can't see it. I've done this for banks, hospitals, governments, and multinationals across five countries.

In 2022, the same skills turned inward.

My wife is Danish. We live in Copenhagen. In 2020, at the height of COVID, we bought and renovated a French estate and turned it into tourist accommodation. The timing was catastrophic.

COVID closed the borders. Then the energy crisis hit. Gas prices destroyed what was left of the business model. Between the two crises, we lost approximately £230,000.

That's not a statistic. That's a kitchen table with a calculator on it and a marriage under pressure.

What I couldn't understand was why my neighbour Peter was fine. Same street. Same winter. Same war. His bills barely moved. Mine tripled.

So I did what I do professionally. I stopped looking at the symptoms and started mapping the system.

What I found wasn't a broken system. It was one working exactly as designed.