WHO WE ARE
We came together asking questions we couldn't answer alone.
So we built Fallow Bourne and brought the living world into the enquiry, as teacher, co-creator and co-facilitator.
OUR NAME
Fallow
Land consciously left unplanted for the soil to renew itself. Resting, so that what comes next has something to grow into.
Bourne
- A seasonal stream, running only when conditions are right.
- A threshold—the edge between known and unknown.
- A destination: not a fixed point, but a direction.
Fallow Bourne
A place of deliberate emptying, at the edge of what is known, with a vital current running through it.
CO-FOUNDER, FACILITATOR
Leadership Advisor · Published Author · Systemic Designer · Ecotherapist · Somatic Psychotherapist
Dr Melis Senova
Melis has spent three decades at the intersection of human development, systemic design, and the science of how people change. She is a published neuroscientist, the author of two internationally distributed books — This Human and Design Character (BIS Publishers) — and co-founder of Huddle, an award-winning strategic design firm.
Her research into the role of inner development in leadership sits at the precise boundary where neuroscience, somatic practice, and systemic design meet. Now her work is guided by this question:
How do we lead through times of great consequence?
That question has taken her into rooms holding significant influence. She holds active advisory relationships with government bodies, heads-of-state, and global institutions. She has taught post-graduate design at RMIT and Swinburne and has now dedicated her final act to creating life-giving regenerative cultures.
CO-FOUNDER, FACILITATOR
Senior Leader · Culture Maker · Educator · Ecotherapist · Learning Designer
Ruby Biscuit
Ruby began creating cultural events in the Arts, understanding early on that culture is not incidental to what an organisation does. It is what an organisation is.
That conviction carried her into three decades in executive roles across the private and public sectors — Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, NextEd Group, and MEGT. She has served on government advisory panels and industry association boards, and received leadership awards in her sector.
What would it take to build cultures that serve life?
Her path into ecotherapy was not a departure from this work. The living world, she found, holds things that organisations cannot — a different quality of witness, a different timescale, a different kind of honesty.
I worked closely with Ruby while I was in a Head of Sales role, and what had the biggest impact on me was how Ruby challenged my thinking. She has a knack for asking questions that get you thinking about how you are leading. This prompted a change in how I approached my role, and the type of leader I wanted to be. I'd recommend Ruby to any leader who's looking to think differently about the challenges they're facing and the role they play.
Melissa McKenzie
CO-FACILITATOR
The Living World
The third co-facilitator is not human. The foundation of eco-psychology is that the living world is not separate from human psychological life.
Every landscape we work within carries ecological memory and maturity — in its fungal networks, its seed relationships, its geology, its non-human life operating on timescales we cannot fully comprehend. We collaborate with these landscapes for their capacity to hold the work.
The body registers what the mind has learned to dismiss. Sustained, genuine encounter with the living world recalibrates the senses. The nervous system remembers what the mind has been trained to override.
We work within landscapes that have been known, tended and held in relationship long before we arrived — and we acknowledge this.
The living world has been holding thresholds far longer than we have.
WHAT WE STAND FOR
Six principles guide what we will do — and what we won't.
01
We create conditions for honest reckoning.
02
We work in genuine relationship with the living world.
03
We design for depth, not comfort.
04
We hold the threshold with care and responsibility.
05
We tend the edges so the quieter voices grow.
06