Interdisciplinary by nature
Careers do not sit inside one discipline and neither does the thinking that helps them. Claudia brings negotiation, systems thinking, political philosophy and plain human attention into the same room.
About
From Kleve to Zimbabwe, from South America to the European institutions. A life spent learning to think across lines.
Claudia Bülbül founded Senso Global Consulting after twenty years in personal and professional development, international cooperation and conflict resolution. This is how she got here.
Claudia Bülbül
Consultant, Advisor, Facilitator
The story
It started with a photograph in a local newspaper.
Claudia was ten years old. The picture in the NRZ, the daily paper of her small hometown of Kleve at the very western edge of Germany, showed a bird soaked in oil after a tanker had run aground. What she remembers is not the photograph. It is what happened in her body: compassion for the animal, sadness at how helpless the whole situation was, and then anger, rising from her stomach to her throat to the top of her head. By the time it arrived there, it had become a decision. She would do something about injustice.
She did not become an environmentalist, which would have been the obvious route. She went sideways. As a teenager she felt an early and lasting pull towards people and cultures unlike her own. Time in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, taught her two things at once: that there is far more to the world than central Europe, and that Europe carries a responsibility that emerged from its own colonial history. After school came Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and a first understanding of how organisations, national governments and international cooperation actually connect, and how much depends on the individual humans inside those systems.
Back in Europe, she found she felt European in a way that surprised her. That interest led into supranational work, the EU and the UN, and into the long and complicated relationship between the European Union and Turkey. From there came conflict resolution, international negotiation, the Middle East and political philosophy: different disciplines with one thread running through them.
The thread is this. In every sector she worked in, academia, international business, development and cooperation, the deciding factor was never the structure. It was the people inside the structure, and how well they understood themselves when the structure changed. Twenty years on, that is the whole of her practice.
Today
What Claudia does now
She advises senior professionals in government, NGOs, INGOs and international development at the point where the institution around them changes. A restructuring, a mandate that ended, a funding decision made somewhere above them. Her clients have not lost their competence. They have lost the context that made it legible, and those are very different problems. She works with them on both questions: the practical one about what comes next, and the harder one underneath it about who they are without the title. She also works with organisations directly, as an external consultant, facilitator and trainer, through transitions, leadership development and intercultural collaboration.
How she works
Four commitments
Human first, then strategic
The practical work on CVs, profiles and positioning is real and thorough. It only lands, though, once the person underneath the title has been properly heard.
Honest about scope
This is strategic professional support. It is not therapy, and it makes no promise of employment, salary or placement. What it does promise is clarity, structure and materials that finally say what you actually did.
Rooted in Germany, at home in the EU
Claudia works in English and German, with a deep working knowledge of German public institutions and the European landscape her clients move within.
Where she has worked
Sectors and settings
- Public administration and government
- NGOs and international NGOs
- International development and cooperation
- European and supranational institutions
- Academia and research
- International business
- Conflict resolution and international negotiation
The best way to know whether the fit is right is a conversation.
Thirty minutes, online, no preparation needed.
Book your intro call