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Meet the Team
Behavioural Scientist and Leadership Consultant
Dr Ian Stewart
I'm fascinated by why people behave the way they do. Throughout my career I've worked with military leaders, CEOs, boards, governments, universities and entrepreneurial founders. Despite their very different worlds, I kept noticing the same thing. Intelligent, experienced people often made surprisingly predictable mistakes. Under pressure they reverted to familiar ways of thinking, teams fell into recurring patterns, and organisations repeated behaviours they believed they had already fixed.
That observation eventually became Hidden Patterns.
The central idea is simple. Beneath the behaviours we can all see lie hidden mental patterns—our assumptions, habits, learned scripts and ways of interpreting the world. These patterns quietly shape how we lead, collaborate, make decisions, deal with conflict, innovate and respond when the pressure is on. If we can understand those hidden patterns, we can understand behaviour much more accurately and, more importantly, help people change it.
That's what the Hidden Patterns approach is designed to do. It isn't about putting people into personality boxes or telling them who they are. It's about revealing the behavioural patterns that drive performance, culture and decision-making, then helping people become more adaptable, more self-aware and ultimately more effective.
My professional background is in behavioural science and leadership development. Over the past twenty-five years I've designed leadership academies, executive programmes and organisational development initiatives for clients across defence, government, higher education and the private sector, including the Public Investment Fund in Saudi Arabia, LHH, Kaplan, leading business schools and the UK Ministry of Defence.
Before founding Hidden Patterns, I was Head of Behavioural Science at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where I established and led the Department of Applied Behavioural Science.
Sandhurst was an extraordinary place to study leadership because it demonstrated every day that success rarely depends on technical competence alone. Character, judgement, identity, relationships and the ability to adapt under pressure matter just as much.
Behaviour is rarely random. Understand the pattern, and you can change the outcome
Andy Perkins
Investor, Innovator & ENTREPRENEUR
I back and build ventures through businesses including HiddenPatterns™, Procountancy™, Meta Team™ and The Financial Modelling Institute™.
Across every investment, advisory role, and startup I’ve helped scale, one uncomfortable truth keeps surfacing: Innovation rarely fails because of the idea. It fails because of how people behave when the pressure hits.
That’s why I’m especially excited to be part of Hidden Patterns™ and working again with Dr. Ian Stewart.
The behavioural lens we’ve developed gives investors, founders, and venture teams something they’ve never had before: a clearer way to predict and shape behaviour under pressure. The result is stronger teams, sharper execution, and a significantly higher probability of return on innovation investment.
My own journey began in accountancy. After training at BDO, I built and grew my own practice in London’s West End from 1983 until its sale in 2026. Along the way, I moved from finance into financial education, becoming CEO of EW FACT plc—the first FTSE-listed training business.
I launched a dot-com venture in 1999 during the wild west of the early web, was part of the sale of The Financial Training Company to Kaplan in a uniquely democratic transaction where every employee held equity, and went on to work with Kaplan in both the UK and US.
From there, I built and scaled a leadership development business with an exclusive partnership with the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, delivering major global programmes across London, Tokyo, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, the UAE, Qatar, Oman and Jordan.
Kaplan later invited me back as Global VP. Over seven years on the senior leadership team in the US, I led an forward thinking intrapreneurial project with an international team aswell as the acquisition of a successful learning business in Dubai.
In 2021, my wife and I moved to Valencia to focus on our most successful start-ups yet: Juno 4 and Mila 3.
Today I invest in, advise, and build ventures with one clear focus: helping teams develop the behavioural range to scale under pressure and turn innovation into results.
Great ideas matter. Behaviour under pressure matters more. My work sits where innovation, leadership, and commercial performance meet.