Stories. Rooms.
Ideas worth entering.
Connection is what makes them matter.
The work changed.
The instinct didn’t.
From corporate problem-solving to creative work, I’ve always been drawn to the same thing: understanding what makes people, ideas and systems move.
Complex rooms. Real stakes.
I built my career in technology, banking, project delivery and quality management — working inside large initiatives, complex teams and situations where making things work actually mattered.
I started building my own.
Consulting became strategy. Strategy became creative development. Over time, the work expanded into branding, websites, design, storytelling and the many places where business and creativity meet.
Different forms. Same curiosity.
Today that work lives through Mercure, Parler pour parler et Consulting — three very different expressions of the same interest in people, ideas, judgment, connection and what becomes possible when the conditions are right.
I’ve never really changed subjects.
I’ve just found better ways to explore them.
I spent much of my professional career as Doris Smith. Today I work and publish under a family name, Doris Proudlove.
The range is the advantage.
My training has never stayed neatly inside one discipline. Neither has the work.
Over the years, technology, project delivery, business analysis, coaching, human dynamics, design and entrepreneurship have all become part of the same working vocabulary.
Systems
Computer programming, technology, digital platforms and the logic of how things fit together.
Strategy
Project management, business analysis, delivery and making complicated ideas executable.
People
Coaching, human dynamics and an enduring interest in how people think, choose and respond to one another.
Design
Graphic design, web design and the visual architecture that shapes how an idea is experienced.
Business
Entrepreneurship, positioning and the practical realities of turning ideas into something people can actually use.
Facilitation
Creating the conditions in which people can think together without prescribing what they should think.
Choose where you want to go next.
A room. A story. A problem worth solving.
Give your team something
worth talking about.
Private facilitated experiences for small teams who want something more thoughtful than another meeting, workshop or virtual social.
EXPLORE PARLER POUR PARLER
Enter a story.
Stay for the world.
Mercurial is the House of Illustrated Cinema — original stories, serialized worlds and films made to be entered rather than simply watched.
ENTER MERCURIAL
Bring me the thing
you can’t quite solve alone.
FOR YOUR BUSINESS Fix the thing that’s held together by hope. Private working sessions and fractional engagements for the automation, system or process problem you can’t quite solve alone.
ENTER CONSULTINGA few words that stayed with me.
Reflections from clients and colleagues across different chapters of my career.
The School of Feminine Fortune