Setting the scene
It was one of those first real sunny afternoons of the year.
For months the streets of Strijp-S had felt less buzzing, almost quiet. Winter days in the Netherlands have a way of pushing people indoors. But when the first real sun appears, something shifts. The city wakes up again.
More people are outside. Terraces are filled. Sunglasses suddenly appeared everywhere. Dark rain jackets were swapped for more fashionable outfits. It felt like everyone had been waiting for this moment.
I headed over to Anne & Max, a coffee place that is in a building that houses both office and living spaces. It didn’t take long before I spotted Milou walking around the corner.
For both of us it had been a meeting-packed day where you move from room to room and barely notice the outside world. A week earlier we probably would have taken a seat inside. But today there was no discussion.
“Let’s sit outside, I’ve been inside long enough,” Milou said.
We grabbed a small table in the sun and around us the street had that early-spring energy.
When Milou sat down, something immediately caught my attention. Clipped to her belt was a large pager. The device looked almost outdated, like something from the era before smartphones existed. It almost looked comically big on her body.
When she adjusted it to sit on the chair I couldn’t resist asking about it.
She enthusiastically explained that she is currently training to become a volunteer firefighter. Pagers are still part of the system. When it goes off, she drops whatever she’s doing and heads to the fire station.
Right now she trains twice a week. Partly because she enjoys the physical challenge. But also because she wants to contribute to the local community.
It felt like a fitting start to the conversation.
Before we had even touched on work and physical activities, something was already clear: if something interests Milou, she steps into it.
What she does
Milou’s work revolves around the interaction between people and their environment.
With a background that combines psychology and engineering, she approaches projects from both perspectives: technical and human.
Her curiosity lies in how environments shape behavior, how public spaces influence daily decisions, and how thoughtful design can improve both physical and mental well-being.
Milou works as Team Lead Regional Development & Infrastructure at Haskoning.
In practice, that means steering and contributing to the output of a team that shapes systems around us: roads, public spaces, and infrastructure.
Behind every road or intersection lies a complex web of planning, engineering, and collaboration that determines how thousands of people move through their day.
Outside of work, sport plays a major role in her life.
This is where our conversation naturally started.
What we talked about
Navigating through challenge
Milou competes in adventure races, multi-day events where individuals or teams navigate an unmarked course using map and compass while trekking, mountain biking, and paddling.
She told me about a five-day race in Spain she completed last year.
Sleep was limited, navigation was difficult, and fatigue slowly accumulated over the days. Yet that difficulty is exactly what makes the experience meaningful.
One detail fascinated me.
Each team receives two maps, yet they deliberately assign one lead navigator at a time.
At first that sounds counterintuitive.
Wouldn’t two navigators reduce the chance of error?
Milou explained that the opposite often happens.
When responsibility is shared too loosely, assumptions creep in. One person assumes the other is certain. The other assumes the first has it under control.
In a long race, with fatigue and sleep deprivation, that ambiguity becomes costly.
Others can support, challenge, or take over when needed, but ownership has to be clear.
That handover matters.
A single lead navigator creates clarity.
Sleep follows the same pragmatic logic.
Sometimes teams take short naps at checkpoints. Other times they simply lie down next to the road. Comfort matters less when you prioritize speed.
You improvise, and that improvisation becomes part of the experience.
Rather than belonging to one single sporting niche, Milou comes across as broadly active, outdoor-focused, and not afraid of adventure.
She does not just participate, but has also organized activities such as running archery, a sport that combines running with bow shooting.
Think of it as biathlon without snow.
Earlier, she was deeply involved in it, helping organize a team, trainings, and competitions around the sport.
Sport as identity
Sport is an important part of Milou’s identity.
She explained that it is not something she schedules separately. It is simply part of daily life.
She cycles to work, runs through forest trails, and spends time outside whenever possible.
She enthusiastically explained that if you run or cycle every day, it eventually becomes easier. It stops draining you but gives you energy.
Add terrain and unpredictability, and it becomes genuinely engaging.
People start seeing you as “athlete” and they associate you with sport.
You collect people around you that share the same enthusiasm. You get invited to trainings, races, and this fuels you to do even more.
However, there are also downsides.
At the moment, Milou is recovering from a foot injury.
I expected a dramatic story from some extreme race, but the cause was much more ordinary: a bicycle accident at a cycle-path crossing, where two people ended up in the same place at the same time.
The impact seemed minor, yet it fractured something in her foot.
For someone who trains daily, that kind of interruption changes the rhythm of life.
People around you expect you to be active, but suddenly you cannot join them.
She tried replacing it with gym training, but it felt socially isolated and disconnected from the outdoors.
Recovery turned out to be a challenge in its own right.
Still, things are improving.
She had recently gone for her first careful run again.
It was short, but it felt like a glimpse of what might become possible again.
Human instincts in an engineered world
This conversation led us to a broader topic.
The world we build is increasingly technological.
Infrastructure systems, digital networks, and artificial intelligence make our environments more complex than ever before.
Yet even in highly engineered systems, people still respond in deeply human ways through movement, intuition, environment, and social connection.
Adventure races and outdoor sports make that visible.
They pull you back into direct contact with terrain, weather, uncertainty, and your own body.
They sharpen awareness in a way modern life often smooths over.
Milou explained that infrastructure design has traditionally focused on engineering priorities such as efficiency, safety, and capacity.
Increasingly, designers also consider the human experience of spaces: how places feel, how environments shape behavior, and how design affects everyday life.
That shift matters, because infrastructure is ultimately experienced by people, not by diagrams.
Another fascinating element is how infrastructure gets tested before it is built permanently.
Unlike software, roads, intersections, cycle paths, footpaths, squares, and public spaces cannot simply be updated overnight.
Many remain in use for years or decades, which makes getting the design right the first time especially important.
Traffic flows can be simulated digitally, but some ideas are also prototyped in the real world.
Streets are temporarily marked with tape, barriers, or signage to observe how people actually move through a space.
For a short period, the street becomes a live experiment.
Even highly permanent systems often begin as prototypes.
You’re responsible for the meaning you give to your work
At one point Milou said something that stayed with me:
“You’re responsible for the meaning you give to your work.”
That sparked something deeper.
You can describe a project by saying you are designing a road.
Or you can see it as shaping how thousands of people move through their environment every day.
The task itself remains the same, but the meaning changes depending on how you frame it.
A road is never just a line on a drawing.
It shapes journeys, rhythms, encounters, and everyday experience.
The same applies to sport.
Many sports are objectively unnecessary.
Running long distances, climbing obstacles, hitting a target with bow and arrow, none of it is necessary in the strict sense.
But the moment you take the challenge seriously, it becomes engaging, demanding, and meaningful.
Sometimes it even becomes part of a much deeper personal journey.
Work follows the same logic.
You can decide it is meaningless and experience it that way.
Or you can take it seriously enough to give it purpose and in doing so make both the process and the result feel meaningful.
Designing the in-between
Toward the end of the conversation, Milou brought up a concept that had recently caught her attention: liminal space.
Anthropologists use the term to describe transitional phases in which someone is no longer who they were, but has not yet become who they will be.
In many rituals, that in-between phase is where the real transformation happens.
Drawing on ideas from corporate anthropology and on related thinking about how groups and organizations change, Milou applies the concepts to modern systems in her own environment.
In projects and organizations, we often focus heavily on the desired end state.
We define success, describe the destination, and clarify where we want to go.
But transformation does not happen at the finish line.
It happens in the space in between.
In teams, projects, and leadership, shaping that transition can be one of the most powerful ways to influence the outcome.
Instead of only defining the destination, leaders can also design the environment in which people move toward it.
Sometimes the most important design decision is not setting the end point, but shaping the liminal space that allows people to get there.
Reflections
Meaning is assigned
What struck me most about our conversation is how naturally different worlds overlapped: sport, infrastructure, technology, and leadership.
At first glance they seem unrelated, yet similar patterns appear across all of them.
Being outside reconnects us to older layers of intelligence in ourselves.
Voluntary challenges give us joy.
And meaning rarely exists on its own. We assign it.
Designing a road, solving a problem, or finishing a project can all appear simple on the surface.
But the moment we see the complexity and impact behind those actions, the experience changes.
In that sense, work is not so different from sport.
Both can be reduced to simple tasks, yet both become meaningful depending on how seriously we choose to approach them.
Designing the liminal space
Milou’s perspective on liminal spaces also stayed with me.
It is common advice to start with the end in mind and define the goal clearly.
But in practice, progress rarely happens in straight lines.
Instead of trying to control every step, it may be more effective to shape the environment in which progress happens.
When the conditions are right, people move forward naturally.
The journey itself becomes motivating, not just the finish line.
Clarity beats consensus
The lead-navigator rule in adventure racing kept resurfacing in my mind.
Giving two people the same responsibility may sound safer, but it often creates confusion.
When everyone assumes someone else is steering, nobody really is.
That does not mean only one person can think.
It means ownership has to be clear.
Support can be shared.
Responsibility cannot.
Sometimes progress depends less on gathering more opinions and more on assigning clear decision-making authority.