The conversation ran well past the first coffee, ranging across workplace transformation, the future of teams, the practicalities of AI adoption, and the difference between talking about new technology and actually putting it to work. By the time the cups were empty, Damian had agreed to accept Deborah’s invitation to join the next NoCodeLab Accelerator cohort. This piece is, in part, the story of what happened next.
Meet Damian
Damian Mears is one of the more thoughtful workplace transformation consultants working in the UK today. He is the Director of Third Space UK Group, a consultancy he has run for nearly a decade, partnering with senior teams on technology adoption, workplace strategy, and full-scale organisational transformation. He is also Director of Partnerships and Alliances at Workplaced, where he leads customer impact across the Future of Work ecosystem.
Alongside that work, he collaborates with the team at Curve Cambridge, the workplace transformation practice run by John Monks and Alison Booth, and with CamColours CIC on creative community engagement and public realm initiatives. His range spans AI adoption for SMEs and enterprise teams, alternative workplace strategies, fractional advisory work, and team cohesion at scale.
He is, in other words, exactly the kind of person we love having in an accelerator cohort. His standards are high, his experience is deep, and his judgement is unhurried in the best sense of the word.
When Damian joined the accelerator, he was already well-read on AI. He had been to the right talks, followed the right thinkers, and could hold his own in any boardroom conversation. But he told us, with admirable honesty, that when a client asked him a direct question about what AI could actually do for their business, he could feel himself reaching for someone else's vocabulary rather than his own conviction. He wanted that to change. He wanted to move from being a fluent observer of the moment to being a confident builder within it.
What the NoCodeLab Launchpad Accelerator actually does
Our accelerator is not a course about AI. It is a programme that puts you in the room with AI for long enough, and with enough structure, that you stop being a tourist and start being a builder.
There is theory, context, discussion of where the models work and where they fail. But the real engine of the programme is the building. Every participant arrives with a challenge or an idea from their own working life, and over the course of the cohort they turn it into something real. Not a deck about something real. The thing itself.
Damian arrived with the instincts of an experienced facilitator and a clear-eyed view of what good professional development looks like, having designed and delivered plenty of it himself. He left having built working prototype(s) and an impressive MVP, having understood the underlying logic well enough to critique what he was using, and having developed a working method he could bring into his client engagements.
Coming from someone who has spent a long career being trained, training others, and assessing what good development looks like, his feedback landed with particular weight.
The shift in what he can offer
The most interesting part of this story is what happens next, in the consulting work Damian is already doing. He has updated his professional profile to reflect his new capability and is positioning AI fluency as a clear value add to his existing client base. He is now able to walk into a client conversation, listen to a problem, and move from problem to clickable prototype within the same engagement. That is a different kind of consultant from the one who walked in.
In workshops, where Damian has historically used post-its and structured exercises to surface ideas from a team, he can now layer in a step that did not exist before. Ideas become tangible artefacts in the same session in which they are generated. Teams react to something rather than imagining it.
This matters particularly for the kind of work he does with Curve Cambridge, whose whole approach is about taking teams out of office noise and into a space where real change can happen. Add the ability to leave that space with not just clarity but with prototypes, and the value of the workshop compounds.
Confidence is the real return
There is an emotional return on this kind of training that does not appear on any spec sheet, and it is worth naming. Damian told us that the programme has given him a renewed confidence in how he reads, listens, and contributes to conversations about AI. He can now critically assess what he reads. He can spot a claim that does not hold up. He can hear someone speaking on the subject and know, calmly, whether to engage or to nod politely and turn his attention elsewhere.
He told us a story that captured it nicely. Not long after the programme, he found himself at a workspace in conversation with a fellow co-worker whose desk sign invited people to ask him about AI. The gentleman was holding court with confidence about how vibe coding was a fad, how AI-assisted builds were toys, and how nothing serious could come out of any of it.
As Damian put it:
"A few weeks ago, I might have nodded along and assumed he knew more than I did. This time, I realised I was listening to someone describe a world I had just spent six weeks actually working in. I asked a few questions, listened properly, and walked away knowing that the difference between reading about this and doing it is enormous. That is the gift the programme gave me, and it is not a small one."
On the programme itself, Damian was equally generous:
"It is the most useful training I have done in years. The pace was right, the content was demanding without ever being intimidating, and Sara's ability to make the hard parts feel approachable was remarkable. I came in thinking I needed to catch up. I left realising I had moved past most of the conversation altogether."
What this opens up
A few threads are now in motion. The first is the possibility of NoCodeLab delivering discrete modules of our accelerator into Damian's existing client work, so that the senior teams he advises get a taste of what is possible without committing to a full programme. Conversations are also underway about retreats and joint initiatives where workplace transformation and AI capability meet in the same room.
A closing thought
When Deborah and Damian first met on the Cambridge riverside, neither of them knew quite where the conversation would lead. That is often how the most interesting work begins. A good introduction, a good cup of coffee, a willingness to listen properly, and a shared sense that there is real work to be done.
If you recognise yourself in the earlier version of Damian's story, the one where you have done the reading but not yet done the building, our next accelerator cohort is the place to come. Bring a challenge. Bring an idea. Leave with a working method, a renewed confidence, and the quiet authority that comes from having actually done the work.