I kept seeing the same pattern: in government, in media, in consulting, in enterprise IT. Strategies are approved, budgets are committed, transformations are launched — and the implicit beliefs underneath them are never exposed to adversarial pressure until markets, regulators, or operational reality do it first.
I founded Apparens to build a discipline for doing that deliberately.
Where this comes from
My day job is at the Dutch Tax Authority, where I work as a strategic advisor on AI, governance, risk, and compliance. It is one of the largest and most complex public IT environments in the Netherlands. Mission-critical systems, high regulatory pressure, and decisions that directly affect millions of citizens.
Before that, I led the IT department for Toeslagen at the Tax Authority, managed IT at the Dutch Public Broadcasting Corporation (NPO), and worked as a principal consultant at Quint Wellington Redwood.
What Apparens is
Apparens is where I develop and test Strategic Red Teaming. A structured, adversarial methodology for stress-testing strategies and AI investments against the conditions they will actually face.
I build this with agentic AI. The systems I've developed generate thousands of scenarios and hundreds of testable hypotheses from a single strategic position. Every assumption is surfaced. Every dependency is tested. Every claim is held to evidence.
Apparens is not a traditional consultancy. It is an applied research practice — an ongoing experiment at the frontier of what AI can do for strategic decision-making.
A note on independence
Apparens operates independently of my role at the Belastingdienst. Client engagements, data, and outputs are strictly separated. All diagnostic work is subject to confidentiality agreements.
Apparens holds no vendor relationships, earns no implementation revenue, and has no financial incentive in the outcome of any diagnostic.
Why Red Teaming
Red teaming originated in military and intelligence communities as a method for challenging plans from an adversary's perspective before those plans meet reality. If you want to know where your strategy breaks, assign someone the explicit task of breaking it.
At Apparens, I developed a methodology that brings red teaming to the level of strategic decision-making. It combines adversarial scenario analysis with agentic AI — systems that autonomously generate thousands of strategic scenarios, produce hundreds of testable hypotheses, and evaluate every assumption against documented evidence.
What I believe
Most never get that test. The assumptions harden. The momentum builds. And by the time the gap between belief and evidence becomes visible, the cost of correction is enormous.
Strategic Red Teaming is the discipline of finding that gap early — while you can still do something about it.