I didn't learn this in a classroom.
15 years inside organisations scaling faster than their leadership could handle taught me more about structural failure than any framework ever could.
Fifteen years building leadership structures inside global organisations – through growth, integration, restructuring, and crisis.
Years of senior experience
Markets of international expansion
Countries called home
Employees across post-merger integration
THE STORY
From a reception desk in Rio to an advisory practice in Stavanger.
I started working at 13 in Brazil – not by choice, but by necessity. My parents were out of work and I entered the job market before most people my age had finished school. What I learned early was that how an organisation operates under pressure says almost everything about the people leading it. I didn’t have the language for it then. I do now.
At 19, I was working at a reception desk in Rio de Janeiro for a boss whose leadership style was the opposite of mine, and the friction was daily. That contrast – between what good leadership looks like and what I was watching every day – is a realisation I’ve carried ever since: when things go wrong in organisations, the problem is rarely the people. It’s almost always the system they’re operating in.
Over the next fifteen years I built and led people operations across four countries and two continents. Energy and oil & gas in Rio. Fashion retail and beauty in London. And most recently, as the HR leader responsible for scaling a global consumer brand across 13 countries – building the people function from the ground up and serving as a trusted advisor to the CEO and founder through its most intense period of growth.
Across all of it, I saw the same pattern repeat. Companies that scaled their ambition without scaling their infrastructure. Founders who became the bottleneck for everything without meaning to. Strong teams absorbing impossible loads because the system was never designed to distribute them properly.
I founded Luciana Breivik Advisory in Stavanger to do this work independently – for the organisations that need it most, at the level where it actually matters.
15+ years
What fifteen years taught me.
Structural problems don’t announce themselves. They show up as slow decisions, frustrated teams, and founders who can’t step back from the detail no matter how hard they try.
My work is diagnostic before it is prescriptive. I come in to understand the decision pathways, the information flows, and the load distribution — before I recommend anything.
The organisations that navigate change most successfully are not the ones with the best strategy. They’re the ones with leadership infrastructure that can carry the weight of that strategy. That’s what I help build.
That's what I help build.
OUTSIDE THE WORK
Built slowly, one kilometre at a time.
I’m Brazilian, based in Stavanger, and still figuring out Norwegian winters. This year I took on my first half marathon — 21 kilometres through Stavanger — because I needed a physical reminder that the most important things are built slowly, one kilometre at a time.
I write about that tension between patience and ambition on Substack
A conversation costs nothing.
I work with a small number of organisations at any one time. If the fit is right, we’ll know quickly.