Three disciplines. One practice.

The work came first. The research came from the work.

Samia spent years inside organisations — in human resources and leadership development, across corporates, government, family enterprises and universities in the UAE and wider MENA region. That work made one pattern impossible to ignore: leaders would leave a programme genuinely changed, and the organisation would look exactly the same three months later.

She went into doctoral research to understand why. Her PhD examined the internal architecture that shapes advancement — the beliefs, patterns and cultural expectations that structural change alone does not reach. The findings became the foundation of the SAWA framework, and later of Women in Gold.

Alongside the research, she kept practising: designing and facilitating leadership development, teaching as adjunct faculty and guest lecturer, and working across Arabic, French and English with leaders whose teams span several cultures at once.

“The first time I held a piece of Kintsugi in Japan, I understood something I had been trying to explain for years: the repair is not hidden. It is the most valuable part of the object.”

She trained in Japan and became a certified Kintsugi practitioner. Not as an aesthetic interest — as the missing piece. Kintsugi gave the research a physical form. A leader can be told that resilience is built through repair; holding a piece they mended themselves in gold is a different kind of knowing.

SAWA Leadership is where those three disciplines meet. Kintsugi is the practice. SAWA is the methodology. Resilience is one of its most requested applications — alongside behavioural change, inclusive leadership, organisational culture and cross-cultural collaboration.