About
The people, the method, and the platform
The founders of The Reservoir Method recognised a need to address a recurring problem they saw across personal, organisational and institutional life: systems carrying more than they can sustainably hold, and compensating with urgency, performance, or control.
The method brings together depth psychology, systemic thinking, and structural design to work with pressure, capacity, and responsibility in ways that strengthen what holds rather than testing it further.
The Reservoir is not simply a practice. It is a method and platform designed to be taught, shared, and carried forward by other practitioners over time—without losing its ethical spine.
The founders
The Reservoir Method was founded and developed by Lula and Chris Baker whose work brings together two complementary disciplines: depth and structure.
Together, they hold both:
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the psychological and symbolic intelligence of the work
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and the systemic and methodological architecture that allows it to function in real-world contexts
Their collaboration ensures that the method remains:
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ethically grounded
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structurally rigorous
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and practically applicable across different kinds of systems
Lula
Co-founder · Depth practitioner · Psychological and symbolic intelligence
Lula’s work focuses on the emotional and symbolic architecture that shapes how people and systems carry pressure, responsibility, and meaning.
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With a background in psychodynamic psychotherapy and extensive experience in child and family work, teaching, and depth-oriented practice, she brings a rare capacity to work with the unseen forces that influence behaviour: unconscious contracts, inherited patterns, relational dynamics, and the timing of psychological and systemic maturation.
Her approach is reflective rather than directive. She works as a mirror—helping individuals and leaders see the deeper structures shaping their experience, not by offering answers, but by restoring the conditions in which their own judgment can function well.
Lula specialises in:
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working with pressure and responsibility at depth
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supporting leaders and practitioners in contact with complexity and ambiguity
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illuminating unconscious patterns shaping systems and relationships
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holding emotional and psychological containment in periods of change
Within The Reservoir Method, Lula holds the depth dimension of the work: the psychological, symbolic, and relational intelligence that ensures the method remains ethically grounded, humanly attuned, and sensitive to timing and capacity.
Chris Baker
Co-founder · systems architect · structural strategist
Chris works with the architecture of systems under pressure.
He is a systems architect and strategic practitioner whose work focuses on how individuals, organisations, and regions carry responsibility, complexity, and change over time. He is co-founder and co-creator of The Reservoir Method, a capacity-led approach to restoring proportion between demand and what a system can realistically hold.
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Trained in design and innovation, Chris began his career in applied research before establishing his own business in 2001 where he led the development and commercialisation of a portfolio of intellectual property, taking ideas from concept through to acquisition by a global firm. Alongside this he worked with other organisations to help structure and develop new ideas—early experiences that shaped his interest in how innovation actually lives or fails inside real systems.
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Over the past decade his work has increasingly focused on complex institutions and public systems through senior roles in innovation and knowledge exchange. He has worked at the intersection of policy, partnerships, delivery frameworks, and organisational change—supporting universities, public bodies, industry, and regional stakeholders to work more coherently together.
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Most recently, Chris has been operating at regional and institutional scale designing methodologies, governance structures, and delivery architectures for large, multi-stakeholder innovation ecosystems. This work is less about ideas and more about conditions: how pace is set, how responsibility is distributed, how readiness is assessed, and how systems avoid moving faster than their own capacity to integrate change.
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What unites all of his work is a focus on the architecture beneath performance—the unseen structures that shape behaviour, decision-making and sustainability under pressure. He is less interested in what systems say they are doing and more interested in what their structure actually allows.
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Within The Reservoir Method, Chris holds the architectural and strategic dimension of the work. He designs the method’s frameworks, protects its ethical constraints, and ensures that depth and insight are translated into structures that people and institutions can genuinely use. His role is not to direct or prescribe but to shape the conditions in which authority, judgment, and responsibility can function more cleanly.
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His presence is calm, precise and relational. He works with leaders and complex systems not to push for performance but to help build structures that can carry reality without resorting to urgency, overextension or control.
For Chris, The Reservoir Method is both vocation and practice: a commitment to live and work by the same principles of capacity, proportion, and ethical pacing that the method itself exists to protect.
The Reservoir as a platform
From the beginning, The Reservoir Method has been designed not just as a private practice, but as a teachable, transmissible method.
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The long-term vision is:
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to train other practitioners in the method
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to ensure the work can reach more people and systems
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and to do so without diluting its ethical foundations
This means the method is being developed with:
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clear principles and constraints
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a strong ethical pacing framework
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and a structure that can be carried by others without becoming extractive, coercive, or outcome-driven
Lula and Chris remain the stewards of the method: responsible for its integrity, evolution, and ethical boundaries, even as it is taught and practised more widely.
Our commitment
We are committed to work that:
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protects capacity rather than extracting from it
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treats pace as an ethical variable, not a productivity one
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reduces dependency rather than creating it
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and keeps authority with the person or system doing the work
We do not promise transformation on a timeline.
We do not work with urgency as a guide.
We do not take on work that cannot be held responsibly.
Our aim is to contribute to a wider culture of leadership, practice, and system design that is more psychologically informed, structurally honest, and capable of carrying responsibility without collapse or distortion.