What makes me different?

I’ve always walked a slightly different path. A great deal of that comes down to dyslexia.

As a child, I wasn’t diagnosed—I was simply labelled as a little slow, unable to read confidently aloud and prone to struggling with long words. It was only well into my Royal Navy career that somebody finally gave it a name. By then, I had already developed my own ways of processing information, solving problems and communicating under pressure.

Something changed when I moved further into technical work. I began to understand that dyslexia did not only present challenges; it also influenced how I approached complex systems. I tend to think visually. Rather than recalling a solution directly from a manual, I often see the system operating in my mind and work through the problem as a sequence of interactions.

That way of thinking also encourages me to connect ideas from fields that would not ordinarily sit together. Marine engineering, aeronautics, defence technology and natural flow systems can all offer different perspectives on the same problem. Those connections do not replace engineering evidence, but they can provide a valuable starting point for experimentation.

That approach helped shape MPVXX. The concept began as an unconventional combination of ideas and developed through CAD, additive manufacturing and an extensive instrumented tank-test programme supported by Innovate UK. Not every configuration worked as expected, but each result improved my understanding of the system and informed the next iteration.

I do not claim to have every answer. Hydrastorm has benefited from specialist input, practical facilities and the experience of people willing to challenge my assumptions. My role is to hold the wider system in view, ask questions that might otherwise be missed and then test those ideas against measurable evidence.

Dyslexia remains a challenge at times, but it has also helped shape the persistence, visual reasoning and cross-disciplinary thinking I bring to engineering. It is not the reason an idea is valid—the evidence must establish that—but it is part of how I reached the question in the first place.

That difference in perspective helped begin Hydrastorm, and disciplined engineering is what will carry it forward.