Overview
Piet Haerens is the founder of haedes, where he has served as Chief Soul & Strategy Officer since January 2020. He is based in Gent. In July 2019 he founded S@lto Consulting, which he also still runs, and from October 2020 to September 2025 he was Vice President of the Belgian-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce.
He spent more than a decade at IMDC, joining in June 2007 as a project manager for coastal and marine infrastructure and for offshore wind farms, and going on to work as an ISO auditor, knowledge manager for coastal and marine infrastructures, commercial head of the offshore, dredging and environment department, and finally CEO from January 2017 to January 2019. Earlier he was a project manager and advisor at HAECON INTERNATIONAL from 2000 to 2007, a researcher at Universidade do Algarve - CIMA from 2005 to 2006, and a project engineer at Geologica.
He holds an MSc in engineering with a focus on topography from KU Leuven Ghent Campus and an MSc in coastal and marine studies from Universidade do Algarve, and has since studied regenerative development and kynology.
Career history
In the news
- After about 30 years in the water sector, I keep coming back to the assumptions beneath our work. Not which technology we choose, how much data we gather, or how we innovate, but through which lens we look. The lens comes first. Before we ever sound a river, we have already decided what she is: a flow to calculate, a channel to maintain, a risk to manage. Our instruments carry that decision inside them. Rick Rubin says that whoever makes something is not the source, but an antenna. What comes through depends on what you are tuned to
- 6 The Maverick — Now we are at the source Walk along a river - and it stays a view. Walk with the River - and something in you changes. Not the water. You. The way you see, the way you be. Episode #6 is out (see comments). This is the source episode. Not an arrival. A making visible. What was always here, waiting only for the walking. Day twenty. Constância. The Zêzere flows into the Tagus. Her name changes there. Her water does not. There, I didn’t feel an end. I found the source. The body put down the pack. The walk
- A weathered wooden table under old oaks, near Guarda, at Rewilding Portugal. That was my workspace this morning. Sunlight. Birds. The smell of the trees. Leaves turning colours. The focus came by itself, my head was clear, my body relaxed. It is not a romantic story. When it rains, tomorrow, I won't sit here. The place gives what she can give today. Tomorrow something else, or nothing for me, but for others. Exactly that rubs with how we organise our work. An office built to be always the same: same light, same temperature, same
- What if we ask better questions? What is our relationship with the world?
- This afternoon, the autumn sun found us sitting. Light through turning leaves. Gold, copper, a red we have no name for. I caught myself reaching for what it meant. Then I stopped. "Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada." "There is metaphysics enough in not thinking of anything." #AlbertoCaeiro (Fernando Pessoa), written more than a hundred years ago. Still alive. The light shone through the leaves. That was enough. That same enough, further south, where the Zêzere is flowing. She does not see the colours on her banks. Does
- Some books add to what you know. "Small Arcs of Larger Circles – Framing Through Other Pattern" by Nora Bateson does something else: it takes away. The book turns my worldview upside down. It asks me to un-learn, re-learn. Sentences that keep coming back since I closed the book: "Being wrong and not knowing are assets." "Never rest in certainty." One word kept surfacing while reading: PARADOX. Our lives are full of them. Many realities, all at once. Holding them together, looking through several lenses at the same time is a
- There are books that make you cry, poetry, songs, and... also podcasts. Nate Hagensgens with Alexa Firmenichirmenich on Biodiversity, Beauty and Being, January 2024, was one of them. I still know where I was when I listened, and I still feel it in my body. That listening unfolded something in me. This morning I listened (again) to Nate with Samantha Sweetwater and a pattern revealed itself. In 2022 Nate's podcast was mostly about energy, money and materials. Precise, sobering, necessary. Then the guests started to change. Alexa
- Another Maverick. Greetings from Nova Scotia." One of the listeners of #TheMaverick sent me that message earlier this month, with a photo of a boat that carries the same name: "Maverick - Just Lucky". For twenty days the Zêzere was my companion. At the time it felt like a whole journey. Now I see it was a small arc. The Zêzere gives herself to the Tagus and the Tagus into the Atlantic. From there, currents carry some of her water south, then west, then north with the Gulf Stream, passing the waters off Nova Scotia before turning
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