In the 1980’s I was running projects and leading teams at a world-class innovation lab here in Cambridge UK.
One day, a longstanding client said to me: “Geoff – we like working with your people. In fact we like working with your people more than with our own people. You couldn’t come and make our people behave more like your people could you?”
Questions are fateful. That one shaped the next forty years of my career helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness for themselves, by themselves.
I started out without a theory, just lived experience as a technology professional working in organisations whose cultures were either innovative, agile, and adaptive or not so much.
Over the years, my clients and I accumulated a substantial body of practice-based evidence revealing how workplace cultures form, and how they can be reformed by the people who work there so the organisation is able to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
By mid-2025 I’d published over 150 Substack perspectives on what we’d discovered.
Several of those perspectives are highlighted in the Resources section above, along with links to the full perspectives on Substack. The Resources section also hosts various how-to videos, podcast conversations, and an 18-page summary of the Five Fatal Habits that consistently prevent organisations from becoming future-fit.
Since mid-2025 I’ve been on a kind of sabbatical.
I say “kind of” because I have been known to come out of hiding for particularly interesting collaborations with particularly interesting people.
But primarily I’m taking some time to reflect on a unique four-decade journey and pondering what’s next.
So watch this space.
But maybe don’t hold your breath…