The story so far…
When I was 8 years old, the school I attended in Coventry (UK) adopted recommendations from the 1967 Plowden Report “espousing a child-centred, informal, humanist approach, stressing the uniqueness of each child and the paramount need for individualisation of the learning process”. The aim was for children to flourish, and seemingly it worked. Three years later, I’d apparently sucked the school dry of things they could teach me, so the Headmaster kept me busy helping out in the library.
At age 11 I passed the state school selection examination (The “Eleven Plus”) and in 1970 moved on to King Henry VIII (KHVIII) all boys grammar school. KHVIII (aka Henry’s) had been founded in 1545 by John Hales as part of a deal with King Henry VIII to purchase former monastery lands around the city during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. My immediate impression was that not much had changed in the intervening four centuries. Its rigidly top down, authoritarian, “spare the rod and spoil the child” system of governance was brutally enacted by schoolmasters who wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children today. It would be a massive understatement to say that life at Henry’s was not to be the most child-centred school experience.
I left Henry’s in 1976 having majored in Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Physics. I went on to study Electrical and Electronic Engineering at university, specialising in digital real-time control systems and graduating with a 2:1 in 1980. The degree was a “sandwich course”, meaning that blocks of academic study were interleaved with industrial experience, which in my case was undertaken at British Aerospace (BAe). I specifically chose such a course because I wanted to learn to do real engineering work, not just learn about engineering as academic ivory-tower based theory. It’s an outlook that’s persisted my whole professional career, and turned out to be vital for effective culture transformation.
A few years after graduating, I left BAe and joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in studio and transmission chain engineering, which was about to undergo digital transformation. This seemed too good an opportunity to turn down, but in the three month notice period between accepting the job offer and turning up for my first day, the BBC had kindly decided to defer their digitisation programme for a few years. As an innovation-focused digital guy in a tradition-bound analogue organisation, the employment relationship was never destined to last…
One of my sisters was a high school physics teacher and saw a recruitment advert placed by one of the world’s leading open innovation labs, based in Cambridge (UK). I fit the profile, applied, got the job, and was almost instantly blown away by the stark contrast of the culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness at the Lab compared to the traditional top-down, command and control cultures I experienced at both BAe and the BBC.
Several years later it dawned on me I’d gone full circle… The lab was ultimately based on the same person-centred cultural foundations as my first school.
The lab’s founders had instinctively known that if the people they hired flourished we’d do great work. And if we did great work, the lab would flourish. And it worked. It worked so well that one day a long-standing client of the lab asked me if I would “come and make our people behave more like your people”, launching a unique 40-year career path.
The Lab’s parent company, the professional services firm Arthur D. Little (ADL) got wind of the work I was doing helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness and pulled me in on assignments with their Technology and Innovation Management clients throughout Europe, Asia, and the US.
Then, in 1995, ADL acquired Innovation Associates (IA), the world’s leading organisational learning professional services firm, founded by Dr Peter Senge, Charles Kiefer, and Joel Yanowitz. Peter was author of the seminal 1990 organisational learning book “The Fifth Discipline”, described by Harvard Business Review as one of the most important management texts of the previous 75 years.
With the IA acquisition I became Corporate Director and Global Head of Organisational Learning and Innovation Leadership for the combined ADL + IA team, and worked with clients alongside many of the world’s top organisational learning and innovation culture change professionals for the next six years.
Then in 2001 ADL came under new management who decided to move away from innovation and instead adopt the regressive finders, minders, grinders model of professional services operated by the traditional mainstream management consulting firms. I had zero interest in that business model where clients are persuaded to buy very large, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter consulting projects that generate high revenues for the consulting company whilst simultaneously undermining the clients organisation’s capacity to shape their own future. So I left and set up in private practice.
In total, over a 40-year period, 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.
I’m taking some time out to reflect on the above journey and explore what’s next. If the above resonates, drop me a line.