Foundation course - coming soon...
A self-paced online course to deepen your essential understanding, skills, and character traits as a future-fit culture catalyst
“The woodcutter is far better for skill than brute strength. It is by skill that the sea captain holds the fast ship on its course, though torn by winds, over the wine-blue water.” — Homer, The Iliad. 1
I’ve just given my website it’s first major update in five years, to reflect recent changes in how I’ve been helping people create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
The last website update was in 2019, when I was still primarily supporting senior executive clients with hands-on, in-person, face-to-face consultancy support.
I ended up in management consulting organically, you might even say accidentally, starting more than 40 years ago when I came to Cambridge to join one of the world’s leading open innovation labs as a specialist in real-time digital control systems.
Fast forward a few years and a senior executive client was telling me how much he appreciated our culture of innovation and then posed the fateful question that launched my consulting career: “Could you come and help our people behave more like your people?”.
A few years later, the lab’s then parent company, Arthur D. Little (ADL) became aware of the work I’d been doing and started bringing me in to help their global clients develop cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Then in 1995 ADL acquired Innovation Associates (IA), the consulting firm established by Peter Senge, Charles Kiefer, and Joel Yanowitz to help clients cultivate their capacity for organisational learning, based on Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline, described by HBR as “one of the seminal management works of the previous 75 years”. 2
I joined the combined ADL/AI team as Corporate Director and Global Head of Organisational Learning and Innovation Leadership and remained in that role until 2001 when a new management regime in ADL turned the firm towards the dark side…
ADL had been sideswiped by the bursting of the tech stock bubble in 2000 and having dispensed with the top team, the new regime decided to abandon ADL’s historical strengths in innovation management, and adopt the regressive finders, minders, grinders model operated by the mainstream “Big Con” consulting firms.3
I’ve always had precisely zero interest in peddling humungous overstaffed projects that undermine the capacity of the people in the client organisation to shape their own future, so left in early 2001 and set up in private practice.
For the next 20 years I continued to be hired by senior executives who recognised the that Big Con firms not only fail to help, but actively hinder, organisational efforts to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 4
Transformational culture change requires people in the organisation to develop new innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles. Therefore, internal people must be the ones who do the heavy lifting.
So, even though I was always hired by senior executives with the budgetary capacity to do so, I also worked closely with hand-picked individuals having a deep personal and professional interest in developing the skills of an effective future-fit culture catalyst.
Being an effective future-fit culture catalyst clearly requires a thorough understanding of organisational culture, how it forms, and how it can be reformed.
That is definitely necessary, but on its own insufficient.
An effective catalyst of future-fit culture also needs specific skills, and deeper than that, foundational character traits that underpin their practice.
In recent years — especially since the 2020 pandemic — I’ve increasingly been asked by organisations and individuals to help them develop culture catalyst capabilities remotely, over Zoom, Teams, etc.
The challenge here is that the understanding, skills, and character traits required can only be developed in practice. However, the effectiveness of that practice depends on its foundation.
I’ve therefore recently embarked on the process of creating a self-paced online course intended to provide a solid foundation on which future-fit culture catalysts can build the required understanding, skills, and character traits.
I’m currently aiming for the Foundations for Future-Fit Culture course to go live later this year. In the meantime you can sign up to receive updates as I develop the course. Early registrations will receive a special discount when the course goes on sale. Click the button below to find out more on the registration page of the website:
And while you’re there, do check out the rest of the site where you’ll find various free resources including my recent six-episode Substack video series and links to some of my most popular Substack articles published over the past three years.
Homer, The Iliad, Book 23, lines 315–318 translated by Richmond Lattimore.
For more on the Big Con, see this previous article.
For more on why and how this happens, check out the Five Fatal Habits page on the updated website here.