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 it certainly worked for me. 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. I'd passed the '11-plus' selection examination, and in 1970 moved on to King Henry VIII grammar school.

The school 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, 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 KHVIII was in stark contrast to my earlier child-centred school experience.

I left King Henry VIII school in 1976 with three Advanced Level certificates - in Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Physics - and went on to study electrical and electronic engineering at university, specialising in digital real-time control systems. My degree was a four-year "sandwich" design - periods of academic study interleaved with industrial experience at British Aerospace. I specifically chose this course because I wanted to learn to do real engineering work, not just learn about it 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 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 period between accepting the BBC's offer and turning up for my first day, they had kindly decided to defer their digital investments for a few years. As an innovation-focused digital guy in a tradition-bound analogue organisation, it 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), looking for someone just like me. So I applied, got the job, and was immediately blown away by the culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness at the Lab - compared to the traditional top-down, command and control culture that had pervaded British Aerospace and the BBC.

It was years later that it dawned on me I'd gone full circle. The lab was based on the same person-centred cultural foundations as my first school. The lab's founders knew that if the people they hired flourished we'd do great work. And if we did great work, the lab itself would flourish. And it worked so well that one day a long-standing client of the lab asked me if I could "come and make our people behave more like your people". This launched the unique career path I've been on ever since.

The Lab's parent company, the professional services firm Arthur D. Little (ADL) heard 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 is best known as 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 (and still have) zero interest in selling clients large, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter consulting projects that undermine their capacity to shape their own future, so left and set up in private practice.

Over the subsequent 20 years I built on my previous 15 years' experience to evolve a powerful philosophy and practical methods for helping change catalysts in client organisations create the future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness they need to thrive in an increasing uncertain and unpredictable world.

My philosophy and practice has now been applied, refined, and validated with dozens of organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US. I now draw on this unique, extensive, in-depth, global experience to help future-fit culture catalysts gain the insights, skills, and confidence they need to create cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in their own organisations.