Coaching with OSKAR

I had the opportunity to attend the International Association of Facilitator's North America conference in Halifax, Canada, last week.  In addition to the expected value of networking with fellow professional facilitators, there was also the chance to learn with and from some experienced colleagues.

I was introduced to a new (to me) coaching tool in a session on "Coaching Executive Teams".  The tool comes from the Solutions Focused Therapy movement, which "is a type of talking therapy that is based upon social constructionist philosophy. It focuses on what clients want to achieve through therapy rather than on the problem(s) that made them seek help. The approach does not focus on the past, but instead, focuses on the present and future." (definition from wikipedia)

It is an interesting tool to bring to an organizational setting, as it encourages you to look forward, to solutions, rather than spending your energy tackling the many obstacles you might face. 

In fact, the metaphor that jumps into my mind is that of a rugby player (I'm giving away from roots in Ireland and South Africa here!) - the player with the ball dodges and weaves their way past the defense, looking for the gaps, rather than trying to power their way through obstacles.  This approach can allow for greater progress when you do exploit the gap!

So what is OSKAR?

It is an acronym for:

Outcome

Scale

Know-how

Affirm and Action

Review

Outcome - this is a description of the difference that the coachee wants to see as a result of the coaching.  This is more than just a 'goal', as you can also describe characteristics of the difference.

Scale - the coachee is asked to rate themselves on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the Outcome has been achieved.

There are a couple of interesting points here.  First, by scaling themselves in this way, the coachee is reminded that they are very unlikely to be at 0, the complete opposite point from the Outcome.  They are some way along the continuum, so they are making some progress towards their desired outcome.

The second point is that the coachee is then asked "What would it take for you to increase your own score by X decimal point?"  As the coachee both chooses how far along they desire to move up the scale, and determine what they will have to do to make that happen, there is a high level of ownership of the actions they identify.

Note that the coach is not giving advice or directing the coachee towards certain actions.  They are helping the coachee by asking questions, and helping them consider just how far they are willing to move this time.

Know-how and Resources - this is an opportunity to ask the coachee to remind themselves of how resourceful they already are, and the resources to which they have access.  By looking to the know-how that has enabled them to reach this far along the continuum, the coachee is reminded what resources they can call on for the next set of steps they are considering.  And they can also identify the resources in the people around them that are available to assist them.

Affirm and Action - the coach has a chance to affirm the positive qualities they have noticed in the coachee, based on their observations in the coaching session.  The coachee also identifies the Actions they will take, the small steps to move themselves further along to the continuum to the point they identified when they did the Scale work.  The next steps should build on what is working, on the know-how they have developed over time.

Review - the focus of follow-up sessions between coach and coachee is not on whether the planned actions were carried out, but on 'what's better?' By assessing whether things are moving in the right direction, the discussion remains 'solutions focused'

I think this is a useful tool, and I intend to incorporate it into my consulting toolkit.  In addition to the solutions focus, which I find very compelling, you can get a lot of value from even a brief use of the tool in a coaching conversation.  When we practiced using the tool in pairs in the conference setting, my coaching partner and I each described getting good value from thoughtful, solutions-focused questions, in less than 10 minutes!




A nice summary of OSKAR is available from the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work.

Tools and Techniques for Data Collection

 So, just how do you know?

In our efforts to develop and put our effort behind worthwhile initiatives, we want to have some confidence that we are working on things that will achieve their results and make a positive difference – in our organizations, in our communities, or in the wider society.

There is obviously a lot that goes into getting this right. One foundational component is to ensure that our efforts are targeted towards "real" needs – that is, needs that can be identified and assessed in as concrete a manner as possible.

Obviously not all needs are concrete, and not all issues lend themselves to being measured in a scientifically valid manner.  Nevertheless, we can collect subjective and qualitative information about the current state of affairs, and use this to inform our discussion about needs, and about where we should put our efforts.

Many resources exist for people interested in this area. A new publication, A Guide to Assessing Needs, does a useful service by compiling almost a dozen different ways to collect information (download it from this link).

Written by a team with a strong interest in performance improvement and educational strategies, the book offers practical information and tips on using the tools, which include:

• Document or Data Review
• Guided Expert Reviews
• Management of Focus Groups
• Interviews
• Dual–Response Surveys
• SWOT+
• World Café (with "Speed Dating" Variation)
• Delphi Technique
• Performance Observations
• Task Analysis (Hierarchical or Sequential, If–Then, and Model–Based)
• Cognitive Task Analysis

The benefit of these techniques is that they provide data that can inform our analysis and decision-making.  This data can validate our hunches and support our gut intuition.  Or it can help us realize and understand where we have misunderstood the issues. even if we disagree with the findings, we have a basis for discussing what appears to be going on in the world around us.

And that is a good thing - for the more we know, the more ready we are to assess the gap between the current situation and our vision for the future.  And this allows us to make well-informed decisions about how to use our time and resources.

How do you know?

 "We want to make a difference."

"We can do things more effectively."

I encounter these two comments fairly frequently in my work as an organizational consultant – my clients either have a vision for the change that they see as needed in the world around them, or they have a good sense of how things can be improved, to overcome sub-optimal conditions.

My response to these comments is often a question: "How do you know?"

I don't doubt that the sorts of changes that they can sense are necessary. But I am interested in ensuring that they, and their organizations, don't simply put their efforts behind things that are based on a personal vision or a gut sense.  I would prefer that they act on the basis of evidence - the more solid, the better. I encourage them to have confidence that the issues in which they invest their time and resources are indeed the right issues, the ones that will bring about the improvements, the changes, the difference, that they seek in their organizations and in society.

Working in organizations to bring about societal change, we have to work with others and develop a shared view about priority needs and opportunities.  We will often have to use the arts of persuasion to win others over to our point of view. Yet the commitment to these priorities is likely to be stronger if it results from the process of dialogue, of discussions in which I offer my perspective of the needs, and I listen carefully to your perspective.  If I am willing to be persuaded by you, then you might be willing to be persuaded by me!

To avoid this dialogue breaking down into an argument about whose perspective is
'correct' or 'better', it helps if we are have some data to inform our discussion.  And in my experience, this data has more credibility if it is either prepared jointly or offered in a transparent manner.

This means that we need to be willing to engage in a process of shared analysis, prioritization and decision-making, resulting in a joint agreement on what improvements we will work to bring about.

To get to this point, we need to be willing to do the hard work of coming to an honest (and as accurate as possible) assessment of the current state of affairs. We need to be able to develop a realistic vision for how things might be, could be. And we need to be able to examine the gap between the current reality and our future vision, to understand not only how it came about, but also what forces prevent the vision from being realized.

An assessment like this can be done fairly quickly and easily by an individual. But this assessment may not persuade others, particularly if they are from other parts of the organization, or even from other organizations.

It seems to me that if the assessment is to have validity, it should ideally meet two criteria:

• it should be conducted jointly and
• both the data and the analysis should be transparent to others.

By joining with others, using reliable techniques and working in a transparent and participatory fashion, you will be in a much better position to say "This is why we know, so come and join our efforts…"

In future posts, I will describe various resources that you can use to assess the current state, to develop a vision for the future, and to understand the dynamics of the gap between the two.

Insights into Change - from the Open Source Software movement

I've been thinking about innovation, and how we can support and encourage fresh thinking in our organizations.  Some of this comes from my interest in trying to better understand how organizations can renew themselves when their current business model is no longer supporting them in providing value to their stakeholders (see my recent posts on why innovation is so crucial for all organizations and the sigmoid curve of  the timing of innovations in business model and organizational practice).

One thing that has drawn my curiousity is the open source software movement - I think of this as innovation on a mass scale, with the invitation to participate and contribute being issued to anyone who is interested.  I went in search of further information on open source movement, and was led (as we so often are these days!) to an entry in Wikipedia called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

The title references an essay written by Eric Raymond, a software engineer, and his reflections of the early days of Linux, and the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design approaches.  The wikipedia article summarizes the essay, and Raymond's outline of 19 guidelines for creating good open source software.

I was struck by how many of these guidelines are relevant to the field and practice of change and innovation.  See what you think of the list below!

Below I have provided a list of the 11 guidelines that have the greatest application for organizational work, with some of my own comments added...

 

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

Every change process starts with an itch, be that a need to change an unsatisfactory situation, or to give shape to some potential, such as a vision for what might be...

 

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

Good change leaders know how to review and reuse what has been developed before by others, and don't feel a need to invent it all themselves. 

 

4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Speaks for itself! 

 

5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

 I like the orientation here - we are stewards of what happens in organizations, part of a community of people interested in its effectiveness and impact.  When we don't want to continue our involvement, how do we pass our responsibilities to others, rather than abandon the effort? 

 

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

 View stakeholders as partners and co-creators - whether they can support and inform the process, or are beneficiaries of the change.  It reduces resistance, and can introduce invaluable new insights and energy for positive change.

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

While analysis, consultation and design are important, so too are field tests and experience.  We will never get to the 'perfect design' of a change, so it is better to get started and make continued improvements as you get feedback from the early implementers or adopters of the change.

 

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

The early adopters are a critical and supportive audience.  They want you to succeed, so their feedback is well-intentioned to help improve your design and your implementation efforts.  Listen to them, and take on their suggestions. 

 

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

... because the users are in the heart of practice, field-testing your ideas.  They may have insights into what works, and why, that you may never gain from a distance.  So value, acknowledge, and use their suggestions.

 

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Our interests in developing and introducing necessary changes may be well-intentioned, but if we misunderstand the nature of the situation, we can too easily design ill-fitting 'solutions' that will not survive their engagement with reality.  Listening broadly to different perspectives, and listening deeply to their analysis and insight, can allow us to appreciate the problem in fresh ways that lead to new thinking, and new solutions.

 

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

You need to have a stake in the problem, or else it is simply an intellectual exercise.  You must genuinely be interested in the issue, and really want to see positive changes, as this is the source of motivation that will keep you engaged and listening when the work becomes more difficult.

 

19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Mobilizing a team of people as interested in the problem as you are, and taking the time to develop the communications platform and protocols to support your thinking and working together, will pay off.  Diversity of experience and perspective will allow for a richer analysis of the problem situation, and provide a foundation for identifying and combining different ideas into novel solutions.

 

So what do you think?  Which of these guidelines resonates with your experience of change in organizations?

Learning to facilitate - one step at a time

So just how do you learn to become a facilitator?  This is an important question, as many people are called on to serve as facilitators in meetings, and public training courses may not be easily available or affordable at a time when needed.

While I have been designing and running meetings for more than 25 years, I would say that I have been a professional facilitator for just over 17 years. I believe that I have become better at my craft over this time, and I cringe when I think back to some of the meetings that I ran back in the early days, when I did not know very much about facilitation!  Perhaps because I didn't attend any facilitation courses until I had been leading meetings for a good number of years (such things were not easily available in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s), I realized that I learned how to facilitate the same way many people do - by observing how other people facilitated meetings, and by being coached by more experienced colleagues...  (and I was fortunate to have some good coaches and role models!)

I had the opportunity recently to think about how people develop skills and experience in facilitating meetings.  Penny Walker, a colleague in London, wrote on her blog about how she works one-on-one with some of her clients, helping them prepare to facilitate meetings by themselves.

Responding to her blog, I recalled the way I have worked with a number of clients, advising them on how to facilitate meetings.  Because some of my clients are global organizations, it is fairly common that I am asked to help an individual or a team think through how they can facilitate a meeting or conference without the presence of a professional facilitator.  

In cases like this, I find that it helps to divide the task into 2 parts:

Design the Meeting.  What are your objectives?  Who is going to be there, and how long do you have for the meeting?  What design choices are available to you, given this context?

Facilitate the Meeting.  How much experience do you have leading and facilitating meetings?  What is your comfort level in running this specific meeting, according to the way it has been designed?  What support will you need to build your comfort to lead a successful meeting?

The starting point really does need to be the design discussion.  There are many more options available than plenary presentations with large group discussion.  And you can do more than have small group breakout sessions.  But your selection of activities should be driven by your purpose, and not by your comfort level in facilitating the session.

Once the design is determined, then we look at how to facilitate each step along the way.  As I said in my response to Penny, it can be intimidating to consider taking on an entire session by yourself.  But as we break the facilitation task into discrete steps (such as: forming small groups, giving instructions to the groups, managing small group reports), we give simple guidance and tips for accomplishing each piece.  And then as they are all integrated in practice, the task of facilitation become far more manageable for novice facilitators and meeting leaders!

What do you think?  Can you learn to facilitate meetings through one-on-one processes?

Newsflash: Penny Walker has written an article on this topic in the European newsletter of the International Association of Facilitators, and she kindly includes my original comments in the text.

Renewal, Innovation and the Sigmoid Curve

My recent posts have explored the theme of how organizations develop and, inevitably, decline. Almost all organizations end up closing their doors – some do this in a planned and graceful manner, some do it through managed mergers and acquisitions, and some do it abruptly and without much notice.

While the end of an organization is inevitable, the time and place when this happens is not. Organizations have opportunities to renew themselves, to innovate their services and products, to change their business model, and to gain a new lease on life. Rather than the lifespan of an organization looking like a bell curve, this renewal brings about renewed growth and performance – this creates the shape of an S curve, known to mathematicians as a Sigmoid Curve.

Source unknown

One of the best descriptions of this is provided by Charles Handy in his classic book “The Age of Paradox” (also known under its British title as “The Empty Raincoat"). He views the essential paradox of this renewal and innovation in this way:

"the secret to constant growth is to start a new sigmoid curve before the first one peters out. The right place to start the second curve is at point A where there is the time, as well as the resources and the energy, to get the new curve through its initial explorations and flounderings before the first curve begins to dip downward."

This is a key dilemma for leaders in organizations – how do you assess when your current business model, your current "theory of success", has run its course? How do you judge when the very approach that led to your growth and success will now be the cause of your decline and close?

Part of the response to this dilemma is that you can never know when that tipping point is reached, until well after the fact. This is why leaders need to be questioning their assumptions about what is making them successful, and what will continue to drive success in the future.

Leaders also need to be able to hold the paradox of embracing their business model (or strategic plan), being fully committed to implementing it in all its details, while at the same time questioning whether this model needs to be replaced by a new focus.  (The text of Handy's chapter on the Sigmoid Curve can be viewed online)

One way of holding this paradox (as I'm not sure it can actually be "managed") is to promote innovation and experimentation across the organization. Encouraging people to be dissatisfied with the way things are today gives them permission to push the boundaries and develop new ways of working – whether this is improving and making more efficient work processes or developing disruptive products and services.

Either way, an organization’s lifecycle is typically shaped like a sigmoid curve. The question is how many curves will be evident in it before the organization comes to its inevitable close?

Source:http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/Sigmoid%20curves.png

Dave Snowden, writing in his always provocative and thoughtful Cognitive Edge blog, has sketched out 3 sigmoid curves over the history of management, starting with Taylor's Scientific Management.  This diagram illustrates how management thinking and practice has evolved over time, as the changes in technology and markets meant that older modes of management would have resulted in the decline and close of the original companies. 

In a similar fashion, companies have the possibility and the opportunity to launch new growth curves - but they have to do so before they reach the tipping point that leads to decline.  The risk of waiting too long to introduce a new approach, and to scale down and abandon an old approach, is that resources (whether of money or energy) are reduced on the decline.  You may also face increasing resistance - in the form of active resistance or of apathy - that disrupt your efforts to introduce needed changes.

So how do you promote - and model - dissatisfaction with the status quo and a quest for innovation and improvement? 

Companies can expect to die - unless they innovate!

I commented in my last post about the ways in which organizations are like living systems, and how it can be helpful to anticipate these natural of and change in our organizational life. However, I was taken by surprise by some validation of this from an unexpected source…

I was watching a TED Talk called "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations" by Geoffrey West  (a physicist associated with the Santa Fe Institute, a research group focused on multidisciplinary studies of complex adaptive systems).  (Additional references to his work are available at the bottom of this post).   

The title was the first thing that caught my eye, but I became increasingly intrigued as he started to explain some curious parallels between animals, cities and corporations.

Dr West first offers some background, drawing on some of his earlier work.  He had uncovered the mathematical principles that explains an observed relationship that exists between all mammals - the greater the mass of the mammal (think of mice and elephants as two extremes of the scale), the more efficient its metabolism - in a predictable manner.  The elephant is about 75% as efficient as a mouse, relative to its size (this is known as the metabolic scaling theory - a useful introduction is available here).

Source: http://www.thecloudcollective.org/blog/9/blog_intro.jpg

West wondered whether this principle might be found in other living systems, such as cities. After wading through the data, he found that this principle of efficiency and scale does indeed apply.  The basic idea is that doubling the size of a city brings about a 85% increase in certain  infrastructure (e.g. banks, gas stations), rather than the expected doubling - this 15% is known as sub linear growth, and is the basis of the idea of economies of scale.  (An example from the Netherlands is shown in the chart). However, the city research also uncovered that doubling the size of a city brings about a 115% growth in certain 'assets' such as income, number of patents, (and crime!). This super liner growth points to the benefits of growth, the reasons why cities have continued to grow and be successful is that the serve the needs of their inhabitants in ways that smaller towns and cities cannot...

Then West began to ponder whether this principle might apply to that other large social system in which we spend much of our time – corporations. Working with data from thousands of publicly traded companies in the United States (useful because of comparable data), West and his colleagues found that the same scaling theory was evident.

In some ways, this is not surprising. As companies grow larger, they need to become more efficient in their processes and systems.  Companies will see sub linear growth as they achieve economies of scale.

This is the concept inherent in the shift from the Pioneer Phase to the Rational Phase that is described in the Barefoot Guide that I introduced in my previous post.

However, profit per employee (a useful metric for the nature and quality of growth) also follows a sub linear pattern – the larger a company becomes, the more efficient its processes and systems, the lower the profit per employee, as companies invest more and more revenue in managing and maintaining the systems that are necessary to sustain their size.

This raises the key challenge for organizations – their growth will inevitably lead to their decline and death.  The only way out of this predicament is to bring about super linear growth, a route that is often only possible through innovation and disruptive change (this is what cities have had to do in order to maintain their super linear growth).

The difficulty of this is that organizations have become comfortable with their business models, and are often reluctant to change a business model that appears to be working so well for them – after all, it's this very business model that allowed them to grow and be successful in the first place.  Compounding the challenge, it can be very hard to recognize just when the organization has gone over the top of the Growth/Decline curve, and managers are reticent to abandon a business model that still seems to be working for them. 

There is a wealth of interesting research and writing on this theme of confronting a declining business model.  I will explore this further in future posts, as I believe this ability to forecast and anticipate decline, while simultaneously investing in and building new and disruptive business lines is a critical capacity in organizational leaders.

Additional resources on Dr. West's work:

"A Physicist Solves the City" New York Times Magazine

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster  – a conversation with Geoffrey West  

A "Barefoot" foundation

In my previous post, I introduced the value of paying attention to the models or frameworks that inform our understanding of organizations and what enables them to be effective.  I described two  books that had an important influence on my own understanding at the start of my career. In this post, I am going to describe a third framework that has had an important influence on my approach and practice in building the effectiveness of organizations.

When you take a systems perspective on organizations, you begin to understand  that they have a dynamic interaction with the environment within which they are located, and that changes both within and outside the organization can have a influence on its potential for effectiveness. Looking at the world around us, we see many examples of this dynamic interaction, not least in the natural world. So if organizations are social systems, created by the people who are part of these organizations, it is not a big stretch to consider that organizations may share many similarities with the people who inhabit them.

One of the key frameworks that help me understand this draws from the work of Bernard Lievegoed, the founder of the NPI Institute of Organization Development.  Along with my colleagues at Olive OD&T at the time, I was introduced to this work by Mario van Boeschoten, James Taylor, Sue Soal and their colleagues at CDRA in Cape Town.

One of the key concepts is that organizations, like people, develop in predictable and understandable fashions.  In fact, organizations can be viewed as living systems, and it would be strange indeed were they not to develop over time.  Organizations typically move through four phases:

• Pioneering Phase – A dynamic, intimate workplace characterized by close connections to the client and a central role for the founder
• Rational Phase – As the organization grows, there are necessary calls for more structure, consistency, systems, predictability; (this phase is also known as the 'Bureaucratic' phase for obvious reasons!).  While the increased structure of the Rational phase helps the organization grow and become more effective, there are obvious downsides during this time, not least of which is the development of the "silo" mentality.
• Integrated Phase – While organizations can continue in the rational phase for a long time, eventually the internal and external calls for coordination become strong enough to lead the organization into the Integrated phase. This phase is characterized by a renewed vision, increased self-management, and more integration of functions and teams.
• Associative Phase – this final phase for mature organizations is fairly rare in practice. It is a phase in which the organization is open to sharing with its environment, in which it has a focus on collaboration and on challenging systems of power through strategic alliances.

A simple summary of these phases is to view them in terms of relationship:

Dependent (Pioneering)

Independent (Rational)

Interdependent (Integrated and Associative)

 I am pleased to see that a fairly accessible introduction to Lievegoed's ideas has recently been published by an ad-hoc group calling themselves the "Barefoot Collective".  They have published two volumes under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to download and use these resources freely!  Their website also offers a number of easy to use resources that you can use to take stock of your own organization and begin a more deliberate process of developing your effectiveness.

Foundations and Frameworks

If you're going to blog about building the effectiveness of organizations, it helps to have a model in mind of what effectiveness looks like, and some thoughts about ways of helping to bring about this effectiveness in diverse organizations.

Now the challenge is that there are literally hundreds of models describing organizational effectiveness, and many of them make useful contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of organizations. I have never taken the view that there is only one way to look at organizations – my experience as a consultant, entering into many different organizational contexts over the last 20 years, has shown me that you need to keep an open mind as to which model can offer insight into the particular dynamics of a specific organization.

Having said that, we are all influenced by some core models, or foundational frameworks.  these may come from the work of influential researchers and practitioners, or they may come from our own experience. We may have been introduced to them at an early point in our careers, or met them at timely moments when they offer insight into a particular setting.

Some of my own foundational frameworks come from my time as a practitioner in South Africa during the 1990s. The process of change that the whole society was undergoing was reflected in changes taking place in organizations across the spectrum. And this coincided with a broader shift around the world in views about organizations, with increasing emphasis being placed on participation and engagement within a systems perspective. 

Two books had an important influence on my understanding of organizations at the start of my career, And ideas from these books have continued to influence my practice to this day.

The first is the classic "The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization" by Peter Senge.  I continue to call on many ideas whose origin I can trace to concepts I was first introduced to in this book, and I view systems thinking (the fifth discipline, with the other four disciplines being Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, and Team Learning) as central to my practice as a  practitioner.

The second book is Marvin Weisbord's "Productive Workplaces" (a third edition, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original text, is to to be published next week). one of the pleasures of this book is that it provides a very useful background of how thinking about organizational effectiveness has developed over the last 100 years, summarized in the simple diagram that can be summarized as:

• 1900: Experts Solve Problems
• 1950: "Everybody" Solves Problems
• 1965: Experts Improve Whole Systems
• 2001+: "Everybody" Improves Whole Systems

By linking theory (and theorists) with practical cases, Weisbord illustrates how the practice of building effective organizations has developed through the 20th century and into the 21st century.  No doubt our thinking and insights into effective organizations will continue to develop, helped in no small part by writers like Senge and Weisbord who help us understand where we have come from and who continued probing the boundaries for what we still have to discover…

In my next post, I will introduce a third foundational framework that informs my understanding about organizational effectiveness.

Happy New Year

Welcome to 2012, and to my new blog!

This blog will focus on my interests on building the effectiveness of organizations, and you will find periodic contributions, reflections, reviews, and resources on this broad topic.

I look forward to sharing with you ideas that come across through my work, and that emerge from my reflections on my consulting practice.

Some posts will draw on material I have written elsewhere, though of course I will take the opportunity to update and incorporate my latest thinking on these topics. (If you are interested, you can view my other print and electronic publications on my website - www.RandelConsultingAssociates.com

And of course I look forward to conversations with you, the readers of this blog, as you respond and comment on what I share here…