I am a professional facilitator and planning process specialist, based in Sydney Australia.  I head a thought leader practice, Business Generation, which I founded in 1989.  The mission of Business Generation is to enhance corporate performance through the facilitated introduction of best-practice planning processes.

I have spent most of my professional career in the planning and business development domain, initially in staff positions with large corporates, then in the Strategic Management practice of a Big 4 global consulting firm, and then as Principal of my own company.  My formal qualifications include an undergraduate degree in Agricultural Science, an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, and Diplomas in Company Directorship and in Project Management.  I have also completed a Mastery in Deep Facilitation qualification to strengthen my understanding of personal and group dynamics.

A facilitator is someone who makes things easy.  As a planning process facilitator I make it easier for groups of people to embrace the future together.

In my role I effectively become a temporary member of an organisation’s executive team for part of its journey.    That provides me with a privileged vantage point.  I work across industries, across geographies, and across cultures – ethnic and organisational.  In my travels I pick up ideas, and I pass ideas on.   That breadth of exposure helps me to recognise patterns that others might miss.  It has made me increasingly appreciative of why people behave the way that they do in the corporate environment.

There is a time to be silent, and a time to speak.  For the process facilitator the challenge is to get other people to talk freely about what is on their minds.  Their focus is on issues;  mine is on the group dynamics.   I don’t expect to know as much about their particular enterprise domain as they do, and that’s not why I’m there.  My contribution is to achieve common understanding about the situation, and then unanimity on how best to proceed.   I do that by encouraging others to contribute to the information pool.  I invite, and collect, and sieve, and question, and challenge, and re-phrase, and summarise, and feed back.

Independence of thought is a vital freedom, and a resource of inestimable value.  As a facilitator I seek to protect that freedom and tap that resource by enabling freedom of expression.

On this blog I take my own turn to speak, in the same spirit.