AOC

Richard Holti, BA, MSc, PhD

In both his research and consulting, Richard Holti’s main interest concerns the application of action research perspectives to develop a rigorous and critical understanding of organisational life, thus providing a basis for practitioners to increase both their individual and organisational effectiveness.

Currently Richard’s R&D work involves the “built environment” sector – looking at the issues involved for building clients, designers, contractors and component suppliers to understand one another and work together – and the UK National Health Service – examining how governance and incentive arrangements affect the functioning of both hospitals and primary care organisations.

He grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England, but lived his adult life in the south. He studied physics and history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, and subsequently took an MSc and PhD in industrial sociology at Imperial College in London.

Richard joined the Tavistock Institute in 1983, and has since researched and consulted widely on the relationship between business strategy, technological innovation and organisational change. He has been a member of the Core Faculty of The Tavistock Institute’s Advanced Organisational Change and Consulting (AOC) programme since 1993.

During the 18 years in which he worked full time at the Tavistock Institute, Richard ended up directing a programme of research and consulting in the area of organisational change. Since 2001, he has held an appointment as Senior Lecturer at the Open University Business School in Milton Keynes, where he also serves as Associate Dean.

At the OU, Richard has recently run a large-scale action research project on supply chain management, and also been a co-investigator on a research project on the nature of business knowledge, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Currently he is part of a team funded to research the link between “governance and performance” for the NHS. He is also part of team that has designed and now runs an innovative action learning course for the Open University MBA. He continues to consult, mainly in the area of developing inter-organisational relationships.

I live in Brixton (South London), with my wife, Jean Neumann and our two teenage children.