AOC
Sue Whittle, BA, MSc, PhD
Dr. Sue Whittle consults to individual managers, change agents and consultants, to project and work based teams, and to cross boundary groups. She specialises in helping clients to introduce new ways of thinking and working, to shape performance measurement and management systems, and to build new forms of intra-organisational and inter-organisational networks.
Sue practices from the principle that appropriate and sustainable changes to organisations are the outcome of interventions that influence how people in different organisational spaces make sense of their work and their own identities. Finding ways to acknowledge and address anxieties about change is central to the way she works.
Before moving into management and organisation development Sue worked in inner city, public sector housing. For 20 years she has worked as an organisation development consultant and participatory researcher in local government, manufacturing, health, construction, and the prison service. Her main interests are: sector level innovation; regulation and control; organisation design; cross boundary collaboration; individual, organisational and inter-organisational learning; and the relationships between individual thinking and organisation change.
More recent interventions have focused on:
- Consulting to strategy options in contested political contexts
- Public Service delivery redesign
- Cross boundary service innovations in regulated environments
- Leadership coaching and role changes as vehicles for organisational change
- Loss of trust in area based initiatives
- Consortium building in contexts of resource scarcity
- Recovering from bad policy decisions
- Working with taken-for-granted knowledge and expertise in new areas of work
Sue believes in evidence-based consulting practice and critical self-development. She has directed sector-level action research interventions in partnership with national government agencies and private sector bodies that have supported strategic policy changes and produced toolkits and development support for wider practitioner use.
Sue has published around 40 academic and practitioner articles and has taught OD, MBA and HR programmes at masters level in a number of universities. Currently, she serves in a core faculty role on the National School of Government Masters Programme in Leading Public Sector Change and Organisational Development and continues in her role of core faculty at The Tavistock Institute on The Masters Programme in Advanced Organisational Change and Consulting .
