Director, P3C

Sue Whittle, BA, MSc, PhD

I consult to professionals in change agent or consultant roles, to work based teams involved in creating and coping with change, and to groups working across boundaries to craft novel solutions. Typically, this involves helping clients introduce new ways of thinking and working, reshaping performance measurement and management systems, and building collaborations within and across territories.

Successful and sustainable change requires interventions that influence how people in different organisational spaces make sense of their work, their roles, and their identities. The building blocks of my approach are: (1) find out what's known and what isn't known; (2) work with concerns about changing and not changing; and (3) find ways to translate aspirations into actions.

Examples of some of my interventions include:

• Making risk management matter in a property development and management company
• Improving group performance by using storytelling to say the unsayable
• Leadership coaching and role changes as vehicles for organisational change
• Shadow consulting to external consultants working on high risk/ high profile assignments
• Consulting to strategy options in contested political contexts
• Cross boundary service innovations in regulated environments
• Consortium building in contexts of resource scarcity
• Discovering how taken-for-granted knowledge and expertise stifle change and innovation

My work as an organisation consultant and participatory researcher spans 20+ years and includes manufacturing, construction, local and national government, health, and prison service clients. I have 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 practitioner use.

Since 1990, I have delivered and examined masters level programmes in several universities and provided bespoke programmes for bodies such as the Institute of Directors. From 2001 -2009 I enjoyed a Core Faculty role on The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations MA in Advanced Organisational Consultation. My current Institute roles are Co-Director of The Practitioner Certificate in Consulting and Change (P3C)programme and Core Faculty on the University of Birmingham's Masters Programme in Leading Public Service Change and Organisational Development.

With Karen Izod, I have recently edited Mind-ful Consulting a collection of stories from the field, told by members of the AOC Society and have around 40 other academic and practitioner publications. My current interests are: the relationship between individual thinking and organisation change; using play for development; the design of change management strategies; fashioning functional cultures; learning for collaboration; and the links between quality and control.