As a system thinking expert Richard obsesses over leadership and stewardship of the future. His quest is to restore this fundamental tenet of leadership that too often is lost in managing the pressure for short-term advantage.
Richard works with leaders of complex enterprises and with people starting their journey. He guides thinking and practice in building capabilities to get work done now and into the future. He helps leaders answer three questions: what is needed, how much is enough and why, and how to best employ networks of capabilities as a complex adaptive system operating in a rapidly changing environment.
He garnered his expertise in public, private and academic sectors as an experimental scientist, a consultant with top-tier strategy firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and general manager and company director with CAE Inc.
He is now a Thought Leader educator, adviser, and mentor helping organisations through fundamental challenges of breaking with reductionist and linear thinking and practice that dominated the 20th Century to build capabilities and capacity fit for the 21st Century.
Richard is a member of Faculty of Thought Leaders Business School in Australia, where he mentors other thought leaders in building their own commercial practices, with the aim of making clever people commercially smart. He’s inspired by the company he keeps and with them raising consciousness on the planet to achieve sustainable development through viable organisation design, leadership and governance.
Richard has a PhD from the University of South Australia, on the topic “Systems approaches to strategy and execution in national security enterprises.” His thesis was assessed and accepted by one of the world’s leading systems educators and practitioners in Professor Michael Jackson, OBE who has written several books on the application of systems approaches. He continues research on complex systems governance with Professor Charles Keating, Director of the National Center for Systems of Systems Engineering, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. USA
He is a member of the International Council of Systems Engineering and presents at their annual conference on systemic interventions of complex systems and enterprises.