A Different Conversation…

Hello. I’m David Firth. Welcome to my site, most of which is about the work I do as an OD consultant.

The work I do is to help clients develop the capacity of their organisation to create a more powerful, successful future for itself. This involves profound practices for bringing about the engagement, enrolment and participation of the workforce. I work with companies who want to build relationships with their stakeholders based on respect, commitment, accountability and mutuality. As a consultant I specialise in complex, intractable problems, areas where previous interventions have brought limited or temporary progress, and in difficult relationships or personalities.

The work is founded on simple ideas, some of which are:

(i) that people matter, and are more than simply resources
(ii) that work itself matters, and that we begin to demean its power in our lives and its contribution to our collective futures the moment we begin to see it primarily as an economic transaction
(iii) that we are capable of co-creating extraordinary futures – and that phrase may simply be another expression for ‘the Organisation’ - but as human beings we sometimes get in our own way
(iv) that traditional, popular, patriarchal ways of organising have not just outlived their usefulness, but have become a real example of how we unintentionally get in the way of our own best futures
(v) that improving relationships up and down the organisation is always going to be a weaker option than creating a space for powerful, peer-to-peer, Adult-Adult relationships to develop
(vi) that following any instinct to minimise or sanitise anxiety in an individual or organisation (and common examples of this include appraisal systems, most training and your annual conference) is a result of not having understood (i) above.

Never be satisfied
Never be boring
You can do anything you can imagine
The Lords of Misrule 1986