Ashridge Consulting - Our approach

We believe that sustainable change can only be achieved through a genuine understanding of the real issues facing organisations. We consult by working collaboratively with our clients, involving them in creating and developing a participative process to bring about real change.

To try and convey what we do in a few words on a website is difficult to do well; below we have tried to answer the 'what we do' question in terms of types of work, client perspectives and types of consulting intervention.

Ashridge's consultancy practice is based on the view that organisations are not 'things' which can be known objectively by detached observers. We see organisations as social processes in which everyone, including consultants, is a participant. Hence we focus on how people interact, the forms which conversations take, the emergent patterns and dynamics, and the interplay of persistence and change. We engage with our clients in a process of inquiry; we help leaders articulate and convey their strategic intentions; and we encourage staff to take initiatives and help organisations mobilise their innovative potential. This will involve challenging some of the constraints, such as routine and habitual ways of working, or unexamined rules and assumptions, or excessive power differentials which inhibit the emergence of creative experimentation and induce risk aversion.

Our consultancy ‘expertise’ lies in working with the social processes in an organisation rather than in imposing pre-formed methods and solutions on the organisation.