Patrick Hoverstadt

The books and papers I write have come directly from practical consulting work and it’s really important to me that whatever I write about is based in reality. So, although it almost always involves taking a radically different perspective to traditional management approaches, it’s never a flight of fancy, it’s always rooted in solving practical problems for real organisations.

I do consultancy mainly in organisation design, strategy, and organisational change using management science and systems approaches. That basis in systems makes it really easy to provide a different take on a wide range of organisational and strategic issues where the traditional paradigm has been reductionist linear thinking. As well as making the task of developing new approaches much easier, basing it in systems thinking provides at least some reassurance that there is a strong theoretical basis for what we’re doing.

In my spare time (when I’m not doing consultancy, developing new approaches, or writing) I do a bit of academic work, for several business schools and I’m a visiting research fellow at Cranfield. I also chair a community of systems practitioners - SCiO.

In my real spare time, I enjoy sailing tallships, climbing mountains, cycling, and pubs and along with Karen Blixen and Sir Walter Scott I share an abiding love affair with Scottish Deerhounds.