Co-Instructor

Dr. Richard Thayer is managing director at Syngineering Solutions, a small management consultancy headquartered in Baltimore, MD. He and his partners have written Syngineering: Building Agility into Any Organization through John Hunt Publishing, coming out this spring. This step-by-step guide helps practitioners at all experience levels introduce agility and responsiveness into their organization, very useful in todays' volatile and uncertain times.

As an organization design practitioner, author, teacher, and advisor, Rich’s work focuses on agility and collaboration. He and his partners have a seamless consulting style that extends into a sizeable working network which includes many of the leading lights in organization design consulting today, including Dr. Naomi Stanford. Selected clients include Shell Projects & Technology, Sakhalin Energy, Shell Gulf of Mexico Shelf Division, North Caspian Operating Company, Shell Faculty Science Symposia, Cairn Energy, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, Nature Conservancy Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The partnership currently has projects building agility in US Bank and Chevron.

Rich teaches public and internal programs on agile organization design and operating models in conjunction with LBL Strategies and George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (CEPL.) as well as Caliber Consulting.

He is married, has three amazing children, and lives in the woods of urban Baltimore. When not serving clients, Rich coordinates an alternative to violence curriculum in the Maryland Department of Corrections, serves on the boards of several non-profits, and coaches’ friends, colleagues, and relatives at critical points in their lives.

Select publications and presentations.

• Syngineering: Building Agility into Any Organization (in press)
• Syngineering Case Studies, Zybach & Thayer, 2018, Organization Design Forum (ODF) Annual Meeting
• Accelerate: Doing Business at the Speed of Success Case Studies, Thayer & Zybach, 2017, European Org. Forum Annual Meeting
• Acceleration: Activating Strategy through Culture-Specific Design, Zybach and Thayer, 2017, ODF Annual Meeting
• Championing Production and Operations Efforts: Aligning People and Systems for Optimum Performance, Thayer & Zybach, 2015, public workshop through In Acuity, Inc.
• Design Challenge: Reframing Organization Design through the Lens of Four Landscapes of Work, Zybach & Thayer, 2014, ODF Annual Meeting
• Co-author internal Shell reports: Change Architecture Framework, Organization Designs That Work, and Process Improvement Guide

European instructor and major program design contributor

Dr. Naomi Stanford is an organization design expert, practitioner, teacher, and author.  She advises and supports corporate and government clients in the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Recent projects have included developing a culture of teamwork with a European Union body, redesigning patient flow with a healthcare company, introducing a bespoke organization design methodology to an Australian state government department, and advising on an HR Strategy for a conglomerate in Sudan.

She has worked as both an internal and external organization design consultant in both the public and private sectors in the US, UK, and Europe and is currently lead consultant in a major UK government organization. Her belief is that organizations perform the way they are continuously and reflectively designed to perform.  Poor design leads to sub-par performance and dysfunctional cultures.  Careful design leads to high performance and being a good place to work.

She is the author of six books: Organization Design: The Practitioner’s Guide,  Organization Design: Engaging with Change, Organization Design, the Collaborative Approach, The Economist Guide to Organization Design, Corporate Culture: Getting it Right (also an Economist publication) and Organizational Health: an integrated approach to building optimum performance. All royalties from her books are donated directly to Freedom from Torture.

During her earlier UK career, she was a corporate employee of large multinational companies, including Price Waterhouse, British Airways, Marks & Spencer, and Xerox. She then moved to the US working as an organization design consultant to a range of organizations in the government, non-profit and private sectors. She has now returned to the UK to work in the government sector.

Naomi is a bold, thoughtful, but introspective thought leader, change agent, and coach. She transforms, influences, and leads the organizations and the teams she works with through role modeling, encouragement, and issuing challenges. People who work with and for Naomi seek to emulate her skills and value her insights long after she has moved on to other projects. 

Naomi also writes blogs, articles, speaks at conferences, and tweets regularly on organization design.

Subject Matter Expert

Shelley is a Principal at The MITRE Corporation and an adjunct professor at George Mason University. Her work focuses on organizational agility, organizational assessment, and leader vision statements.

“Leaders simply can’t approach today’s work the same way as they did in the past. This program presents a new way of thinking about how to organize in order to get the results you want.”

Shelley Kirkpatrick, PhD, Organizational Change Management Principal, The MITRE Corporation and MAOD program contributor