Doctoral application
Starting as I hope to go on, sharing a paper about my why, what and how of doing a Doctorate in Organisational Change (DOC) at Ashridge.
My work with Absurd Intelligence continues to be rewarding, hectic and a bit too confidential to share. So, instead here is something vulnerable but at least only to me: my application to do a Doctorate in Organisational Change (DOC) at Hult Ashridge.
Two and a bit years ago I shared that I had been exploring a doctorate, at first in conversations with the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. Turns out that UCL doesn’t really do practice-based or action research doctorates (where the object of your study is what you are doing in (some of) your life).
My exploration went on pause for reasons. Then, a few weeks ago I spoke with Dr Margaret Gearty, who I know through the Bath Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice. She went on to be a doctoral supervisor at Ashridge, and encouraged me to apply.
Over the weekend, I did. They ask that you submit a 3,000-ish word acceptance paper. Given that it is mostly about how my career developed into the Atelier of What’s Next, I thought I would share it with you all.
Also, publishing this is emblematic of something else: if I get accepted to do the doctorate, then this newsletter would be one place where I would be exploring my learning with as much honesty as I can.
The rest of the newsletter has the following structure:
Introduction. What are the key themes of my application
Personal and career history. How have I arrived at this time and place in my life?
My current work. What do I want to study at a doctoral level?
The doctoral need. Why do I want to do a doctorate, and why now?
Initial ideas on how I want to go about my inquiry. How do I want to study at a doctoral level?
Wish me luck on whether I get accepted. Also, I hope to be able to move back to regular updates on the Atelier in the coming week.
Introduction
This paper describes what has led me to the point of choosing to study my practice at a Doctoral level, and to begin establishing a theoretical and methodological basis for my work. The aim, obviously, is to demonstrate my suitability for the Doctorate in Organisational Change (DOC) at Ashridge, and be accepted on to the next programme, starting in 2026.
After over 20 years working sustainability, I have consolidated my approach and experience into the ‘Atelier of What’s Next’ – a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future.
Although the specific initiatives ‘in’ the Atelier can be very different, my working hypothesis is that there is a set of tools, methods and perspectives which help a frontier initiative to succeed so it contributes to generating a better world.
That is the practice I want to study at the rigorous intensity of a Doctorate: how can I lead the Atelier so that it is supporting frontier initiatives to contribute to a better future?
This requires research that touches on different disciplines, including: innovation and start-ups; sectoral transition; and, macro-political, social and economic change. The Ashridge DOC is a good fit because of my past study with action research at Bath, and the strong first-person emphasis also speaks to my intuition that my work needs on-going personal development to flourish. (I have access to technical content through my association with the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources.)
In the Doctorate, the work of the Atelier would be the practice domain. The DOC programme would help me deepen and accelerate my learning-by-doing, in the service of more generative impact through the initiatives ‘in’ the Atelier, plus the diffusion of insights gleaned for others to use.
Personal and career history
“I’m interested in how the world works” was the first sentence in my UCAS personal statement when I was 17. I went on to study physics, and I got my MPhys after four years at Oxford. I left interested in how the world works but in a different way – in the social, economic and political sense.
While at university, I had got involved with the student societies around development, environment, human rights, and all those other issues that gradually got bundled up in ‘sustainability’. I had a tiny role in the first-ever Alternative Careers Fair in 1996, and acted as a coordinator across the rainbow coalition of progressive causes (mainly trying to get events to be on different nights).
I realised that I want a world that works fairly (which, in my view, also covers environmental issues, as the people most affected are usually the most marginalised and have done the least to contribute to the problem; that’s just not fair). For me, understanding how the world works is part of then working for a fairer society.
Even so, as I left university I had an alternative career fail. Unlike my friends, my parents could not support me on a gap year or period of finding my professional self. Instead, I joined an audit firm in order to qualify as an accountant.
Turns out that wasn’t a great choice for me. While I learnt financial and business skills, I was bored, and few of my colleagues had interest in how the world works. My very first audit client was a subsidiary of Shell – a company I had been campaigning against months before. I told my friends that I wasn’t selling my soul, only lending it.
It was the time that things could only get better with New Labour. There was a wave of Corporate Social Responsibility. Once I had passed all my accounting exams, I decided to create a bridge into this new, exciting area. I applied to the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice (RBP) at the University of Bath, and was accepted.
Like many of the people who did the RBP Masters, I didn’t know what this Action Research thing was. Still, I found the whole experience one of the most profound of my life.
My dissertation was titled ‘How can I be wrong?’ (after a song by The Auteurs), about various experiments in changing my employer, a Big 5 audit firm. Unsurprisingly, it changed not at all. But I learnt that there was a ‘me’ beyond the rational physicist, who could connect with people, who could facilitate experiences, and who could be appreciated even when not perfect. Turns out trying something and learning from the experience through various lenses is worthwhile!
In my cohort, I was the one who arrived saying that I wanted to change careers, but was pretty much the last to move. Eventually I got a new job. I handed in my notice (ignoring a senior partner telling me “don’t chase this CSR fad”), handed in my dissertation, had a week in New York, and started at the new job.
Success! The Masters was a bridge out of auditing, and into Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity. At the time in 2003, through to roughly 2012, Forum had a legitimate claim as the leading advisor/change catalyst on sustainability in the UK, certainly with business.
My experience was completely different to PwC. People were committed and did care the world. After feeling like a tiny cog in a massive machine, at Forum I felt part of a gang against that machine, the unsustainable status quo.
I started as a green accountant, calculating the cost to a company if it had to internalise the environmental externalities of its business. Turns out just telling people off doesn’t work, when you have no power to impose the punishment. They can just ignore you.
So, Forum shifted its approach from a ‘responsibility’ frame (‘do this because you should’) to a ‘futures’ frame (‘do this because there will be upside for you, and there is downside to doing nothing’). I was part of making that organisational shift happen, as described in my chapter in Leadership for Sustainability, the book reviewing the impact of the RBP (Bent, 2011). That chapter title encapsulates my framing for that shift: ‘Creating places to stand and the levers to move the world’.
In my 13 years at Forum I was promoted, eventually to the senior management team as Director of Sustainable Business. I was responsible for developing our advisory practice, combining methods from systems thinking, futures (like scenario planning), and change management into offers that appealed to for-profit corporates, and which my colleagues could deliver.
Over that time, I lead engagements which, for instance, resulted in The Guardian’s first sustainability strategy, O2 setting the most aggressive climate targets in UK telecoms, and an Indian conglomerate (Arditya Birla) rolling out scenario planning across all its businesses, so that sustainability was embedded in corporate strategy. For the most part, this period was intense and fun.
Even so, I felt there were significant limitations to the one-to-one advisory approach. In 2014 I started a two-year Policy Fellowship at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge, on the question: What is the role of business in enabling the shift to a global sustainable economy?
My conclusion: we cannot rely on the voluntary actions of heroic CEOs. We need to shift the incentives that companies face so that doing the sustainable thing is the most commercial thing. Therefore, there will need to be industrial strategy, which means changing from the minimalist state which sometimes fixes market failures (the neoliberal orthodoxy) to an active state that is shaping markets.
I found that my conclusions were anticipated by Prof Mariana Mazzucato’s mission-orientated innovation policy (for instance in The Entrepreneurial State, 2013) and Prof Johan Schott’s system transition work (for instance Schot, J., & Kanger, L., 2018), amongst others.
There were whole fields of emerging theories to use. But, in my view, Forum had got stuck with serving existing relationships, and lost its zeal for being at the leading edge. I no longer believed it was a place to stand to move the world.
It was around this time that I didn’t shave during a three-week holiday. I had always resisted having a beard, because my dad had one. I realised that I was comfortable with it because I had accepted that part of me which came from my dad: caring, dutiful, passionate about fairness. A few months later, sadly, he died. But now I had a financial buffer to go independent.
From 2016, I did a number of OK-to-good projects, including helping the Cabinet Office launch its Inclusive Economy Partnership, and advised UNDP on making markets work for the Sustainable Development Goals. I also tried to start a programme within an academic setting ‘Transforming Tomorrow’, which had the aim to “catalyse an unprecedented period of experimentation in the social, cultural, political and economic innovations to shift us from climate emergency to prosperity”. That fell apart under the pressure of COVID.
It all felt unsatisfactory. I tried on different kinds of focus for size – climate, sustainable finance, using futures – but none of them worked well, in the sense of creating coherence and consistently attracting good work.
I felt that familiar technocratic approaches of corporate sustainability were too narrow given the rise of populism, and the deep challenges humankind faced on climate and more. I had a peer coaching group and other relationships which gave me advice and kept me developing my approach. But I knew I was on the wrong track.
In 2021, during COVID, my wife died 4 months after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. A year later, her mother died peacefully, also of cancer, and then her father committed suicide. These bereavements were huge shocks for my children (11 and 13 when their mother died), and also myself. I slowed down my professional life, and wondered what was next.
One December evening in 2022, I was at an event for start-ups. Each entrepreneur would get up and declare what they were building for the world. Several glasses of wine in, I asked myself what I would want to say I was building for the world. A phrase popped into my head: ‘The Atelier of What’s Next’.
My current work
It took me a few months to work through what an ‘Atelier of What’s Next’ actually is, and what it does. To create a place to stand.
I describe it as a ‘studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future’, specifically:
‘Studio’. An artists or worker’s workroom.
‘Initiatives’. A deliberate attempt, usually well-bounded, to generate a better future. (This is a deliberately broad category.)
‘Frontier’. At the edge of what is possible now. (This constraint what provides the focus and coherence.)
‘Generating’. Creating, forming and otherwise causing the desired outcomes.
‘A better future’. A world where there are on-going deep transformations in our societies towards humankind living in ways that align with nature, and where people can choose their own version of the good life.
The presumption of the Atelier is that we are living in a time of connected, escalating crises. The normal way of doing things is both a cause of these crises, and a barrier to next steps. Hence there is a big need for frontier initiatives to flourish.
Which is why the Atelier exists: to help frontier initiatives contribute to deep transformations we need.
The method of the Atelier is to bring a ‘doing-by-learning’ attitude and a ‘deep transformation’ toolkit (which builds on methods I used and/or developed in Forum). The idea is to put initiatives ‘in’ the Atelier, and work together on what is needed, what is ready, what can we do and what next.
The theory of change for the Atelier is currently based heavily on the Multi-Level Perspective (Geels, 2010), which has three levels: Landscape (macro-, the big picture); Regime (meso-, mainstream for different countries and sectors); and Niche (micro-, the small clusters of people trying out new stuff).
The inquiry questions for the Atelier are:
Landscape. How can we accelerate deep transformations in our economies and societies towards humankind living in ways that align with nature, and where people can choose their own version of the good life?
Regime. How can we create the innovation ecosystems, political movements and appropriate governance for systemic transformation?
Niches. How can we quickly learn-by-doing, in this moment, on this specific intervention, so that it thrives by accelerating shifts at the regime and landscape levels?
Underneath all these questions is a first person inquiry: how can I lead the Atelier so that it is supporting frontier initiatives to contribute to a better future?
One choice was to create a regular newsletter, Exploring What’s Next, which publicly described was trying to do, and what I was learning. (The summary of the Atelier above is expanded in this post.)
Another was to accept the invitation to be an Honorary Lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. I co-lead a Masters module on ‘Innovation and Sustainability in Business’, which has forced me to articulate more of my working hypothesis (some of the lectures are written up here. Also, I have access to world-leading academics and research on the technical aspects of sustainable economics.
One framework I have developed that guides my work is the Depth of Change spectrum, which is based on a spectrum on ‘different approaches to reform with regard to modernity / coloniality’ in Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa De Oliveira (2021).
My view is that there is a response to our situation, let’s call it ‘Deep Transformation’, which:
Is more than strong reform, that would just give a different version of the unsustainable status quo.
Uses the insights of those who have been radical resisters, for instance in degrowth work – but acknowledging that, by defining themselves as anti-, de-, or post- the current status quo, those rebellions are still trapped by the status quo (Greaber, unknown).
Does not retreat to make ‘good ruins’ for future generations to thrive on (Hine, 2023).
Since establishing the Atelier, I have supported various frontier initiatives, for instance:
A five-day innovation workshop for Innovate UK to accelerate Net Zero Heat, written up here.
Long-term support with the Sustainable Shipping Initiative, first developing an ambitious strategy and then turning an existing sectoral roadmap into a continual source of insight and challenge for the industry called the State of Sustainable Shipping, or SoSS (more here).
Used SoSS to develop a new futures method to create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards transformative outcomes called Influential Trajectories.
Applied Influential Trajectories to transition planning on for rural electrification in Aotearoa New Zealand (more here).
Those last bullet points illustrate how I am learning by trying, and using the newsletter to land insights for myself, which others may then use. My rusty, but active, efforts at Action Research.
Learning-by-trying is my short-term aim for the Atelier. In the medium-term I want to be thriving by doing-and-learning, so that in the long-term the Atelier is contributing to a better future. More detail in the diagram (from here):
The Atelier itself currently has three areas of work (which will doubtless evolve over the coming years). These are (more detail here):
Using futures for decision-making (current project with Chatham House, plus the still-evolving Influential Trajectories method).
For-impact start-up ecosystem (for instance, as Venture Partner, or unpaid advisor, to Conduit Connect, a for-impact venture capital form).
Culture upstream of politics (through a new kind of think tank called Absurd Intelligence).
The challenge I have set for myself is: how can I embody and enact a practice of Deep Transformation (more than reform; learning from, but not trapped by, radicals; and not giving up on the potential in the present) through the work of the Atelier?
The doctoral need
That is a big challenge, and one that needs proper support to answer. It is an inquiry question with many dimensions:
There are levels of scale: Landscape, Regime and Niche (see questions above).
There are levels of who is involved:
First person: how can I lead an organisation so that it is supporting frontier initiatives to contribute to a better future?
Second person: how can we generate a better future, and develop a practice for that, through the work we are doing together on frontier initiatives?
Third person: How can a practice of supporting frontier initiatives, individually, in clusters and as a loose movement, generate a better future?
There are different disciplines to draw on, including:
Landscape: history, politics and economics of societal change (for instance, Deep Transitions, Schot and Kanger, 2018).
Regime: systems transition (for instance Geels, 2010).
Niche: entrepreneurship and innovation literatures, plus ontological design (Escobar, 2018).
My intuition is that I could be more effective in creating change in the world (and have a more meaningful life) with the rigour of academic practice-based study. My desire is to deepen my practice and insights, plus widen the perspectives I draw on. Essentially, I want to accelerate the rate of learning (’clock rate’) for myself, the organisations I am in, and the context I am operating in.
In addition, a doctorate would provide me with credibility when I have been on a very unconventional career path.
The Ashridge Doctorate in Organisational Change looks like a good fit. There is the familiar (if rusty) action research approach, which I have from my Masters. There is the support of having a peer cohort (which I know, from my UCL experience, is often missing in doctoral programmes). The strong first person emphasis also speaks to my intuition that my work needs on-going personal development to flourish.
As to why now, my family situation is more stable, and the Atelier is established enough.
My hope is to have more impact, both directly, through the initiatives I am part of, and indirectly, by increasing the effectiveness of those I am working with. I hope a doctorate will open up more future career paths, and give me confidence in the place to stand.
Initial ideas on how I want to go about my inquiry
The initial idea is to use the Atelier as the practice domain to study ‘Deep Transformation’. I can see two strands:
All the initiatives which are ‘in’ the Atelier.
The management of the Atelier itself. (In one sense, the Atelier is an example of a frontier initiative that is also ‘in’ the Atelier.)
In Phase 1, I imagine I would be designing my Action Research practice (so that all the experiences from the Atelier become ‘data’ for the doctorate), and enhancing my understanding of various disciplines, so I can deepen the Atelier’s theory of change and methods. This would also include how to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a generative, ethical way, inspired by Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence (2024).
Also, I would want to design a community of practice around what I’ve been calling ‘Deep Transformation’ (though I’d avoid imposing this label). This would provide a vehicle for what Boisot (1998) calls social learning, through cycles of scanning, codifying, broadcasting and absorbing the developing methods.
My on-going connection with UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources would give me access to the more technical content relating to Deep Transitions.
Conclusion
I am excited to bring the rigorous intensity of the Ashridge Doctorate in Organisational Change to my inquiry: how can I lead the Atelier so that it is supporting frontier initiatives to contribute to a better future?
I am sure I will find out lots of ways in which I am wrong! The good news, just like my Masters dissertation, is that will then mean I can do things better, do better things and imagine a different better.
People are aching for change. The Atelier is an appropriate vehicle. I am ready to explore, and learn-by-doing, in the service of generating a better future.
References
Bent, D. (2011). Creating places to stand and the levers to move the world in Marshall, J., Coleman, G., & Reason, P. (2011). Leadership for Sustainability: An Action Research Approach (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351278287.
Boisot, M. H. (1998). Knowledge assets: Securing competitive advantage in the information economy. OUP Oxford.
De Oliveira, V. M. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Geels, F. W. (2010). Ontologies, socio-technical transitions (to sustainability), and the multi-level perspective. Research policy, 39(4), 495-510. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.022
Greaber, D. (unknown) I’ve been told by friends of David Graeber that he believed creating a better future requires active construction rather than simply protesting the present. However, I cannot find a published quote to that effect.
Hine, D. (2023). At work in the ruins: finding our place in the time of science, climate change, pandemics and all the other emergencies. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Mazzucato, M. (2013). The entrepreneurial state: Debunking public vs. private sector myths. Anthem Press.
Mollick, E. (2024). Co-intelligence: Living and working with AI. WH Allen.
Schot, J., & Kanger, L. (2018). Deep transitions: Emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality. Research Policy, 47(6), 1045-1059. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.03.009