This is what I don’t put in my CV.  It’s intended to provide a bit of background to the actual document.  You can download that, if you wish, via the link at the end.

I left school at 18 having rather fallen out of love with conventional education, and decided to get a job.

So I joined the civil service, which turned out to be much more interesting that it sounds. I worked in two central government departments which had a wide range of responsibilities. In my first job I learned a lot about project management. The team I joined was managing the installation of a telephone network covering all government departments in central London – some 35,000 telephone lines. I didn’t know, being 18, that project management is often quite difficult. So I happily chaired meetings of contractors boring £10,000 (at 1974 prices) holes with massive diamond-tipped drills in nuclear-proof underground bunkers. I just thought this was what you did as an 18 year old civil servant.

After about 10 years in the civil service I reached the grade of Senior Executive Officer, which was pretty good although not quite as senior as it sounds.  The grade title gives the impression I was running the whole show, and I certainly wasn’t. I don’t think I was, at that level, actually entitled to the gold-embossed leather briefcase which I managed to persuade the stationery clerk to give me, but it did look much better than the plastic ones as I wandered to and fro in Whitehall, which was where I worked.

I was actually the youngest person at that grade in HM Treasury after my ten years, so I was rather surprised when a boss whose views I very much respected said ‘Andrew, you should leave’. I didn’t actually depart until two years later, but she had spotted that I would be rather frustrated by working within a formal management structure and that I was possibly a bit more creative than my intended career would allow.

During those final two years I worked in something called the Information Systems Strategy Division of a now defunct Treasury agency. It was a fascinating period. One of projects I worked on involved figuring out how the relatively newly arrived ‘micro computers’ could be exploited by government departments. We guessed quite a lot of what might happen, but little did we know that when Bill Gates was saying ‘A computer on every desk’ he really meant it. I got to play with pre-release version of these, in modern terms, quite primitive machines.  One of them ran a programme which taught you how to touch type, a very useful skill which is primarily to blame for my posts being too long.

In 1980 a number of threads joined themselves together. By then I’d taken an Open University degree and, as a result had fallen back in love with education It was a wonderful experience in every way. I took courses in the humanities, government, computers, systems thinking and psychology. The OU prepared me for spending the rest of my life (to date, at least) deepening my knowledge in all these areas, but particularly the last three. As I’ve mentioned on the ‘threads’ page, I think they make a powerful combination.

Some of my work in the Treasury had involved internal consultancy – advising people and running projects of various kinds – and during what turned out to be my last summer working for Her Majesty, I was asked to work with an external consultant on a study of the Royal Household’s computer needs. If I told you too much more about that I’d have to kill you but it, too, was great fun.

I worked with Sir William (Bill) Heseltine, HM’s private secretary at the time, and Michael Shea, who ran the press office. Heseltine, an Australian, was extremely laid back. In fact the whole Household was; they are, for obvious reasons, very good at putting people at their ease.

Sadly, I didn’t get to meet the end-user but we were carefully briefed on what to do if she made an appearance, with or without Corgis. The drill was simply to stand to one side and pretty much pretend she wasn’t there, apart from inclining your head slightly as she passed. I remember thinking that the ‘don’t speak until you’re spoken to’ part of the briefing was a little superfluous: I was hardly likely to say ‘Ah, I’m glad you’ve turned up at last your majesty. Now, about these computers Mike says you need…’.  (Note: if you do bump into HM you’re supposed to say ‘your majesty’ the first time you speak to her and ma’am’ thereafter.)

After my resignation, preceded by attending a Royal Garden Party which hadn’t been arranged in my honour, I joined a small firm of consultants with whom I’d worked on the end user computing project. I liked where and how they worked – in an office in Museum Street, mostly in jeans and T-shirts – to the rather more formal atmosphere of a government department.

But to be honest this wasn’t a particularly happy time. I was still working in an organisation, albeit a small one.  Small businesses often have many of the same problems that afflict large organisations, but without the checks and balances which keep the large ones from falling apart. Problems and differences are magnified, particularly when all those involved in the businesses are management consultants with their own strong views about how things should be done.

However, I learnt a lot more about systems thinking, amongst other things, during this period. The company had been formed by a combination of two small groups. One of the groups had worked with Peter Checkland, the industrial-chemist turned management academic who originated the idea of soft systems methodology, in the company that Lancaster University had set up to carry out action-research for fee paying clients using the approach.

The original company evolved into a partnership which we called Mindworks, but eventually continuing tensions, to put it mildly,  resulted in us going our separate ways. Since then I’ve found working as a freelance much more fulfilling. I’ve worked, often with like-minded associates, on a wide range of interesting projects in various countries, some of which I mention on this blog.

A few of these projects have been life-changing. For example I have worked in East Africa for each of the last 11 years and I helped to design and deliver a two day programme on innovation for a large multi-national in the UK, Australia, Saudi Arabia, France and Germany.

The events were based around my ‘Huge Corporation’ idea and my nine step thinking process.  They were run on a large scale, with an actor playing Huge’s commissioning director, beamed back as a hologram from the future to brief the participants on what they needed to do to enable the future Huge to succeed.  It was, as we used to say, a real trip and the team from the large consultancy to which I was sub-contracted for the project were great fun to work with and I learned a lot from them.

I have also applied some of what I’ve learnt working with organisations to a project to help volunteers from a local town developed what is, in effect, a strategic plan for its future.  For a year I project managed the exercise and this, also, has been a life-changing experience.  It has sparked many thoughts about ways in which the organisational learning ideas, and thinking tools I know about, can enable people to get actively involved in improving where they life.   I set up two linked websites for the project and continue to work on it on a freelance basis.  There are lots more interesting things to be done there and we are just getting the second phase under way after a pause during which the necessary resources were being gathered.

Also, I also once sold a pack of my Meeting Cards to management-guru Charles Handy’s sister at a conference in Dublin, and not many people can say that. I wonder what she did with them.

One last point: I really don’t like the term ‘management consultant’, even though that’s what it says on my passport. ‘Consultant’ means, of course, both a person who gives advice and one who asks for it. And management is just about how people get things done in groups. Perhaps I really should put ‘Inventor of the Nuclear Powered Teapot’ on my business card.

If you would like a copy of my actual CV please get in touch using one of the contact methods in the left hand side bar.

Andrew Cooper