Phrontis is an interdependent network of individual practitioners and small consultancies operating in the field of systems thinking, performance and process management. As a virtual consultancy practice, we are able to offer a broad base of experience and a highly tailored approach to meeting individual client requirements.

Below we provide brief biographies of our key members.

Robin Campbell
is a consultant specialising in strategic change. He has worked both as a practitioner, a consultant and an academic. For 26 years he was a police officer in Northern Ireland retiring with the rank of Chief Superintendent having attended the Strategic Command Course in 1998. He designed the change processes in the then Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the Patten Report and is a visiting research and teaching fellow at the universities of Cranfield, Strathclyde and San Diego in Strategic Change and Criminal Justice. Dr Campbell has developed approaches to optimise Corporate Governance, Strategic Leadership, Strategic Management and Operational Management. Robin has worked in securing and sustaining change in Police, Public and Private Sector organisations. He believes passionately at putting people at the heart of Corporate Purpose. He strives to sustain synergies between strategic and systemic thinking and believes in the integration between policing, criminal justice and social justice and also theory, research, practice and consultancy. Robin holds a BA in Public Administration, an MSc in Human Resource Management both from the University of Ulster, and an MSt in Applied Criminology, from the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Strathclyde. He is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personal and Development, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management, and a Fellow of the Institute of Administration Management. .

David Corben
is a consultant specialising in systems thinking and system dynamics. He has worked both as a practitioner and as an academic (Bradford Management Centre) and has published papers in journals and conference proceedings. In addition to applying systems thinking and system dynamics (SD) to business issues, he also has wide experience of developing these skills in others through both formal training workshops and individual coaching and mentoring. He has also developed computer based learning environments for use in management development training. David has worked with multinational companies in a wide range of industries such as: oil and gas, financial services, utilities, agri-chemicals, information technology, pharmaceuticals and retailing. SD Modelling projects include: enhancing the value of mature of oil field assets, strategic supply chain modelling in agri-chemicals, product lifecycle management, customer lifecycle management, assessment of the impact of new technologies on organisations and human resource planning. David has a MSc in Computer based Modelling and Simulation (Sunderland University 1990) and was awarded his PhD for work on modelling for management learning in 1995 (Stirling University).

Raúl Espejo
is Professor of Information Management at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside and Managing Director of SYNCHO Limited. He has undertaken numerous international consultancy assignments in the areas of organizational design, information management and organizational transformation. He has published extensively in journals and books and co-authored and co-edited several books, most recently ‘Organizational Transformation and Learning’, Wiley 1996. Raul has a long association with Stafford Beer dating from their combined work with the Chilean government in the 1970s. He has specialised in developing new methods, tools and applications based on management cybernetics and the Viable Systems Model.

Anthony Gill
is a director of Phrontis Limited. Over the last fifteen years, he has applied systems thinking techniques within a range of multinational organizations to help them structure themselves and manage their information flows to support a more dynamic and empowering way of operating. Recent assignments have spanned the distribution, manufacturing, telecommunications and nuclear industries. He has held a number of industrial marketing, operations and supply chain management positions in the building services industry where he worked for some 17 years. As export manager for one of the operating companies of Carrier Corporation, he had autonomous international area responsibility for a $ multi-million budget covering sales, after-sales service and licensee manufacturing. Tony has an M B A (Aston University) and is currently undertaking research at Warwick University on a part-time basis. He has worked extensively with Raul Espejo and was a Director of SYNCHO Limited between 1990 and 1996. He is co-editor with John Mingers of a book entitled ‘MultiMethodology: The Theory and Practice of Combining Management Science Methodologies’ (John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

Antonia Gill
is a director of Phrontis Limited. She spent six years in the field of public relations and corporate communications before entering the management consultancy profession. In 1987 she joined OASiS Limited, where her consulting assignments spanned a wide range of industry sectors and included strategy clarification workshops, new product development process design, and customer information systems design and implementation. In 1990 Toni joined the Hay Group as senior consultant, where she gained extensive experience of organization and job design, career structuring and skills profiling. Since 1993 she has specialised in strategy development using systems thinking approaches to organization design and change management. Recent assignments have been in the banking and telecommunications industries, as well as the Colombian public sector. Toni has an MA (St Andrews University) and an M B A (Aston University).

John Glover
provides the in depth technical expertise required when working with enterprise wide technological systems eg, Microsoft. As organizations of today are technology supported social systems, Phrontis has to be able to support both management and technology in the drive for greater effectiveness and efficiency. John is also a UK based partner in a consultancy with Enterprise Project Knowledge (EPK) Group LLC in the United States. After studying computer science at Newcastle University, he has worked for several of the leading Project Management software vendors including Artemis and Microsoft. He has recently returned to the UK after working as part of the Microsoft Project Development Group in Redmond WA. where he and the other members of EPK Group played a key role in extending Microsoft Project and Project Server into an enterprise system. Since returning to the UK, John has provided consultancy to several large organizations, to extend the capabilities of Project and Project Server and integrate it with their existing information infrastructure, as well as working with EPK to develop a true Portfolio Management extension to Project Server.

Peter Goodwin
is an experienced independent management consultant now working full time with Phrontis. Peter’s early career was in the international oil industry where he spent 10 years working as an engineer and project manager on a number of major construction projects. After completing a full time M B A at Aston University in 1987, Peter joined Trafalgar House as Business Development Manager responsible for leading the company’s construction division into new business areas. In 1991 he set up his own management consultancy and since then has undertaken many strategic assignments for blue chip clients either in, or interfacing with the construction industry. Peter is currently on a long term assignment to the Department of Environment Construction Sponsorship Directorate helping them to improve the effectiveness of their £23M research budget, Peter is a Chartered Civil Engineer and European Engineer and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Allenna Leonard
is a partner in consultancy with Stafford Beer and a Director of Team Syntegrity Inc. of Toronto, Canada. She has played a prominent role in the early implementation of the syntegration process, a collaborative decision-making technology built on cybernetic principles that develops organizational learning through capitalising on the best skills and ideas available within the organization itself. Allenna has consulted and presented internationally and has acted as facilitator or organiser in more than 20 syntegrations. Her writings include a chapter in Beer’s ‘Beyond Dispute’ and numerous other publications in the systems field. Allenna is a part time research fellow at Liverpool John Moores University and has held part time or visiting faculty appointments at several universities; most recently at the Management Institute at St Gallen University in Switzerland. She has a master’s degree from George Washington University and a PhD from the University of Maryland.

John Mingers
is a Professor in Operational Research and Systems at Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick. John’s early career was in Computing and Operational Research when he worked for organizations such as British Leyland, the steel stockholding company Miles Druce and Elida Gibbs (part of Unilever). After taking a masters degree in Systems in Management at Lancaster University with Professor Peter Checkland, he has worked as a lecturer in higher education spending the last seven years at Warwick. He has a PhD in Management Science. John’s main research interests are in the application of systems ideas and systems methodologies to organizational problems. His particular areas of interest are Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodologies (SSM); Information Systems; and the theory of autopoiesis. John has recently published a book on the latter topic entitled "Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis" (Plenum Publishing, 1995). He has also edited two other recent books: "Information Systems: an Emerging Discipline?" (with Prof Frank Stowell, McGraw Hill, 1997) and "Multimethodology: Theory and Practice of Combining Methodologies" (with Tony Gill, Wiley, 1997). John lectures mainly at the postgraduate level, particularly on MBA programmes and on an MSc in Operational Research.

Richard Oliver - MCSA, MCSE, MCT, MIIT, MOS Master Instructor
is an IT professional with a wealth of corporate experience in IT training and course development, specialising in technical and application training to all levels.  Richard has been involved in training, consultancy and course development for 15 years having come from a background of sales and operations in the Air Freight industry at Heathrow.  He spent two years with John Bruce Training in Oxford where, as Bid Manager, he combined training and course development with the responsibility for producing all John Bryce Training’s proposals in response to invitations to tender from major clients.  More recently he has specialised in Microsoft Project course development, installation and training with particular emphasis on the emerging Microsoft EPMU standards and Microsoft Project Server 2003 installation.

Duncan Shaw
is a lecturer at Aston Business School in the Knowledge Management Research Group. He is the co-founder of the Modelling Strategic Problems Group – a network group for practitioners and academics who are interested in improving methodology for modelling strategic problems. Duncan has a First Class Honours, and a Ph.D., in Management Science from Strathclyde University. In his consulting work, Duncan has lead, or has been on the facilitation team, of over 60 workshops for a wide range of organisations, large and small, public and private, for Board, managerial and operational level staff. His consulting and research work focusses on effective sharing of knowledge in the preparation of strategic plans, psychological buy-in to those plans and issues concerning organizational change. Much of Duncan's facilitation work on Group Mapping in the areas of knowledge management, strategy development and organizational change has been published internationally.

Geoffrey Mullery
a Founder of Systemic Methods Limited (SML), graduated in mathematics and spent five to six years each at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Ferranti and Systems Designers Limited. In 1978/9 he defined the CORE specification technique and much current research work in computer systems requirements analysis is acknowledged to have been strongly influenced by these ideas. In 1983 he founded SML to support development and application of methods and tools. He assisted Imperial Software Technology with an Integrated Project Support Environment and SYNCHO with its Viable Systems Method support tool, VIPLAN. He has supported the UK Ministry of Defence and their suppliers (e.g. British Aerospace, Pactel and EASAMS) on projects with budgets from £10,000 to £100,000,000. He has provided courses/talks at places such as the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, MILCOMP, Ada UK International Conference and Technische Universität Munchen and for major organizations (e.g. British Telecom and GEC). He served on committees such as the European Workshop of Industrial Computer Systems and the Department of Industry's STARTS committee.

Graham Winch
has held posts in market research and in the resins and metal finishing industries in the UK and Germany, and has consulted widely in business dynamics and systems thinking in the US, Mexico, Italy, and Belgium as well as in the UK. He was board director and V-P of Federal Group Inc., the consulting subsidiary of New York investment banking firm Eberstadt-Fleming - the Boston-based practice specialised in developing and using dynamic models to support strategy formulation, competitive position appraisal, and for longer-term business outlooks. Consulting clients have included Exxon, DuPont, Banco Naçional de Mexico, Humana Corp., SmithKline-Beecham, Northern Rock and Sony. His first degree is in industrial chemistry and he has a PhD in forecasting. He is currently Professor of Business Analysis at a UK business school and has taught executive and MBA programmes at a number of leading schools in the UK and United States. He also served as Executive Editor of the System Dynamics Review for five years.