Phil Wolsey

Working with organisations, it's the combination of hard data and values that turns me on. To be a successful, complex, adaptive organisation, you need to call on the whole resources - everyone in the place - not just the managers. I like the democratic values inherent in distributed control. It's about bringing more people into the process from the start - getting them to help develop the strategy.

I met David in 1978. He was the first psychologist I'd met who actually knew how to do anything, so I was a fan from the start. We struck up a friendship and subsequent collaboration that eventually morphed into a business relationship in about 1988.

I worked in the NHS as a psychiatric nurse and became a highly trained family therapist in a CAMHS, then a qualified teacher of adults, teaching professionals from multi-disciplinary teams a range of psychotherapies. My degree looked at schizophrenia, after which I moved back into mainstream mental health, writing a development programme for reducing the rate of relapse in schizophrenia, using a range of psychological interventions.

Bit by bit, I believe the penny is dropping in the public sector: the NHS now has the most sophisticated organisational development process going on anywhere in the world and I've enjoyed being a part of that.

I'm on a roll at the moment, developing a complete system for doing organisational development: studying, reading and thinking. I still find time for seeing friends, reading voraciously and running about 35 miles a week - it's good for the brain, gets lots of oxygen going up there!