The Business Experience consultancy members have up to
20 years’ experience on major £multi-million projects …

from Concept Design, through Detailed Planning, to Operations

thinking about, evaluating, and improving the PERFORMANCE of Business, Leaders, Teams, and People … especially their THINKING.

 The Business Experience has two co-founders, Michael Barrett and Alyson Burn. They make a Balanced Team in terms of Whole-Brain Thinking Styles.

Michael is strong in the Reasoning and Visionary Thinking Styles, whilst Alyson's strengths cover the Task and People Thinking Styles. Between them they make a Whole-Brained Team, covering all four Core Thinking Styles.

 Michael Barrett is a Chemical Process Design Engineer by backgound but moved into Performance Consultancy specialising in Customer Focus, Communications Analysis, and Flexible Clear Thinking.

He initially worked in Sales & Marketing with global suppliers to the Chemicals, Oil, and Gas industries. But he then switched careers to work with major oil companies and construction contractors in design and purchasing ... buying the same products and services he had been selling.

He found the perspectives of the Seller and Buyer to be polar opposites, and that it was extremely difficult for the Sellers to see their offerings and communications from the customers' viewpoint.

This dual-perspective experience formed the basis of a "unique customer-viewpoint insight" - a frequent client quote. This insight is offered to clients' teams to help them see any aspect of their business from the customers' perspective.  It also enabled Michael to develop the world's first Quality Assurance systen for testing and improving the effectiveness of any form of communications ... AdQA.  

This unique insight led to Michael's most dramatic impact on a client's business performance (to date). He designed and facilitated a series of Customer-Focused Strategy, Marketing & Selling Workshops for senior managers of a business unit of an FT-100 company.  When the unit split from its parent soon after, it went on to grow rapidly to more than double the market capitalisation of its parent. A key element of the event was a customer role-play exercise that provided a major learning 'shot' for all participants.

Clear Thinking, Problem Solving, and Ideas Creation, Evaluation, and Planning are some of Michael's core skills. These abilities developed from his experiences in designing oil & gas processing plant which require skills in process design and problem-solving in addition to attention to detail and seeing the 'big picture'. Together with his dual-perspective of Seller and Buyer, these experiences are ideal for helping client teams to find 'hidden' improvements across their business.

Michael continues to research "Why Strategies, Plans, Projects, Innovations, and Communications GO WRONG" and "What really affects Business and Team Performance". The results of this on-going research are published in our Clear Thinking Case Study of the Month, our News section.

And from studying Whole-Brain Thinking, Michael developed the world's first system for helping people and teams to think flexibly and clearly, via a four-stage Clear Thinking Process. This is now offered as a training course in Flexible, Clear Thinking - again a world-first.

Co-founder Alyson Burn has over 20 years' experience as a Leadership, Learning & Development Consultant. She has worked with and for a diverse range of UK and global organisations in the pharmaceutical, energy, engineering, transport, and tourism industries. Alyson is a qualified Psychometric Tester, eg MBTI, OPQ, Belbin.

Her expertise includes designing, facilitating, or project-managing Team Development events, Leadership and Talent Development initiatives, Change initiatives, short Management Training sessions, and Assessment & Development Centres.

She has also designed and project-managed development interventions for high-potential managers which resulted in organisation-wide impact. For example: her design for a Key Talent Forum for 50 hi-po's was rolled out globally across a major pharmaceutical company.

Alyson is a seasoned interviewer and puts these skills to use in our service in Interviewing Senior Leaders to enable them to communicate effective organisational messages.

A particular area of interest is Managers as People Developers, where managers take the prime responsibility for monitoring and developing the performance of their reports. To assist this process, Alyson has devised a large and varied range of on-job development activities that managers can select from and apply.

Alyson's expertise in Leadership Development drives The Business Experience's Whole-Brain Leadership Model. This evolved from examining a range of Leadership models, exracting the most useful aspects, then intergrating the critical leadership factors with the Whole-Brain Thinking Model. The result is a model which encompasses six leadership Styles, seven Leadership Roles, and a range of Thinking Styles crucial to effective Leadership.

Include Shell, Glaxo SmithKline, British Gas/BG, British Airways, Johnson & Johnson, Amec, and central government (Whitehall). We’ve had client relationships with, or exposure to, leading management development deliverers such as Duke University, Ashridge Management College, and Harvard Business School.

For one project we worked with the chairman, and the head of HR, of a 15,000-strong business unit of a top global company to design and facilitate a Strategy Forum for 200 key-talent managers. For another client (a business unit), a series of Customer-Focused Strategy workshops ultimately led to the business unit leapfrogging its much larger parent (by market capitalisation) after a demerger.

♦  "A unique customer insight" ... typical client comment
♦  "That's odd, nobody's pointed that out before" ... virtually every client
♦  "I now realise that I didn't really understand what strategy is"
      ... Strategy Manager, Energy company, at Customer-Focused Strategy Workshop
♦  "Thank you for a very pleasurable and productive teambuilding day"
      ... Regulatory Affairs Director, Fortune 100 company
♦  "You really got them thinking about flexing their Influencing & Motivation Style"
      ... HR Director, major Pharmaceutical company
♦  "Your work on Competencies was tremendous" ... CEO, tourism organisation

♦  "That's a stupid question - of course our customers know that"
      ... client Marketing Director with a Harvard MBA
    "Well, actually, that's an intersting point. We'll need to think about that"
      ... his Marketing Manager
 ♦  "Brilliant. Frankly, brilliant. It's a holistic solution for me" ... delegate on our Flexible, Clear Thinking course, an experienced manager with a global company.