David L Francis has enjoyed a diverse career. He has been a manager, an action-learning facilitator, an organisation development specialist and a strategy coach. Currently he is a Principal Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Entrepreneurship, Change Management and Innovation at the University of Brighton. In addition, he is an Executive Associate of the Henley Business School, a Chartered Fellow of the Institute for Personnel and Development and the author or co-author of 31 books.
More than 20 years ago David led a research team that completed a two-year anthropological investigation of how managers attempted to implement the Agile Paradigm in practice. Subsequently, he has developed a structured seven-step process for agility-oriented organization development described in his recent book. He writes: “many argue that all organisations should strive to be agile. My book, Exploiting Agility for Advantage, takes a radically different view and shows that requisite agility is required, meaning not too much, not too little, of the right type and delivering wanted agility deliverables”.
