Hugh trained and qualified originally as a secondary school teacher and subsequently as a Gestalt Psychotherapist.
He now runs his own dialogue consultancy, Collective Intelligence Ltd, and for the past 28 years has been a lead consultant for Ashridge Executive Development and a faculty member of that business school’s Masters Degree in Organisational Consulting.
His experience over a 40-year consulting career has been primarily in the fields of strategic thinking, innovation and creativity, arbitration and conflict resolution, and ecologically sustainable development. He has also been greatly influenced in his own thinking and practice as a consultant by a number of years spent early in his career in the Far East.
He has sustained a long-term interest in the conditions that are supportive of dialogue, particularly in the context of issues that are in themselves inherently complex. Typically he gets drawn into facilitating difficult conversations, supporting intelligent responses in complex circumstances, strategic judgement and personal coaching when the stakes are getting high.
He has worked with the leadership in all the services of the criminal justice system in the UK; for the last twelve years with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) at the critical interface between the country’s Universities, the Department of Health and the NHS; and as a trustee of the charity Prison Dialogue, and of the Music Research Institute.
He became a trustee of The Mulberry Bush after 25 years providing consultancy and personal support to the Organisation’s last three Directors, Richard Rollinson, John Diamond and John Turberville.
