Ben is a lead facilitator at 8works, a specialist team in Oliver Wyman that helps organisations think, act and work differently to look at old and new problems in different ways. He leads a team out of the Dubai office, serving the Middle East, India and Africa.
He brings a technical financial background from Australia and having worked in a broad range of places from Silicon Valley through to developing nations. Having developed deep financial and accounting expertise for the entertainment and media industry, he branched out to bring a technical viewpoint to collaborative design and found the two worlds overlapped more than expected. As a closet creative, he abandoned the green pen and now brings collaborative design expertise across all industries and all types of challenges, from organisational purpose all the way through to operational and process problems.
In order to be ‘all-in’ with your strategy you need to be thinking about who needs to believe and be committed to what you are trying to do and involve them. Even a ten percent increase in motivation could completely change the outcome, so why would you leave your people out of the plan? We can help make those conversations happen and turn a great plan on paper into something that people can actually believe in and see through changes in individual actions and collective achievements
He has led teams in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom before joining Oliver Wyman to establish our 8works co-creation capability in the Middle East. He is focusing that skill on nation-changing programmes of work and making sure bold ambitions can translate into real changes in actions on the ground and in front of customers and citizens.
He has helped governments, global organisations, industry bodies and sporting codes think about new strategies, business and operating models, then how to apply them in practice at different levels of the organisation. He works with specialists within the organisation, Oliver Wyman and outside in order to design a way for it to work.
The simplest, but often most effective, thing I do is to help a group of people stop focusing on immediate daily distractions. If they have the space to talk, listen, look up and out, and think longer term together, the conversations from that point are fundamentally different and great things emerge