Gervase Bushe - Professional Bio

Gervase Bushe (pronounced Jervis Bush) is the President of Discovery & Design Inc., a Vancouver based consulting firm with associates throughout North America, Europe and  Asia . He generally takes on one large organizational change project a year, as well as offering leadership development courses and coaching executives and change agents.  He is also president of Clear Learning Ltd., a company that develops leadership training and licenses others worldwide to teach his leadership theories and skills.

Gervase has worked with companies to redesign their structures, change their cultures, improve their customer satisfaction and increase their operational effectiveness. He also has an extensive background in the design and delivery of highly experiential management training programs that significantly improve people's ability to lead people and facilitate change.  He has trained managers and consultants on four continents.  

Gervase is an Associate Professor of Management and Organization Studies in the Segal Graduate School of Businessat Simon Fraser University and an award winning author in the field of organizational change and development. He regularly gives talks to corporate and public audiences on leadership and change.

Dr. Bushe received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from  Case  Western Reserve  University. He was trained in laboratory education methods at the Sir George William's Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies in Montreal and was certified as a T-group facilitator and OD consultant by the International Association of Applied Social Scientists before it disbanded.  He is Director of Professional Development and a past Co-Chair of Human Systems Development Professionals (an association of expert organizational consultants in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), a principle with the Big Rapids Group in the United States, an associate of Provins Fem in Scandinavia and The PerformGroup International in Australia and Southeast Asia

For a list of publications and academic honours go to here

Areas of Competence

Leadership Development (design of management training programs, leadership training, laboratory education, simulations)

Executive Coaching (coaching for success, assessment and design of executive development programs, self development counseling)

Teams and Team Building (process consultation, meeting facilitation, team retreats, quality circle facilitation, diagnosis of team dynamics, executive teams, helping dysfunctional teams, group therapy)

Planned Change (action research, change planning and implementation, visioning, developing commitment to change, use of parallel structures, appreciative inquiry, implementing innovation,)

Organization Development and Effectiveness (process re-engineering, total quality management, processes of continuous improvement, quality of work life, union management co-operation)

Organization Design (process re-engineering, socio-technical systems, empowered work systems, environmental-organizational analysis and fit, innovative structures)

A growing body of practical and empirical evidence shows that Appreciative Inquiry is the most successful method of changing organizational culture yet devised.  Gervase has been at the forefront of researching and developing the method of Appreciative Inquiry and in 2002 was selected one of the top ten AI consultants in the world by the AI Commons – an international web-based community of AI practitioners.  In addition to consulting to leaders interested in broadly based organizational transformation, he has delivered talks and seminars on Appreciative Inquiry and Appreciative Leadership all over the world.

A basis for creating organizations that can perform and learn is to focus on what is working and amplify it.  This popular one hour speech has been turned into a high impact, short training module.  Meeting for half a day twice, two weeks apart, and using an innovative peer coaching method, participants learn how to create more of whatever they want from people and processes.

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