User:TRFlanagan

I began life as a marine biologist back before an Environmental Protection Agency had been created in the United Sates. The world was a vast ocean of connections. My earliest enduring influence in the field of marine biology was the work of John Teal, through a study that he conducted on energy flow through food webs. Here I began to see the power of mapping the "unseeable" so that the world makes more sense.

Life carried me into the field of agricultural research, and then into the deep waters of physiology, neuroscience, and molecular biology. I waltzed between academic and corporate laboratories, dined with students and with Nobel laureates, and both built and sat within corporate board rooms. In 1996, I launched a small, multinational company that sought to provide physicians with tools to reduce the spread of AIDS.

The world of inventing is so much easier than the world of innovating. Innovation imposes changes in the way that folks do things. This is, of course, where all important things happen. My immersion into methodologies of this world was through a need to pull together a multinational project team to explore plans to develop a new biomedical product. Time was of the essence -- and the team’s personal time invested into the planning activity was a precious resource. To assure a rapid and thorough completion of this task, we contracted a consultant team to apply the Structured Dialogic Design process.

If the SDD process had not succeeded so profoundly, I am sure that I would still be working in the world of biomedical products. As it happens, my life changed in parallel with my understanding that so much more was genuinely possible than I had previously understood. Conversions of this sort are not uncommon within the SDD practitioner community. The power of the methodology is compelling.