KRISTIN COBBLE

Kristin Cobble is an organizational development consultant who partners with individuals, teams and organizations to achieve results beyond what they think are possible, using learning organization methodologies. She is a principal of Cobble and Company, Inc, a consulting firm specializing in organizational change.

Past and present clients include NASA, Microsoft, Consilient, Genentech, Coca Cola, Clorox, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, Ford, Teleflex, WEA, Phoenix Insurance, Lowes, Schwab, TXU and the Singapore Police Force.

Two themes emerge from Cobble’s work: She consistently helps groups to 1) reflect on how their thinking may be preventing them from making progress on critical business issues; and 2) explore how they might think and act differently in order to create desired results. Recent consulting work includes:

Executive Team Development and Culture Change

· Consulted to a major manufacturing organization to transform the existing hierarchical culture into a collaborative and learning-oriented culture.

· Worked with an executive team of a service company to develop a new vision and direction for the organization. This lead to partnering with the organization to redesign itself to manifest the new vision.

· Helped an executive team in conflict to have open conversations about their strengths and weaknesses, which then enabled them to make agreements around supporting one another. As a result, they became more aligned and began working together more effectively.

· Helped an internal services group design new organizational structures and processes to enable them to be more collaborative with one another and with their internal clients.

Building Collaborations and Partnerships that Work

· Designed and facilitated an on-going process to help three historically acrimonious multi-billion dollar divisions merge to create a new company that would offer a service that none could offer alone. The Board of the company is counting on this new venture to be the new growth engine of the parent company.

· Designed and facilitated a process to help two organizations decide between a merger, acquisition or joint venture. When the talks began, tension was high. After the process, everyone felt good and excited about the decision, which was for one organization to “acquire” the other.

· Partnered with a governmental organization to create and implement strategies for developing strategic alliances with business.

· Designed and facilitated a process to help two historically acrimonious departments merge. As they began to explore the organizational sources of their conflict, they also saw their personal responsibility for creating and maintaining unwanted dynamics. They began to develop their own skills to not only deal with differences of opinion but to also leverage them.

Strategic Thinking

· Designed processes to enable an organization to move from strategic thinking being a once a year activity at the top to a daily activity of all employees.

· Used Systems Thinking as a lens to help a start-up create executive team alignment around its strategy, core competencies and metrics.

· Developed a business case for a retail company to consider using the environment as lens through which to redefine its strategy, markets and culture.

Teaching Consulting and Coaching Skills

· Developed a cadre of internal managers who incorporated the skills of consulting, coaching and facilitating into their management skill set – to move from being traditional leaders to facilitative leaders.

· Designed a process of training, coaching and shadowing to help an internal group of consultants to become strategic partners to their internal clients.

Coaching

· Helped an executive to become more aware of how he impacted his team how to create an environment in which the team felt freer to share their opinions and to disagree with him.

· Helped an executive to gain the trust of his CEO, through learning how to speak to him and listen to him in a way that lead the executive to having more influence on the CEO.

Cobble authored the article, A Systems Thinking Approach to Conflict Resolution and co-authored the articles Generative Coaching: An Unrealized Tool for Promoting Organizational Learning, Learning from Everyday Conflict and The Self-Organizing Transformation of Hewlett-Packard Labs. Cobble is currently researching the potential of “separate” systems, such as business, government and community, to collaborate in new ways to create the future.

For more than four years, she worked as a consultant for Innovation Associates (IA), co-founded by Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.

Prior to IA, she worked for Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), a consulting and system integration company. Prior to working for CTP, she served as a complaint mediator for the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Cobble holds a BA from Wellesley College. She also studied at the London School of Economics & Political Science.