THE PRACTICE LEADS

The team at Group Partners have both taken fascinating journeys in their respective careers. Their influences, experiences and passions have added richness and depth to their creative and technical offerings.

John and Hazel are essentially problem-solvers – in differing but complementary ways. Both are highly visual people whose mission is to cut through the fog and ambiguity and help business leaders to arrive quickly at genuine solutions without wasting time wandering through irrelevant wormholes.

They both thrive on helping leaders and their teams to reveal the complexity and solve puzzles rather than obsessing over theories and hearsay.

JOHN CASWELL

He is driven by the need to create, the need to deliver and the need to add value.

John became involved in a start-up with some friends in the early eighties, and together they created and marketed The BBC Micro, the most successful microcomputer of its time.

The BBC project and, later, the Electron, spawned ARM Technologies to develop the computer chip technology business that today powers the majority of the world’s most innovative mobile and computing devices. This became the most successful technology company in the UK and was recently sold for $36 Billion.

John left the company when it was bought by computer giant, Olivetti.

During his time working within various business structures, John became exasperated with how decisions were made and how the collaboration happened across the business - an endless round of often fruitless meetings.

Noticing the differences in the language used by various divisions within the same company, he would eventually have to stand up, grab the whiteboard and draw a picture of the conversation to communicate the collective idea being discussed far more clearly.

Years later, he realised that this was his biggest insight - being able to be visual really makes a difference to everything.

Later on, John started, Marketing Communications Workshop (MCW), a ‘through the line‘, creative, strategic marketing and media company in London, which he sold, some years later, to WPP Group PLC.

Group Partners was born on the 1st January 2001 (01:01:01) as the culmination of all these lessons.

HAZEL TIFFANY

Hazel spent over 25 years in central government, initially working in the MoD on finance and logistics projects and, later, moving into a role at the Cabinet Office, where her focus shifted to developing a shared delivery model that would support government e-services through a common registration and authentication platform.

While working in each of these positions, Hazel explored various complex landscapes, with multiple stakeholders involved in systems that supported various critical functions and services. This is where Hazel began to develop a fascination with complexity and to grow the skills that would later lead her to her work with John in the Structured Visual Thinking arena.

As a result of her move into the field of systems design, Hazel went through comprehensive training in data gathering, analysis, and data modelling, as well as software design and development.

Throughout her time working in various systems-building contexts, Hazel experienced a growing frustration with the lack of engagement with information by leaders and their teams - who would inevitably become ‘stuck’, mostly due to an inability to look at challenges objectively, or with consideration of critical context.

Hazel became fascinated with information modelling during her early IT training - understanding the meaning behind information, and the insights that could be revealed through making better connections between things. This was a revelation, and one she believes is even more relevant in today’s world.

Hazel first met John as a client at the Cabinet Office and was immediately inspired by the potential of structured frameworks. So much so, that she was willing to make what was at that time a scary leap from the public sector to the private sector.

Hazel is driven by the need to unravel problems by creating meaning from out of the seemingly meaningless. She thrives on joining things up and making connections where connection seems unlikely, or even impossible, relishing the complexity of each challenge.

Her work in Africa has been particularly inspiring, as it has given her an incredible opportunity to explore and unpack extremely complex social and environmental issues - the challenges for a community living with HIV/AIDs, pastoral conflict in the Horn of Africa, the failings of an electoral system, among many other political and health issues.

Being able to draw on the dynamics of these systems and present them in a structured, visual way has resulted in better discussions and understanding, a challenge she has found very rewarding.

Since joining John, Hazel has made a strong contribution to the development of his original invention and, over the years, she has played a valuable role in pushing them both to continue evolving the approach and finding new ways to make their client’s outcomes more sustainable.

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Behind the practice, there’s a production and creative team that has worked together for over two decades.

Ian Francis and Andrew Morgan are long-term members of Group Partners. They take specific phases of the program into rich visual media and build our communication/storytelling directions.

The rich digital and interactive images, web and other online applications, the development of the platforms, assessments and other technical innovations as well as the graphics, collateral and other materials to support the Structured Visual Thinking™ approach.

Alongside everything, there are the logistics and support needed for in-person and session-related work. Amanda Bravo another long-term part of the team looks after everything that moves.

Beyond this, we have a global bench of partners that we bring in to perform specialist tasks for the benefit of our clients.