Haydn Shaughnessy

Haydn Shaughnessy advises companies on a range of challenges at the leading edge of business strategy, drawing on unique research in global economic change, business platforms and business ecosystems. This research contributes to the overall framework of Flow by helping coaches and clients to understand how to analyses significant changes in markets and enterprise strategies, in an ideal world preventing bad ideas getting into the Flow.

He has written extensively on the risks to western companies of not responding to the pace, scale ands cope of Chinese platforms and the risks of global economic restructuring. He works with Fin on interpreting how these cane translated into new ways to work.

He was formerly the editor of Innovation Management, a feature writer for Innovation Magazine at the Irish Times and wrote the Rethinking Innovation column at Forbes.com. He has also been a technology officer supervising R&D in advanced communications.

He has worked with some of the largest organisations in global finance as well as telecommunications, satellite services and imaging and has also designed software services but found that the most interesting changes are taking place elsewhere, sometimes in the shadows of large organisations where people innovate because they have to or want to. That led to him teaming up with Fin Goulding, a practising CIO, to write about what really goes on in companies that empower people.

That has led to Flow: A Handbook for Change Makers, and 12 Steps to Flow: A New Framework for Business Agility, two books about how people change when they have the power to do so, how they design work when the responsibility is given over to them.

While doing the Forbes work he undertook a series of research projects on topics such as Chinese business platforms (see above), business risk, AI and business failure (digitally analysing 40 years worth of Harvard Business Review writing). There is a lot of wisdom in research but you have to put the time in to find it so that's what he has been doing ever since.

Global economic restructuring (why companies need to behave differently building on his research into Chinese platforms)

Enterprise restructuring (what they are doing about it building on his work with Fin Goulding on how enterprises need to change)

New Ways to Work (what it means for the rest of us and how we can empower ourselves in the new economy).

He has been held a number of positions in academia and research. He was a research fellow at the University of California, Irvine, a fellow of the Society for New Communications Research, a visiting fellow at Genera Insight, where we began documenting the collaborative economy; a senior research associate of the European Institute for the Media, where he was lucky enough to track changes in media technologies; and the Centre for Employment Research, where he got the chance to look at the impact of technology on work.