CommunityIntelligence Ltd.

An evolutionary enterprise

We are continually engaged with the creative tension between what is and what wants to be. We walk on a chaordic path, navigating between chaos and order. We support the best in young leaders and engage their talents for aligning us with the future as it emerges.

A conscious enterprise

Learning and evolving serve as ultimate context to everything we do. We always strive to embody the theories and methods we use.

Our network of seasoned organisational professionals is committed to live by these principles, and continuously share what we are learning with our clients and stakeholders.

Diane Le Moult-Büttner

Cheryl Cooper

Nora Ganescu

Julian Still

Ria Baeck

Stephen Dale

Simone Poutnik

Diederick Janse

George Pór ^up

I am an evolutionary thinker-activist and a strategic learning partner to leaders in business, government and civil society, in matters of culture change and sustaining the next level, innovation and resilience, and social media strategies.

I’ve been tracking the edge of innovation in electronic and social technologies for the last 30 years, and contributing to it, in the areas of collective intelligence, knowledge ecology, communities of practice, and personal mastery. I co-authored several books on related subjects and held Research Fellow positions at INSEAD and London School of Economics.

Cultural transformation

My passion is to inspire social system thrive on chaos and build resilience, by engaging the full creative capacity of their members. The culture and mindset that created their current challenges won’t be the ones able to meet them. I believe learning from nature’s designs for simplicity that underlies complexity, opens the ways to the necessary change and unprecedented system performance.

The first phase of the change that I enjoy eliciting is creating a more collaborative culture, a web of authentic and productive conversations and mutually supportive, value-creating relationships. Out from the flows everything else… My life's journey led me to combine European values with American "can do" spirit and ancient wisdom traditions. I bring them to bear on all assignments that I work on.

Stories from the journey

I started designing and hosting virtual communities and knowledge networks in the early 80’s of the past century, before those concepts were born. My first big project was the co-design of TransPacNet ‘86, the first multimedia conference that connected hundreds of network users in Silicon Valley and in Tokyo, through 10 different communication media.

Invited to write a chapter for the briefing book of President-Elect Clinton's Transition Team in 1992, I responded with one carrying the following title: Transforming the Executive Office of the President into a Learning Organization: Step Towards a Learning Society.

I first articulated my “quest for collective intelligence” in a book chapter, under the same name in 1995. In the late 90’s, I worked on establishing the field of knowledge ecology, by initiating the Knowledge Ecology Fair, Knowledge Ecology University, Knowledge Ecology Consortium, and publishing in the Systems Thinker a seminal article on Nurturing Systemic Wisdom through Knowledge Ecology.

In the first decade of the new millennium, I worked with many communities of practice and leaders sponsoring them. The main publications of this period include: Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice (2005), Cultivating collective intelligence: A core leadership competence in a complex world (2008) and the Blog of Collective Intelligence that I started in 2003. In the last three decades, I wrote over 100 articles, a number of which got translated into French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, and Russian.

I am the founder of CommunityIntelligence, serving as Research Fellow in the Business School of Universiteit van Amsterdam, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Knowledge Management.

My clients include or included: AT&T, British Petroleum, Bull S.A., Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Dow Chemical, EDS, Elf Aquitaine, Ericsson, European Commission, European Foundation for Management Development, Dutch government, European Investment Bank, Flemish government, Ford Motor Co., Greenpeace International, Hewlett Packard, INSEAD, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Prudential, Siemens, Solvay, Sun Microsystems, Swiss Re, Unilever, and the World Business Academy. I can be reached at george(at)Community-Intelligence(dot)com.

Diane Le Moult-Büttner ^up

I can work with you in French, German and English.

Cheryl Cooper ^up

Cheryl is originally from the Pennine region in the North of England, which gave her a love of walking in National Parks, literature and rain.

Nora Ganescu ^up

is a consultant and trainer in human resources and organisational development. Nora has worked in the last 10 years with numerous international NGOs, governments and businesses. She has developed and delivered training programs in the fields of intercultural communication, leadership, conflict management, team working skills and management skills, induction training for new staff in large organisations, and training for trainers.

Nora is a trained "communities of practice" developer and facilitator, and working with CommunityIntelligence to help European institutions becoming better learning organisations.

Nora is also specialised in evaluation, designing evaluation and monitoring programs, developing indicators, preparing and conducting qualitative and quantitative research, evaluating data and reporting.

Her clients include: European Commission, the Committee of the Regions, the Council of Europe, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Dutch National Agency, International Union of Socialist Youth, Federation of Young European Greens, International Catholic Students, Federation of European Roma Youth Platforms, International Young Nature Friends, International Falcon Movement.

Nora has a PhD in Communication Science from the University Ludwig Maximillian in Munich, Germany, and a Sociology Degree from the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

She has lived and worked in Romania, Germany, United States and Belgium. Currently, she lives in Brussels. She speaks English, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Ria Baeck ^up

is a transformational change professional who comes to group facilitation and the collective intelligence field with a rich background of experiences and interests. She is holding a master degree in Clinical Psychogy (KU Leuven). Her earlier work was in psychotherapy, integrating the body in the process of healing. She is a coach and mentor, who combines deep compassion, bodily awareness and a lust for life, to facilitate transformation in individuals and groups.

For the last couple of years, she has been working in the field of Systemic and Organization Constellations that reveal the hidden dynamics in human systems and bringing blocked parts of it into flow again.

Constellation work draws on the collective intelligence and wisdom of a system and because it uses the mental, the emotional and the intuitive knowing, it often brings totally new fresh solutions in a short time. It can be useful for rapid diagnosis, for issue-resolution or the testing of possible strategies. Ria is also trained in the Art of Hosting and a member of the Art of Hosting Fellowship.

Ria is passionate about the development of leadership, consciousness, and how they relate to communities – in work and daily life. Until recently, she worked primarily in the area of personal development, coaching and the social profit sector; currently, she is expending the sectors served to include business and government. She is unleashing individual and organisational potential by holding the question "What else is possible, beyond the edge of what is known," with gentle fierceness.

Ria lives in Belgium, near Brussels, where she facilitates "World Cafés," and travel globally to do the work that she is called to.

Stephen Dale ^up

Stephen is a passionate advocate of the premise that organisations and enterprises can become smarter, faster, more agile and more innovative by recognising the latent creativity and energy locked up their most precious and valuable resource – their people. This can only be achieved by creating an environment of trust, where conversations can flow and where ideas are encouraged and nurtured without being killed stone dead by process. Stephen’s 25 years + background in information and knowledge management, coupled with an intuitive understanding of people and group dynamics has enabled him to blend the disciplines of policy, process and procedure with the human instincts to collaborate and co-create, delivering organisational change and systems where connections and conversations are the key to self-development and the sustainable health of the organisation.

He is both an evangelist and practitioner in the use of Web 2.0 technologies and Social Media applications to support personal learning and knowledge sharing.

He was the business lead and information architect for the community of practice platform currently deployed across the UK local government sector, the largest network of its type, and continues to play a key role in the support of virtual communities of practice for value creation in public services.

Stephen’s current and previous clients include 3i plc, Reuters Ltd, Papillon Technology, the Department for Works and Pensions (DWP), the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), the Central Office of Information (COI), the Office for National Statistics (ONS), The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), London Deanery, and East Lindsey District Council.

Simone Poutnik ^up

is a facilitator of the learning of organisations, by supporting them in cultivating their communities of practice. She is a Junior Partner in CommunityIntelligence.

Simone is passionate about finding holistic solutions for sustainable development through social entrepreneurship, partnerships, multi-stakeholder engagement, learning and networking. She has been a delegate at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, designed a partnership project for rural development in India in 2003 and is currently setting up “The Hub” in Brussels, an incubator of initiatives for social and environmental innovation.

Simone is also a practitioner of the art of hosting, has 5 years of experience in designing and facilitating interactive workshops and group processes in Belgium, Germany, Italy and India and she can do that in English, German and Italian.

With 6 years of experience in project and event design and management, her biggest successes were: the International Congress of AIESEC in 2004 -- 10 days with over 600 participants from all over the world, where she was part of the organising team, and the European Academy of Business in Society’s Annual colloquium in 2005 and 2006, where she designed and managed the 1st and 2nd European Education & Training Exchange on Corporate Responsibility.

She previously worked as project coordinator at the European Academy of Business in Society, which is the leading European business-academic network on research, education and training on corporate responsibility, as leader of the global Sustainability Drive Team, local committee president of AIESEC, one of the largest international student organisations.

Diederick Janse ^up

Diederick is an organization developer. He is passionate about supporting the development of organizations as containers for human beings to express themselves more fully through work. His work revolves around the identification and development of the core practices of the organization, including decision-making, leadership, organization design, meeting practices, performance management, and collaboration. He draws on a range of innovative practices, including Holacracy, the Art of Hosting, voice dialogue, U-Process, role theory, Adizes’ lifecycle of organizations, Spiral Dynamics, and Integral theory. Holacracy in particular has drawn his attention as a way of embedding resilience and responsiveness in the core processes of the organization. Holacracy is a system of governance, at the heart of which there is a set of practices, processes and principles for decision-making, organization design and meetings.

Examples of the work Diederick has done to date: • Developed an Embedded Business Resilience service portfolio for IBM • Facilitated a tri-sector consortium consisting of twenty Dutch organizations working to improve maternal health (United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal #5) • Developed an integral performance management methodology around cultural transformation for the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment • Facilitated transformation processes for IUCN, Shell, WWF, and other profit and non-profit organizations Diederick is currently engaged in implementing Holacracy at the Netherlands Bankers’ Association.