Dr Mike Carter

Chief Scientific Officer

Mike Carter is the Chief Scientific Officer at Tensense and has extensive experience at senior leadership level in the private and public sectors. He is a specialist in the leadership of organisational change and holds a doctorate from the University of Bath.

For 10 years he was the Managing Director of Stratagem Consulting, for 5 years the CEO of Global Intelligence Group Solutions and is a former Director of Executive Development at the University of Exeter Business School.

Mike has consulted in most developed countries of the world for organisations that have included: ING Bank, The Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the NHS, EMI Music, Universal Music & Gillette. For three years, he led a project with Apple Corps (The Beatles) and Cirque du Soleil in London, Montreal and Las Vegas assisting these creative companies to develop The Beatles Love Show – now the most successful show in Las Vegas.

Mike has conducted research in the area of Organisational Sensemaking™ since 1988 and was appointed a Fellow of the University of Bath in 2005 and the University of Exeter in 2008. He has taught on numerous MBA, MSc  and executive development programmes in the areas of leadership and organisational change in the UK, US, Malaysia and Greece.  Mike co-authored the winning 2014 international research paper of the year in Human Relations and between 2014– 2016 he led a UK government grant aided research project with the University of Bath, the findings of which helped him create Tensense’s diagnostic tool.


Sensemaking
December 22, 2022

Sensemaking: enabling leaders to see into the future 

‘Given that the commercial environment is awash with risk and uncertainty, few leaders will want to trust important resourcing and investment decisions to gut instinct. Indeed, risk management may be the top priority in times of crisis, but what if business leaders could avoid the crisis in the first place?’  The contention in this piece is […]

Football Leadership
November 22, 2022

England’s Manager Gareth Southgate stands on the brink of …… in the football World Cup (fill in the blank if you dare, – or care!)

Gareth Southgate embodies many of the qualities and characteristics that we would hope to find in contemporary leadership: setting stretch targets, providing support for his players and staff, an emphasis on great communication; and a healthy dose of humility and vulnerability. “As footballers we’re going to lose matches, we’re going to concede goals, but how […]

November 10, 2022

Ambiguity is the enemy of execution

Life is lived forward but has to be understood backwards. That is to say, understanding follows action – and this is the conundrum for leaders who need an increasingly rapid understanding of ‘what’s the story here?’ (hindsight) in order to improvise plausible foresight. Using foresight rather than hindsight means leaders need to use all the […]

foresight requires hindsight
November 10, 2022

Timely foresight requires timely hindsight

In a recent article, McKinsey set out the challenges facing CEOs in the current economic maelstrom – ‘Businesses need new approaches to build the resilience required in these decisive times, through a perceptive response to current challenges, foresight to anticipate the next round of disruptions, and capability for adaptation that will set the business on […]

Slack
November 5, 2022

Slack – a technology that can enable leaders to ‘hear’ the voices of their people

In a recent Raconteur article Sam Forsdick quotes Slack’s SVP Brian Elliot’s discourse on the post-pandemic competition to attract and retain talented people. Elliot suggests that the Zeitgeist of leaders who try to control the working environment for their people has passed and, effectively, there has been an enforced democratisation of what constitutes good working […]

Salesforce Non-Routine leadership
October 26, 2022

Marc Benioff – Salesforce’s sensemaking and non-routine leader?

The following illuminating extract is from a Chief Executive interview with Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of the behemoth SaaS firm, Salesforce, as he discusses its stellar success. He says a lot about business and organisational culture, but his answers also say a lot about organisational sensemaking and leadership. “You’re one of the few people […]

The sensemaking of Elon Musk
October 20, 2022

The Sensemaking of Elon Musk’s Twitter derided decision-making

A sensemaking analysis (what’s the story here?) of Elon Musk’s approach to decision-making is marginalised to the hunger for a juicy Twitter feed, and yet it reveals an insight into the human condition that is often cloaked by the perceived need for conformity. ‘We have recently been granted a glimpse behind the curtain of how […]

Remote Working
October 12, 2022

Remote working as part of a continuum of organisational change

‘The world of employment has rarely seen such tumult over such a short period. The pandemic has upended the job market and forced employers to adopt practices that many would have dismissed out of hand before 2020 – particularly remote working.’ As the pandemic emerged, I was writing: ‘As operational effectiveness is reduced by the […]

October 10, 2022

Making [more] sense of ‘thinking outside the box

‘Hiring a COO is an opportunity to challenge organisational inertia: to think differently and creatively about processes and systems and to ask important questions about why things are done a certain way’. This is a quotation taken from a recent article in the The Times Raconteur, ‘What will the COO of the future look like?’ […]