About

Release the potential in the organisation

Keith Elford has been helping leaders of organisations across the sectors make the changes required for sustainable success since 1998.  He encourages clients to look at the whole organisational system (identity and culture; present performance; future direction; changes in the environment) and to consider the relationship between both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ factors at work.  This enables clients to achieve step changes in performance by both improving results now and making the changes required to sustain success into the future.

New thinking, new ways of behaving

His role is to help leaders see things ‘from the balcony’, and make sense of what they see, both rationally and emotionally.  This allows clients to think differently about what they do and the context in which they are working: this, in turn, opens up new ways of operating and different outcomes.  Keith is particularly adept at helping clients to articulate the strategy (purpose and values, vision of success, key initiatives) and to manage the human dimension of change: engaging people, defining and shifting mind-set and behaviours.

Keith Elford

Revd Dr Keith Elford MA, PhD, FRSA has worked with leaders of organisations of many kinds and continues to do so.  He has a special passion for those that are explicit about making a positive social impact, and for Church-related organisations in particular – hardly surprising given that he is also an Anglican priest – but he works with people of all faiths and none.  Keith’s route into consulting was unusual – it started when, as the Bishop’s Chaplain, he co-led a major change project in Guildford Diocese. He later became a partner in Telos Partners, an international management consultancy, and there worked on a number of organisational and business change projects between 2001 and July 2013.

Keith enjoys crossing the boundaries that get created throughout modern western societies (between business, community, art, religion, for example) and realising the essential ‘connectedness’ of life.  For him, organisational effectiveness is one aspect of a wider body of wisdom about how people and groups work and achieve their potential.

‘Creating the Future for the Church’, his book applying principles of organisational success to the Church of England, was published in September 2013 (you can find out more about it on the publications page).  In 2022 Keith successfully completed his PhD with a thesis entitled “Being and becoming church: ecclesiological and organisational perspectives on Renewal and Reform in the contemporary Church of England”.  The thesis explores the theological and organisational rationales of “Renewal and Reform”, the Church of England’s national programme responding to declining numbers and influence.  At the same time it addresses the fundamental relationship between organisational and theological concepts.  It suggests a number of ways in which the Church of England might develop its capacity to adapt to a changing world, many of which have application well beyond that particular institution.  If you would like to read the thesis you may download it here.

Keith is an associate of the Susanna Wesley Foundation at the University of Roehampton, and a visiting scholar at Sarum College, where he teaches on leadership.

You can find out more about the Susanna Wesley Foundation here.