Consultant
Paul is a passionate people person. His ‘why’ is simply to help individuals to be happy, to thrive and grow for the benefit of themselves and society and believes that if we all continually identify just one positive change at a time in our working lives then there is no limit to what we can achieve.
His successful time served in the Royal Marines Band Service embedded a strong culture of continual team-building through shifting and challenging periods and embedded in him the need to be constantly learning, improving, and moving forward. During this period Paul was awarded the Prince’s Badge for two years of sustained improvement and impeccable personal conduct and leadership; a reward that is not automatically awarded. He was also fortunate enough to travel the world and be immersed in a multitude of cultures the most intriguing of which were the recently independent Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia,
“Having grown up near a naval dockyard during, and had my outlook on life formed by, the Cold War, I found it astounding to actually be physically in the places and spaces of a perceived ‘enemy’ that had shaped and moulded the framework of my own history, and subsequently was partly responsible for my future choices”.
Paul’s self-determination, and culture of continued improvement, drove the completion of a Masters Degree from Bristol University in the emergence of the modern world through a study of its material culture and the space in which that exists alongside of and influences or is influenced by, the main actors. A large part of his studies that year involved investigating the ‘power’ of buildings both in the traditional sense of how businesses are planned and compartmentalised to create degrees of separation between the public, the staff and the managers; and recording a multi-storey car park through Foucault’s Heterotopic lens, which is to say the study of a perfectly mirrored, ‘world within a world’.
Paul has enjoyed success within the public and private sectors delivering content and advice to national tourism agencies and has handled negotiations between local authorities and development agencies over the regeneration of brownfield sites, and Paul runs his own bespoke tour company specialising in conflict tours where he occasionally still manages to travel around Europe giving talks on major European conflicts to tour groups and indulges his fascination with Military Psychology and the degrees of separation, or not, between politicians and professional soldiers,
“I think if people were more open to the extent of political interference with the running of the First World War, they would perhaps have more sympathy for Douglas Haig’s decision making, and perhaps rethink his rather unfortunate moniker of, ‘Butcher of the Somme’.”
When not in the office, delivering workshops, or travelling, Paul is continuing to research workplaces through the lens of Michel Foucault, and in particular the ‘Panopticon’ which is a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation (including factories); and the Power-Knowledge concept,
“I am particularly interested in how this plays out at work regarding the discourse between the workforce and managers, both of whom can feel at the affect of control and knowledge and fail to grasp that they are always in choice.
I question that if they are encouraged to let their minds play in a space that allows them to become self-aware and responsible would they feel unrestricted and be in control of their own self, and so become more innovative, omni-capable, and therefore exist within a world of unlimited personal and professional growth?”
