What We Do

We have grouped our activities under four main headings. The first of these is ‘Organisation Development’ and the remaining three are methods, or processes, we use to achieve Organisation Development.

ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT
Harrington|Young are Organisation Development (OD) consultants, who use a variety of tools and approaches to facilitate development.

The two goals of our OD programmes are:

  • To improve the functioning of individuals, teams and the whole organisation, as part of achieving business objectives and the business mission
  • To share and grow together the necessary skills, knowledge and perspective(s) that will enable your people to embrace the challenges and opportunities of their own continuing development.

COACHING & FEEDBACK
At Harrington|Young, we use coaching and feedback to help individuals and teams develop their capacity to learn and improve, and we help organisations to improve their own use of these processes.

  • We create coaching relationships with our clients that offer opportunities to explore, experiment and reflect. This enables you to make fundamental changes in terms of your understandings, perspectives, priorities, abilities and commitment to achieving your goals.
  • We help individuals and organisations to make better use of feedback in all its forms.
    • Feedback within surveys, quality control and performance management all tend to focus on specifics and on asking: “Are we doing things right?” (single-loop learning).
    • We help you design and use feedback in more challenging ways, questioning underlying assumptions, developing new skills and asking: “Are we doing the right things?” (double-loop learning).
    • Working at a deeper level with both self-feedback, and informal and formal feedback from other sources, increases the ability to develop, individually and as an organisation. In this way, our clients learn how to use feedback processes more dynamically and to ask: “How can we make well-informed choices that are right for us?” (triple-loop learning).

RESEARCH & EVALUATION
At Harrington|Young, Research & Evaluation has proved a powerful focus for our OD work.

  • We favour Action Research because it is based on participation and collaboration and is concerned with practical knowledge. This means that we work with you to define your questions and issues, and we work together to develop a better understanding of your areas of interest and how to move forward.
  • We undertake evaluations of programmes and projects, evaluating both processes and outcomes, based on data from a wide variety of sources.

WRITING & EDITING
Written work at Harrington|Young brings new perspectives and understanding to your people, helping conceptualise the issues that are key in your organisation’s development.

  • We help clients to develop case studies and write up events, ideas and projects. The majority of these projects are collaborative in the sense that we work together with you to create content and structure that is accessible, informative, challenging and insightful.
  • We edit existing material to prepare it for publication, bringing together work from a wide range of sources. In this way, we help you document developing practice and emerging ideas.