Don Dunoon

Don is a specialist in leadership development and organisational transformation whose focus is on building collective and individual capacity for enabling change with tough (knotty, thorny) issues. He has been an independent consulting practice since1989.

Don’s work is centred in leadership as a practice grounded in conversation and experimentation. His vision in his work is to enable organisations, groups and individuals to increase their capabilities in clarifying and achieving their goals. He approaches his work with a deeply grounded understanding of the dynamics of change and transformation and has high-level skills in helping his clients gain new insights into the challenges they face and in devising and applying strategies for making headway. Don has consulting experience with a wide range of organisations in sectors including public, healthcare, education and business in Australia, as well as with organisations in the US, New Zealand and Singapore.

He is the author of In the Leadership Mode and of articles including one with Dr. Ellen Langer, the renowned Harvard mindfulness researcher. Don’s writings and materials have been used in leadership and related courses and programs in US universities including Penn State, Virginia Tech, the University of Massachusetts and Indiana Wesleyan. Don’s latest article, in the International Journal of Public Leadership in 2016, is “Reimagining leadership –and its relationship with management –for the public sector”.

A workshop on applying Don’s OBREAU Tripod structure for empowering conversations that matter was awarded “Outstanding Educator Workshop” at the 2016 conference of the Association of Leadership Educators in Sacramento, California. (The workshop was presented by a US colleague of Don’s.)‘OBREAU’ represents the first two letters of the three pivotal words, Observation, Reasonableness (allowing that others are reasonable, at least in this instance and in their terms), and Authenticity.

Don co-presented a highly successful workshop on the OBREAU Tripod at the 2018 World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) in Seattle. A further Tripod session on the Tripod will be among the presentations at WCQI 2019.

Don has an M Comm (Hons) degree from the University of NSW in Organisational Behaviour and has taught part-time at that university. He is a member of the International Leadership Association(ILA)and has presented at several ILA conferences. He is also a member of the American Society for Quality.