About | adrianperyer

Bio

I'm a Co-Founder of Shared Vision Toolkit. We design and facilitate face-to-face meetings for clients and equip anyone to run sessions themselves, using the same frameworks, guides, and how-to playbooks clients get, packaged so the work doesn't depend on us being in the room. Our mission is to transform the world's meetings, making them engaging, co-creative spaces where people solve complex problems.

Because of our mission I operate in one of two modes: High touch: We design and facilitate State Of The Art face to face meetings, from $100k a day. I travel extensively globally and work multiple times with the same clients over many years.

Product Manager: We take the same frameworks and guides we use in our engagements and turn them into 'toolkits' - yours to run yourself, from under $30.

I have over four decades of experience designing and facilitating strategic sessions, many of which participants regard as the best meetings they've ever attended.

I'm best known for facilitating Customer Advisory Boards for leading enterprise technology companies. I conduct hundreds of interviews with CIOs, CTOs and CISOs, and help Product Managers and technology executives visualize desired outcomes, build shared visions, and plan the evolution of their products and organizations.

I practice Design-Centric Facilitation™, publishing products that help people bring co-creation tools and techniques into their meetings, and helping leaders evolve their organizational culture and operating model.

I led Hewlett Packard's global advisory practice, ENVISION: The Art of the Possible, and continue to facilitate the Board of Advisors for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Most CABs are death by PowerPoint and polite show-and-tell. The ones I facilitate are the opposite: candid, sometimes uncomfortable, and the meeting executives tell me they most look forward to all year.

Nearly all of this work is confidential. My clients are protective of their CABs, locking in next year's dates before this year's is over, and trusting that I'll serve them and not their competitors. Occasionally the work surfaces in public: a CEO posts a photo, or asks me to be in the room at their investor day to "show the work to Wall Street." But I'm happy off stage, because the real value is in those co-creation conversations, with product managers, general managers, and their customers, and those never go according to plan. Nearly every session has a moment one of my favourite CXOs accurately called "a total shit show." That's the point. Failing in front of a whiteboard together. Co-creating until the problem is truly understood. Arguing over the hard trade-offs. It all beats failing after spending millions on a solution to the wrong problem.

That principle - candour is something you earn and build, not demand or dismiss - runs through my writing. I publish where I see a gap worth filling: on generative organizational culture, on leadership, and on what it takes to grow in the age of AI — from Thriving in the Age of AI: The Generative Advantage to a recent piece using the Post Office Horizon scandal to show the power of the Westrum continuum. I've contributed to more than a dozen podcasts and spent hours in conversation with Ron Westrum, whose work on generative cultures underpins my work. I've also shared with Ron how his framework connects with others we use in ways that helps some leaders steer the transformation to an agentic enterprise.

These are connected concepts, and they converge in the co-creation meetings I design and facilitate. Culture is the biggest and most important context. Organisations with a pathological culture avoid working with me. Those with a bureaucratic culture are often too slow to book us (its not really surprising how often we move very quickly and deliver a meeting before the paperwork is done, our clients with generative cultures expect nothing less and we trust each other).

We usually work in complex contexts. Many decisions are clear and can follow best practice. Others are more complicated and require expertise. Some decisions are hard because the context is complex and their are multiple considerations. The best decision making where the context is complex comes from face to face conversations in good rooms, where a diverse group of people are fully engaged in solving the hard problem, co-creating, immersed, losing track of time in a state of flow and, through that collaboration, producing more than any of them could alone (a win-win).

To get to this place, you need a generative culture (or the meeting does not happen). You have something that is hard and complex (or the ROI on the investment is missing). You can assemble a diverse group of people whose conflict-management styles allow them to collaborate (or you get group-think, unproductive competition, inadequate compromise or accommodation, or plain avoidance of solving the problem). We design the space, the conversations and help raise the level of co-creation.