Rick Allen

For over 15 years, Rick has partnered with executives and senior management teams, helping them develop and harness their workforce capabilities, and build more resilient, adaptable and inventive organizations. He has created, led and managed hundreds of results-focused consulting interventions, off-site seminars and workshops, training programs and executive coaching sessions. These and other learning offerings focused on leadership development, organizational effectiveness, managing change, and building the capacity for innovation, collaborative work skills, communication and teamwork.

Rick has worked with a wide range of business, governmental, educational and nonprofit organizations in the US and abroad, as an independent consultant and in partnership with numerous global consulting firms. He has designed and led a diversity of programs for various US governmental organizations including the Air Force, the Army, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Interior, and the Central Intelligence Agency. He has also coached and led programs for individual leaders of local and national governmental organizations attending his workshops. For many years he has facilitated the teambuilding segments of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management and Professional Management Programs.

Rick has designed and utilized an array of innovative accelerated learning methodologies in his work. He makes extensive use of facilitated group dialogue, experiential exercises, work project simulations, and other real-time, participant driven methodologies that actively engage adults in learning, and generate open and direct dialogue. He has created and employed a wide range of needs assessments, team surveys and other diagnostic tools for groups and individuals, including the use of dialogue, interviews, focus groups, simulations, team surveys, 360 degree feedback assessment processes, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Rick holds a Master of Science Degree in Organizational Development from American University/NTL Institute in Washington DC. He is certified to teach and administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and has been trained by Interaction Associates to teach their Facilitative Leadership program material. Rick spent many years as a Senior Program Manager and Lead Instructor for the Hurricane Island Outward Bound Professional Development Program where he developed and led experiential teambuilding and leadership programs for major organizational clients.

Rick originally studied in the sciences, earning a BS degree in Biology. He was the lead researcher of a large Department of Interior funded study of the ecological health of the Chesapeake Bay and the New Jersey coastal zone; he researched and edited two Department of Energy funded studies (published in book form) reviewing pollution control technologies for coal fired power generation plants; and researched and wrote a cover story for a science journal on global climate change. Aside from his extensive international consulting experience, Rick was also the Administrator of a United Nations funded relief program in the Sudan serving refugees fleeing famine and war. Rick currently lives with his wife and two children near Boston, Massachusetts.