Keith E Rice - Career Highlights

I first fell in love with the behavioural sciences - Psychology especially - during my Foundation Year at university. To me, it was totally fascinating to explore why people thought and behaved as they did. And even better exploring ways to help them cope with thoughts and behaviour that weren't conducive to health and happiness. I was also much taken with investigating philosophical and political ideas as to how we could make our society a 'better society'.

Although my mid-70s teacher training included a module on the Psychology of Child Development, for much of the 1980s my attentions were largely elsewhere. After a year in teaching - a profession to which I returned in 2001 - I was enticed into the world of industry & commerce, working initially as an export despatch controller. Jobs in manufacturing, the theatre, the licenced trade and then in administration followed.

(During this time I also did a little part-time journalism, indulging my love of music by writing reviews of rock bands for several small-time journals and 'fanzines'. Published reviews included Adam & The Ants, The Teardrop Explodes, UK Subs, Starship, The Mamas & The Papas and Crosby Stills & Nash.)

At the time I was head-hunted into the Bridge management training & consultancy operation, I was working as National Administration Manager for what was then Britain's biggest freight forwarding operation, Hellman Mitchell Cotts Ltd (now Hellman International Forwarders Ltd). At no point had I ever intended going into consultancy & training; but it seemed at the time I'd gone as far as I could with Hellmann and the Bridge offer was enticing...and I very quickly learned to be very good at it!

While there was always a significant social/societal element in my thinking around the development of Integrated SocioPsychology and I read the sociologists and philosophers when time allowed and preference swung that way, of necessity my main emphases were on things psychological.

That changed somewhat in 2007 when I took a part-time post at Rossett School in Harrogate where I found myselfI teaching modules of A-Level Sociology alongside the Psychology. Once more I found the scope of both theory and application expanding as my studies explored the nature of social groupings in much greater depth and breadth than before. While theses studies add little to the kernel of what I call Integrated SocioPsychology, they do provide material for a much broader application.

Presently I mix teaching A-Level Psychology and Sociology with one-to-one therapy, small group therapy, consultancy & training in management development & human resources and research for my next book.

On a personal level I live in the grand North Yorkshire town of Harrogate with my gorgeous wife, Caroline, and our 'magic cat', Artemis.

Thanks to... Along the way, certain people have been particularly influential, both in terms of career progression and/or personal development; so it's appropriate to acknowledge as many as I can remember. In approximate chronological order...

Ted Rice, Betty Rice, George Chandler, Rita Smith, Maureen Smith (Williams), Mike Holland, Ian Mackenzie (?), John Bentham, Dave Twist, John North, Steve Smith #1, Peter Parris, Linda Rice, Steve Holton, Jane Rice, Jeremy Gilson, Ian Foster, Andrew Michael, Tom Stock, Steve Bleasby, Tony Brown, Iswar Kautick, Gizelle Harrison, Carol Stretch, John Slack, Val Horsfall, Carol Lloyd, Brother John Tonner, Vanessa Lindsay-Smith, Brother Stanislaus Neild, Brother Robert Moore, Kay Wright, Steven Beevers, Diana Johnson, Angie Patterson, Barbara Gomersall, Kate Dallas-Wood, Ian Lavan, Phil McMahon, Jack Holt, Ian Woodhouse, Christopher Cooke, Dr Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, Lynn Cooper, John Lavan, Ann Slack, Robert Dilts, Suzanne Wade, Sue Poskitt-Lavan, Lee Holt, David Taylor, Peter Dawson, Steve Smith #2, Grey Wolf, Mark Duffy, Paul Edwards, Dennis Turner, Mike Laxton, Penny Parks, Dawn Turner, Stephen Farrer, Dr L Michael Hall, Ian Wilkinson, Jennie Beasty, Dr Jerry Coursen, Dave Yaffey, Richard Royce, Angela Ogilvie, Lewis Lynch, Dr Peter Child, Sheila Kaye, David Burnby, Dr Gregg A Lichtenstein, Jennifer Crossland, Gareth Lucier, Cathy Byrne, Helen Ezard, Chris Massender, Martin Patrick, Max Herold, Duncan Harper, Bernard McGuinn, Max Hodgson, Joan Sanders, Adrian Hartley, Gernia Van Niekerk, Wendy Baxter, Jenny Gavin-Allen, Matthew Kalman, Peter Fryer, Liz Olson, Steve Gorton, Jacky Wass, Martin Evington, Tony Cosgrove, Dr Natasha Todorovic, Nick Bull, Anne McErlane, Kevin Murphy, Graham Sykes, Jonathan Taylor, Linzi Hanlon, Emma Simmons, Diane Barker, Maria Bowers, Dr Susan Blackmore, Dr Eric H Chudler, Kate Bowers, Steve Atkinson, Kate Coulter, Caroline Crummack (Rice), Andrew Mills, Nick Taylor, Bill Hajdu, David Hunter, Kelly Robinson, Barbara Larisch, Tim Roberts, Viki Crummack, Claire

It was an era - the late 1980s - in which it seemed just about anybody with a whiff of business credibility, who couldn't do something better, could become a 'listed consultant' under the DTI Enterprise Initiative and provide 'business support' to smallish companies - 'SMEs' (small-medium enterprises) in the vernacular - with 50% of the consultant's costs being picked up by the taxpayer. (Surveys have shown since that the Enterprise Initiative had only a marginal role in improving the competitiveness of British industry.)

There were good consultants who emerged from the Enterprise Initiative era - and I'd like to think I was one of them. 4 companies assisted to achieve ISO 9000 and 23 to achieve Investors in People is, I think, some mark of achievement - though my proudest moment from those days was receiving a commendation from Enterprise Support (on behalf of the Department of Trade & Industry) for business planning.

Though the primary emphasis during my time with Bridge was on organisational development, my interest in Psychology was revived through working with the DISC model of William Moulton Marston - for which I wrote and delivered courses applying the concepts to sales and management. I was so impressed with the power of the model that I contemplated returning to academia to take a second degree in Psychology.

In that sense at least Bridge was a key step on my road to becoming a 'SocioPsychologist'.

However, the real turning point for me came in 1998 when I was exposed to Spiral Dynamics , Adizes LifeCycle and Neuro-Linguistic Programming - all within the space of 6 months!

Those incredible experiences led to profound changes in my ways of seeing myself and the world around me. So much so that, as a consultant, the work I had been doing previously seemed to be, at best, only 2-dimensional. The term 'consultant' clearly was no longer adequate to describe what I now could do. It was no longer a job, more a vocation. I tried 'Management Faciliator' and 'Management Psychologist' before settling eventually on the title of 'Change Engineer' in 2001.

In the years since the main emphasis in my work has shifted more and more onto people as it is people who really make the difference. It is people who plan, lead, design, manage, sell, buy and work, etc. Finally, in 2007, having coined the term 'Integrated SocioPsychology' in 2004, I decided to adopt the term 'SocioPsychologist' to reflect the fact that, as a teacher, consultant, trainer and therapist, my emphasis had come to be almost exclusively on people - and that was the area of expertise I would focus on from then on.

These pages cover my Career Highlights. While I'm proud of my work in the early 1990s, for obvious reasons it is only covered briefly. Far more space is devoted to being a change engineer and a sociopsychologist than a management consultant!! Conceptually the role has expanded over the years to take on one-to-one Personal Therapy and even the function of A-Level Psychology teacher. Who knows? I may even be growing a new generation of Change Engineers and SocioPsychologists!

Indeed it was a stint (2003-2006) teaching Psychology at Vermuyden School in Goole, East Yorkshire, that led me into experiences almost as profund those of 1998. Through adding so much to my knowledge of Psychology by studying and teaching it at A-Level, I began to conceive how an integrated approach to the behavioural sciences might be developed, based in large part on Spiral Dynamics. I call this approach: Integrated SocioPsychology.

I had been integrating many elements of NLP with Spiral Dynamics and running training courses on the integrated material since 2001; but the span of integration I now began to conceive was of a different order altogether. Eventually my studies led to my own book, 'Knowing You, Knowing Me: an Integrated SocioPsychology Guide to Personal Fulfilment & Better Relationships' (Trafford, 2006). 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' has received accolades such as "groundbreaking" and "wonderful" from right around the globe.

McIntosh, Pat Hunter, Mike Benson, Ali Standen, Dr Emma Dunmore, Elizabeth Clarke, Jane Walton...

...also my A-level course students and the participants in my workshop programmes - all of whose comments, queries and sometimes criticisms force me to think and expand my own perceptions...

...and not forgetting Ken - the Bradford University History lecturer whose surname I can't remember. In 1971 he told me: "Just because it's written in a History book, it doesn't mean it's true"...

...and certainly not fogetting the Psychology lecturer whose name I can't even begin to hazard a guess at now. Drop-dead gorgeous blonde, perched on the edge of a desk a little indiscreetly in a micro-mini skirt, talking explicitly about the sensory pleasure of passing faeces....!!!!!

Shocking and formative experiences both! - the meanings of which have made more and more sense to me as Spiral Dynamics and NLP have driven my revitalised interest in the behavioural sciences and given me many new outlooks on life.