Dr Felicity Healey-Benson, Emergent ThinkersTM
Organisational development. Learning & capability. Innovation & enterprise. Research into practice.
I have spent more than twenty-five years working with people, organisations and systems; helping make sense of complexity, build capability and turn ideas, evidence and strategy into practice.
My career began in industry, not academia. At Unipart I worked in continuous improvement; I moved into systems implementation and workforce development in early e-commerce, organisational performance in local government, strategic learning and development in housing, and later led learning and capability work during the establishment of Amazon’s then-largest UK facility. I came into higher education after years of developing people, organisations and systems in practice. That sequence still shapes how I work.
Since then, my work has crossed industry, public services, professional learning, higher education, schools, research, enterprise and community development. I have designed and led leadership and management development, organisational and workforce learning, professional development, programmes, partnerships and cross-sector initiatives from frontline to senior leadership level.
I am particularly interested in problems that do not sit neatly within one function, profession or institution. Much of my work involves connecting people and perspectives that do not usually meet, surfacing what is being missed and translating between different professional worlds to help complex work move from intention to implementation. That is also what connects the breadth of my career.
I work at the edges where organisations, disciplines, sectors and communities meet. Sometimes that means designing learning or building capability. Sometimes it means convening an ecosystem, translating a framework into practice, developing a programme, researching a difficult question or creating the relationships and infrastructure through which knowledge can travel.
The question underneath much of this work has remained remarkably consistent: what enables people to think well, learn well, lead well and create value in complex conditions?
My doctoral research gave me another way of exploring that question. Grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology, it examined how deep thinking is facilitated and led to the development of Immersive Practitioner Inquiry (IPI). The research subsequently became a Palgrave Macmillan monograph and continues to inform how I approach learning and organisational change: looking beneath what is immediately visible or measurable to understand what enables people to think, learn and act differently.
Today, through Emergent Thinkers™, my work brings together organisational development, learning and capability, enterprise and innovation, research and knowledge mobilisation. I build things that help ideas travel into practice: programmes, tools, collaborations, communities and cross-sector initiatives, and I research and write about what that work reveals.
What I have built recently
Emergent Thinkers™ A living archive of research, reflection and practice writing, now in its seventh year and several hundred posts.
Cards of Insight A published CPD tool for facilitating higher-order thinking, used in Masters programmes and professional development contexts internationally.
Harmonious Heroes A school-community ecosystem project in Llanelli bringing primary and secondary schools, community organisations and civic representatives together to co-create curriculum-mapped learning for the whole town.
hanfod.NL A phenomenological networked learning community co-founded with Dr Mike Johnson
Harmonious Entrepreneurship Society Co-founded with Professor David A. Kirby, working to reframe entrepreneurship around people, planet and profit in equal measure.
Research & Knowledge Exchange
My research and knowledge-exchange work connects scholarship with professional and organisational practice. It spans organisational learning, entrepreneurship and enterprise education, higher-order thinking, phenomenology, educator development and sustainability, with a particular focus on how ideas, evidence and frameworks move into practice.
This has included developing research-informed tools and approaches for professional learning; leading and contributing to international research and knowledge-exchange collaborations; translating European competence frameworks into educator development; and using participatory and practice-based research to inform organisational, educational and community initiatives.
Published work includes a Palgrave Macmillan monograph on thinking facilitation and a Springer edited collection on phenomenology in networked learning, alongside 40+ peer-reviewed publications. My research has also generated practical resources including Cards of Insight and the Professional Context Vlog, which has been adopted across seven Irish universities and endorsed by the International Council for Open and Distance Education.
Across this work, the purpose is consistent: to make knowledge useful & creating the conditions, tools and connections through which research can inform learning, decisions and change.
Qualifications
BSc London School of Economics · PGCE · MBA · MA HRM · DBA · PG Dip CIPD · Dip NLP · SAC Dip · FHEA
Find me elsewhere
Google Scholar · LinkedIn · ORCID
For a full career biography, qualifications and professional associations, see my extended profile.
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Emergent Thinkers™ 