About Ascolto
Our vision is that we will make more of a contribution than our customers ever expected, and every individual, team and organisation that trusts us to help them, thrives even more as a result.
About Ascolto and its People
Kris Bush is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist: a specialist in understanding people’s behaviour and performance in the workplace, as individuals, in teams and in the wider organisational context.
Kris has focused much of her work on coaching, mentoring and assisting board level, senior and middle leaders in their personal development, (in the public, private and voluntary sectors).
I first met Kris when I was a Director at Ofwat. I was privileged to be involved (as an employee) in her work with Ofwat on transforming the culture there, which also included individual development work. Kris is highly skilled and has incredible emotional intelligence. In an organisation of around 100 to 150 staff, Kris got to know everyone by name, which really helped buy-in with her work. When I then took on my first Managing Director role of a not-for-profit organisation, I found Kris personally very supportive as I grappled with a number of challenging organisational issues. Kris also ran a team session for me and some mediation between team members, which helped us to function and was essential to survival of the organisation at that time. Kris is so intuitive and skilled that she made a prediction at the time which did come true! I would highly recommend Kris as a skilled, effective and generous facilitator in team and individual development.
I originally worked alongside Kris within the National College of Police Leadership, where I witnessed first-hand her skills in coaching and developing senior leaders. I was deeply impressed by her approach and it was clear from direct feedback and observable changes in behaviour, that those she worked with greatly appreciated her support. Sometime later, I was engaged in a significant specialist operational collaboration between forces and sought Kris’s advice on how best to manage the cultural change aspects of merging 3 separate specialisms and teams into a single entity. Kris willingly responded to the challenge and within a week she had met in person with all the strategic stakeholders and held team meetings with practitioners in each of the forces involved. Through this she was able to develop a comprehensive change readiness assessment, which formed the basis of our cultural change strategy. I cannot commend Kris’s work highly enough as she so practically demonstrated the impact of professional engagement with operational staff to develop a jointly-owned approach that has resulted in the creation of an efficient and effective team delivering specialist services for the benefit of the communities served.
David is a Chartered Engineer, graduate in psychology and holds a doctorate in engineering. He is a qualified executive and career coach, a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Chartered Institute of Management, the British Psychological Society and the Association of Coaching.
His work focus is on releasing potential in people and teams through bringing clarity and creativity to workplace problems and opportunities.
After working in a variety of organisations and teams, he has come to realise that the most important quality of effective working is having fun!
Training Leaders
My experience of David’s work comes, in the main, from supporting David as he managed, led and facilitated a training course for a team of key next generation leaders within NATS. I found David to be incredibly talented as a coach and mentor for the group we worked with. He has a fantastic ability to provide just the right amount of input to allow people to find their own way through some difficult issues and learn from them. I would not hesitate in recommending David to help develop the potential future leaders of any organisation.
Space to Think
“My experience with Space to Think was exceptional. As a Professor of Computer Science, it is often the case that we do not have time and space to think about new research problems and solutions. The two days activity allow me to think “out of the box”, brainstorm about new research questions and possible ways to investigate these questions, as well as come up with prioritisation of next steps. All of that was, supported by a technique and in an environment in which the brain could flow without any barriers or constraints. David’s coaching was paramount to support the entire process. I really enjoyed the whole experience and have used the method afterwards, in smaller ways, to support my work.”