Gaian Leadership Development- AUTHOR BIOS

Jeff Evans, Ph.D. practices in the areas of human systems change and organizational capability.  He has spent the past 15 years heavily involved in organization development, change management, learning system design, and the management of organizational development and education systems.  His experience includes work as both an internal and external consultant.  He has led work redesigns in manufacturing and business unit settings, numerous improvement projects and team development activities, as well as designed and implemented many training, education, and quality systems at plant and division levels.  His client base has ranged from international executive teams to manufacturing management teams in retail, manufacturing, information technology, telecommunications, research and development, and oil and gas exploration.

Jeff has presented at conferences in the areas of organization development, large scale change, and internal consulting support.  He has authored papers and research studies on learning organizations, leadership, training design, and training systems.  His professional affiliations include American Society for Training and Development, International Society for Performance Improvement, North American Simulation and Gaming Association, Organizational Development Network, and the STS Roundtable.

Jeff is currently the owner of the Gaian Group, an organization development consulting firm.  The Gaian Group has focused on change navigation for large organization design.  As an internal organizational development consultant, Jeff consulted on new organization designs and startups, large group change methodologies, and joint ventures and alliances in international and global settings.  He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in education and social sciences, including a Ph.D. in Educational Human Resource Development from Texas A&M, specializing in Organizational Development and Instructional System Design.  He has completed a 3 Year Post-Graduate track in organization development at the Gestalt Institute in Cleveland.  He has done post-doctoral work in behavioral systems, organizations, and the psychology of group dynamics.  Jeff also has developed and taught extension courses in Human Resource Development through UC Berkeley’s College of Business.

Chuck Schaefer is an experienced professional in the field of helping people work together to meet their organizational challenges and increase their organization's effectiveness. Although his long time practice and prior experience as an organization manager provides him with content expertise in a number of areas of organization performance, basically he works as a "Process Consultant" rather than as a content expert. He guides people through the tasks of doing fundamental, candid "action research" on themselves and their situation, supporting them in managing the significant human dynamics involved in the process and the follow-on organizational change. He works from a "systems" perspective of organization aimed at joint optimization of business, operational and human goals.

Chuck has spent about a third of his professional life as a systems architect and practicing manager in aerospace systems planning and operations, a third as an external organization development and design consultant, and a third as an internal consultant in a variety of organizational settings. His experience includes university faculty appointments in organization, management and human psychology. His undergraduate studies were in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois, and his graduate work was in applied behavioral science, high performance organization and humanistic psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the past few years, he has spent about half of his time supporting High Performance Work Systems redesign and implementation, about a quarter of his time is spent supporting management and work team development, and the rest with a variety of employee involved processes to improve organizational effectiveness and quality of work life.