John, a Visiting Professor at Loughborough since 2009, is an independent management consultant, experienced Board Chair and Non-Executive Director with a focus on developing strategic and operational adaptation and transformation. His approach seeks to enhance performance through new insights and thoughtful innovation. especially with organisations facing challenges of adaptation, survival and growth. Leadership built on effective mentoring enables his coherent whole system approach synthesising the three dimensions of people, process and information. John’s experience extends across public, private and 3rd sector and includes infrastructure, energy, transport, housing, criminal justice, social care, health care and both service focused and manufacturing organisations.
Currently partner in Beckford Consulting, Chair of Corehaus Ltd (MMC housing), and, until April 2025, Board Chair at Rise Mutual CIC (Domestic Abuse, VAWG) and NED at Fusion21 Ltd. (2014-2023) Visiting Professor at University College London (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering) and at Loughborough University Business School (Centre for Information Management). Currently co-supervising 3 doctoral students researching data driven decision making and 3 doctoral students researching long term effectiveness of interventions with perpetrators of domestic abuse/VAWG.
John holds a PhD in Management Systems and Sciences (Hull), is a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society, a Member of The Institute of Management Services, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology. John is immediate Past President of the Cybernetics Society.
John is a cybernetician, he believes that organisational theory must be tested in practice and organisational practice must be tested in theory. He seeks to synthesise the two through theoretically grounded research led consulting and application.
Examples include:
Leading the Board of RISE Mutual for 6 years enabling a turnaround with t/o up from < £1m to £4m and from a loss of £400k to a surplus of £400k, substantially grew the customer base through investing in new products, services and people to generate a sustainable, financially and culturally resilient organisation.
Leading the Board of Corehaus Limited, building houses in a factory using modern methods of construction, through a prolonged start up phase, maintaining relations with investors, overseeing the acquisition of premises, development and accreditation of a range of products and enabling initial penetration to the social housing sector. Investment of around £4m with 19 buildings occupied via social landlords and significant learnings shared with the industry, housing providers and central government.
Developing ‘SARM’ for Network Rail – the Seasonally Agnostic Railway Model – a strategy for integrating data about weather, planned timetables and asset performance to make assertions about future railway performance. Investment by Network Rail of around £1m including sponsorship of three doctoral students.
- Quality’ (Routledge, 5th Edition, 2023)
- ‘The Intelligent Nation’ (Routledge, 2021)
- ‘The Intelligent Organisation’ (Routledge, 2nd Edition, 2020)
- www.beckfordconsulting/blog/
- https://beckfordconsulting.com/publications/
- Understanding and Utilizing data for a Seasonally Agnostic Railway, with Dr. Brian Haddock, Engineering X, Safer Complex Systems Research Programme, Royal Academy of Engineering and Lloyds Register Foundation, 2022
- Rail Adapt: Adapting the Railway for the Future, Union Internationale des Chemins de fer, December 2017 (with Quinn, A, Jack, A., Hodgkinson, S., Ferranti, E., Dora, J). ISBN: 978 2 7461 2680 0
- Tomorrows Railway and Climate Change Adaptation 2 (in consortium with ARUP) for RSSB and Network Rail, January 2016
- Systemic Risk and Opportunities, Lead Researcher and Author, Engineering and Interdependency Expert Group, HM Treasury, June 2011
- Assessing and Reporting on Systemic Risks and Opportunities in Infrastructure, Commissioned by Professor Brian Collins, Chief Scientific Adviser to DfT and BIS, August 2011
- CT Climate Risk, with AEA Technologies: A report commissioned by Will Lochhead, Adaptation and Climate Change Project, DEFRA, April 2010
- Infrastructure Resilience Matters, Commissioned by Professor Brian Collins, Chief Scientific Adviser to DfT and BIS, April 2010
- An Overview of Systemic Dependencies of the UK National Infrastructure, jointly with AEA Ricardo, Commissioned by Professor Brian Collins, Chief Scientific Adviser to DfT and BIS, June 2009