Tom Bigda-Peyton, a co-founder of the Center for Semantic Excellence, is an organizational consultant, researcher, and educator who has spent more than twenty years working with managers, teams, and organizations. Research shows that most of the knowledge adults use to do their jobs comes from informal, on-the-job learning rather than formal training or classroom learning. Tom has focused his efforts on how to close the gap between learning and action, how to create workplace environments which foster informal learning, and how to help adults learn from surprises, successes, and accidental innovations while they are at work.
Tom is the founder of Action Learning Systems, a research and consulting practice started in 1992 to help teams and organizations improve the quality and pace of on-the-job learning, recognize and manage transitions together, and create environments of shared leadership and accountability. He is also a founding partner of Third Ways, an organizational consulting group begun in 1998 to scale the action learning methodology and enrich it through interplay with other useful methods and approaches.
Tom has had a variety of experiences with university administration and faculty. During the last three years, he has worked with faculty at the Center for Public Leadership Harvard University, Tufts University, and the Hartford Seminary. Among other assignments, he has done coaching and advisement, visioning and planning work, and faculty retreats.
On the administrative side, Tom advised the department head and senior consultant from the department of Organizational Development and Training at Tufts on a six-month project to improve the way the university pursued and administered grants for medical research. This project focused on leadership and organizational development involving the Medical School, the Office for Grants and Administration, and Finance. Tom has also worked with the head of the Facilities Management group at MIT. Tom is currently working with the Boston Consortium, a network of Boston-area universities led by CFO’s and dedicated to making a wide range of operational improvements. He is helping to extend the Consortium’s efforts in leadership, collective learning, and organizational development.
Tom has worked extensively in other sectors as well, including projects at the following:
In these engagements, Tom’s focus has been on managing corporate transitions, developing new growth areas for the firm, and fostering sustainable changes in large, complex systems.
From 1989 through 1992, Tom founded and ran a consulting business (Collaborative Action Associates) and a research practice (Center for Management Innovation) intended to advance practical applications of organizational learning and action learning methods and tools. Key clients included Digital Equipment Corporation, Polaroid, and the Office of the Auditor General, Government of Canada.
From 1985 through 1989, Tom did his doctoral work at Harvard and M.I.T. with two pioneers in the field of organizational learning, Chris Argyris and Don Schon. From 1974 through 1985, Tom was a teacher and administrator in two independent schools. In addition to his doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Intervention, Tom holds Master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Harvard.