About Christopher Wilson

Mr. Wilson is a management consultant and researcher in Canada's National Capital region who specializes in issues of collaborative governance, regional stewardship and collective intelligence. He currently holds the post of Senior Research Fellow with the Centre on Governance at the University of Ottawa, where since 1997 he has been a researcher, consultant and lecturer. Between 2003-2006 he was the managing partner of Invenire, an Ottawa-based think tank that explored issues in governance, stewardship and collaboration.

His interests tend to revolve around the issues of collective action and distributed governance such as the governance of collaborations; the assessment of smart communities and community networks; the development of collective intelligence; the development of community information systems and indicators; the governance of local workforce systems and labour market information; comparative studies of community collaboration; the governance impacts of e-commerce and e-government; the learning dynamics of regional innovation; and the management of various multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Christopher has also worked closely with the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI), particularly its SmartCapital, SmartSites and TalentWorks initiatives to help improve the global competitiveness of Ottawa firms. For SmartCapital he worked with a team to assess the effecetiveness of Canada's premier smart community project. He served as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee for the SmartSites program, Ottawa's public Internet access initiative. For TalentWorks, to date Ottawa's most extensive partnership initiative, Christopher has led a team to assess the state of Ottawa's workforce producing a series of three reports collectively entitled Ottawa Works that examined both the context and profile of Ottawa's talent pool and that proposed a set of comprehensive recommendations to align Ottawa's workforce with the realities of a 21st century knowledge economy. He holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa and has been a part-time lecturer in the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa for over a decade. He is a member of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He was a founding member of transition Ottawa and was co-Chair of SmartSites, an organization helping to coordinate public Internet access to Ottawa. He was a Board member of Electronic Commerce Canada and the national capital Suzuki School of Music. Chris is also a member of the Chaordic Alliance  begun by the founding CEO of VISA, Dee Hock to understand new forms collaborative organization. The basis of much of this work lies in the recognition of the fundamental need of individuals and organizations to find  newer and more effective ways to learn and work together. Despite the many overlapping forces in today's society  including globalization, the knowledge economy, the growing need for efficiency and competitiveness, the creation of business networks and ecosystems, the changing nature of work, and the 'hollowing out' of nation states, the pressures to achieve more effective systems of cooperation are paramount. To better understand the confluence of these changes requires new frameworks and new paradigms, improved levels of trust and transparency, and more creative mechanisms for satisfying contingent cooperation so that citizens, business people, and governments can make better use of their resources to provide more effective solutions to their collective challenges.

Together: Collective Failure or Promise of Renewal? Selections from a new book being prepared by Christopher Wilson When a problem proves chronic and perpetually without solution despite the honest efforts of people of good will,  it is because the fundamental assumptions that guide our understanding of the problem, or its potential solutions, are seriously flawed or just plain wrong! When it comes to the coordination of people and organizations, we have continually resisted revising our outdated, control-based, Newtonian paradigm when we should be adopting the relationship paradigm of quantum field theory. When Life is like that, shouldn't we be moving with the current, rather than fighting against it? The whole direction of human development, “the arrow of history”,  according to Robert Wright, is the story of how human beings have found ways to work together. This gives us hope that coherent and integrated human communities are not only the preferred choice of nature but the one towards which we are inexorably being pushed toward.  To avoid the collective action problem, we need to understand that each of our individual choices matters a great deal -- it's the only thing we can really do to make a change. If you assume someone other than yourself will deal with it, then you can expect no one ever will.  The definition of insanity is doing the same things repeatedly yet expecting different results. We can see this pattern being repeated again and again in the way corporations operate, in the way governments develop and implement policy, in international affairs, and in our management of our environment. Yet doing something different may be as simple as turning on the light and watching the problems of darkness just simply disappear. The solution begins with a change in ourselves, through "action from the heart", as Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski and Flowers have described, action that stems from the direct experience of the our unbounded inner nature and the collective intelligence we create together.

Christopher has lived and worked across Canada, but has strong family roots in Ottawa that go back to the Wright family who originally settled the Ottawa Valley beginning around 1800. The Wrights were at the centre of the lumber trade upon which the region was built.

Chris has also lived and worked in a variety of places around the world, including the USA, Europe, the Philippines, and India. Each of these places had its own charm and sense of home and so Christopher feels like an international citizen as much as he is a uniquely Canadian one.