For most of my childhood and adolescence it was assumed that I would be a professional singer or actress – and indeed I did study drama with a view to a career in theatre. But soon after I left college, I found myself torn between the arts and social work… and in the end my interest in social change and community development became the stronger driving force (read more in the About section or browse my CV).

In 1992, I started working for the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) and I was responsible for leading its pioneering partnership work until the end of 2011. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work in so many different parts of the world, with extraordinary colleagues and people from business, governments and civil society who strive to collaborate in spite of considerable odds in order to create a better world for future generations.

Alongside this work, in 1996 I co-founded Trigonos – a social business in North Wales that seeks to integrate social, economic and environmental solutions by providing opportunities for personal and professional development to a range of individuals and groups. Social business as a model of sustainable development is of great interest to me.

Now I am working as an independent consultant and I am busily pursuing my passions for partnership brokering, social innovation, training and mentoring.

I am also pleased to have some ‘space’ in which I may develop… who knows what!

I am interested in sharing information on my current work and discussing new ideas and projects.

Please feel free to get in touch!

• Completing a training in Optimum Nutrition (whoever would have thought I would become fascinated by the bio-chemistry of the citric acid cycle?!)
• Studying and teaching T’ai Chi Ch’uan for more than 12 years – getting up most mornings at 6am (this has become a habit even though the daily T’ai Chi practice stopped somewhere around 1985!). This took me on two study trips to Thailand to study with a Chinese T’ai Chi Master (known as Lao Tsu – or ‘revered teacher’). Tai’Chi accounts, I am sure, for my physical fitness, mental alertness and capacity to contain my energy and pace myself – as I advance into older age. It feels good to be introducing some T’ai Chi exercises into my teaching on the Advanced Practice courses for the Partnership Brokers Association.
• Most recently I have taken up Indian Head Massage a form of massage of the back, shoulders, arms, neck, head and face that is practiced all over India. It is based on Aurvedic principles and on the notion of the chakras – energy centres within the body that, when they are in harmony, mean one is balanced in terms of one’s physical, mental and emotional state. I really like the idea of being able to make people well (or at least, feel better) and this is a simple but effective intervention to be able to offer.

Odysseus himself was a protégée of Athena (Goddess of Wisdom) and she guided Mentor to take on his ‘in loco parentis’ role with great care, insight and dedication. For this reason the personal name Mentor has been adopted as a term meaning someone who imparts wisdom and shares knowledge with a less experienced person.

On the one hand, it feels a little presumptuous to assume one has anything to impart to others (and often I am quite overawed by the capacity others have for courage and creativity in the face of daunting challenges). On the other hand, what can one usefully do with such a wealth of experiences over so many years other than try one’s best to support others just starting out on their journey.

And I suppose I have mentored (informally) for much of my life so what is now proposed is to do so more formally and with more consciousness and discipline.

This is something of a new step and I look forward to seeing how the story unfolds. I always liked myths and legends, so it feels good to be an echo (however small) of the Odyssey – an extraordinary journey by any standards!

SITA is my first name (to the delight to those who check passports in Indian airports) given to me because of my parents’ deep love for the sub-continent and their enjoyment of the stories in the Ramayana in which Sita is stolen away by the monkey god, Hanuman, and is finally rescued by Rama. She is regarded as the epitome of womanhood – devoted, modest, loyal and, of course beautiful. This says more about my parents’ inflated expectations than of my intrinsic characteristics. Needless to say, I fall far short of most of those attributes!

ROSALIND is my second name (always shortened to Ros) – my parents seem to have lost their nerve and adopted my second name for daily use shortly after my birth. I believe they named me after the heroine of Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. As a teenager my first Valentine’s card from an admirer quoted from the play “From the East to Western Ind no jewel is like Rosalind”. I was entirely delighted with this elegant declaration until my father – quick as a flash – retorted with a quote from the same play “Sweetest nut hath sourest rind, so it is with Rosalinde” which brought me rapidly down to earth with a bang. A further indignity was discovering in a Dictionary of Names that Rosalind did not meet ‘a garland of roses’ as I had assumed it did, but actually (in some obscure language) ‘a wreath of snakes’…

My third name is JOANNA – an anglicised version of the German ‘Johanna’ – which was the name of my maternal grandmother whom I never met as she died in a concentration camp, probably in 1944. I have two photos of her: in an early one she is strikingly handsome and dark eyed in the later one – taken just before her arrest and incarceration – she appears strained, unsmiling and rather grim. Having inherited my mother’s colouring and features, I feel a strong connection to that side of my genetic inheritance and – perhaps through sharing a name with her mother – a strong and lasting outrage at any form of religious intolerance and the at the appalling inhumanity of ethnic cleansing.

Last but not least is my surname, TENNYSON, which gets some people really excited… “Are you related to…?” I believe the name was quite a burden to my father – making him feel that at least some originality and talent was expected of him. In my case it brought some surprising but ultimately fairly benign experiences (a trip to the USA in 1969 accompanying my grandfather on a lecture tour; being asked to judge poetry reading competitions; laying wreaths on Tennyson’s tomb in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death and so on). It is bizarre that people expect something special from you when you have a famous ancestor – even when they only make up 1/16th of your actual DNA! I am not complaining, since it has never been a real burden. And I expect my access to my grandfather’s wonderful library enabling me to read hefty tomes from a very early age (War and Peace in a bad English translation from cover to cover at the age of 13, for example) owes something to the Tennyson connection.

Just in case I ever risk becoming too preoccupied with the significance of my names… I should also record that my family nickname is ‘Midge’ – short for ‘midget’ – awarded by my oldest son with unmitigated delight on the day he discovered that he was taller than I was!

“There was much that could never be named… The realm of the nameless was not shapeless. I had to find my way about within it – like being in a room with solid furniture and sharp objects in pitch darkness. And anyway most of my hunches were nameless, or their names were as long as whole books I had not yet read.”

Extract from HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, John Berger, Bloomsbury Press, 2005

IBLF’s focus is how to bring business constructively into the equation – enabling the corporate sector (so often vilified for its destructive rather than constructive behaviour) to contribute its particular set of attributes (eg innovation, speed of delivery, management know-how, potential for reaching scale) to the development table alongside the equally important, if different, attributes of the other two sectors.

It is a relatively small NGO with a track record of being ahead of the evidence and ‘punching above its weight’ (not a particularly attractive image, but I can’t think of another!). Go to www.iblf.org for more information about the important work IBLF does around partnering and beyond.

During my years with IBLF, I was given ‘carte blanche’ to develop ideas, tools and techniques that would build capacity around the world and in all three sectors to ‘partner’ effectively. Much of this material is captured in a series of Partnering Tool Books that IBLF generously makes available to anyone interested – go to www.ThePartneringInitiative.org to download copies. The basic book – The Partnering Toolbook – is now available in 18 languages. This website also gives a rich picture of the on-going partnership work including training, consultancy, research and much more. A selection of publications is available on the publications page.

There is much to say about the wide-ranging nature of this work but my current focus is now on the specific issue of ‘partnership brokering’ – a term (I think) I invented somewhere around 1999 to describe the role of an intermediary working on behalf of the partnership as a whole to make it efficient and to help maximise the partnership’s potential.

Download ‘What is a partnership broker?’

In 2003, with a colleague (Michael Warner), the first training programme was launched for those operating in the partnership-brokering role – designed to build the skills, confidence and competencies necessary to broker partnerships effectively. Since then the scope of work has grown significantly and there is now a freestanding professional not-for-profit entity – the PARTNERSHIP BROKERS ASSOCIATION – that delivers a comprehensive range of training courses as well as undertaking research into the added value brokers bring to partnerships. See www.partnershipbrokers.org

As well as running training courses for the Partnership Brokers Association, I also work as a partnership broker – particularly in brokering the idea of partnerships with those for whom the concept is new.

Something of this role is enshrined in the following paper – co-written with a partnership broker colleague, Rafal Serafin – based on work we did together in Poland in 1993.

Download Brokering the Idea by Ros Tennyson and Rafal Serafin

Above all, this exposure has given me a very strong interest in imagery and in illustration – this impacts my training work considerably.

I continue to dabble with art projects: illustrated ‘books’ for my children; posters trying to capture my sense of urgency about the state of the world and collages (a particular favourite because it liberates one from self-consciousness about limited artistic talent).

My mother was a sculptress – maybe that is where my lately developed interest in clay and ceramics originates, though I don’t remember working with clay in her studio when I was a child. What I like about clay is its three-dimensionality and its solidity. I also like the mix of beauty and utilitarianism as well as the fine line between a pot that is handsome and one that is ungainly.

“The precise and the perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static, regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have some room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom”
from: The Unknown Craftsman, 1972, Soetsu Yanagi

In recent years, when travel and training courses have taken over my life, it has been a pleasure and a relief to be able to escape into my studio and just work with clay – sometimes listening to classical music, but more often in silence. The pleasure of creating something new and the joy of beginning to know when to work further on a piece and when to just stop is intense and immediate. It is a new and continuous kind of learning – an experiment in letting go of intention and just seeing what happens.

” First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object of the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualisation, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better. This non-conceptualisation – the Zen state of No Mind – may seem to represent a negative attitude but from it springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively”
from: The Unknown Craftsman, 1972, Soetsu Yanagi

The Chinese call this phenomenon ‘Wu Wei’ – “Doing by not doing, doing by allowing things to happen”