About me | Consultation Guru

In 2003, he was a prime mover in the creation of The Consultation Institute, (TCI) and served as Programme Director until 2015 and then as Founder Director until 2022. He continues to support the Institute in all its activities.
He has proposed, designed, supervised and secured the implementation of over 120 consultancy assignments for the Consultation Institute, mostly for clients organising public or stakeholder consultations. He understands the challenges they face.
He has written extensively on all aspects of public and stakeholder consultations. These include 380 Tuesday Topics since 2003, over 60 Briefing Papers and about 200 other articles.
Rhion has supervised the development of over 50 one-day training courses and personally delivered almost 500 such courses for the Consultation Institute. He devised five ‘management games’ (The ‘Bloombridge’ series) which were delivered over 250 times to over 3,000 trainees.
He is well-known as an entertaining and inspirational speaker, regularly invited (pre-pandemic) to address audiences across a wide range of private and public sectors.
Since 2007, he has specialised in the Law of Consultation, monitoring and publishing commentaries on over 100 High Court judgments. Alongside Elizabeth Gammell, he delivered a comprehensive training course on the subject for public and in-house audiences about 10 times per annum from 2012 to 2019.

Also with Elizabeth Gammell, he published The Art of Consultation in 2008 and The Politics of Consultation in 2018. This latter volume is a comprehensive analysis of the context within which so many public policy decisions are taken, and the role public consultations play in influencing outcomes.

When Rhion was Manager of Worldwide Customer Satisfaction for ICL (now Fujitsu), he pioneered the European application of Gap Analysis methodologies which he later adapted for use in the TCI Skills Audit.
Between 1989 and 2001, Rhion ran Campaign Information Ltd, a pioneer of Parliamentary monitoring and lobbying systems. This gave him a profound understanding of public affairs and Parliamentary practices.
Also before 2003, Rhion worked extensively with software and solution providers in the customer engagement application area, advising over 20 firms from the USA and Europe about their marketing strategies for the UK and European markets.
He has considerable international experience. For 7 years, he was responsible for developing IT-related professional services throughout continental Europe. He has since worked with the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the European Union.

In 2017, Rhion was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Healthcare Communications Managers.

Rhion has tendered professional advice and conducted consultation training through the medium of Welsh, and strongly supports attempts to provide bilingual support for public engagement in Wales. See Cymraeg
Rhion has worked in all parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (see photo after speaking at Belfast Castle) and is acutely aware of the cultural, legislative and political differences between them and the way this affects public engagement and consultation practices.