Training and consulting for rural food businesses in Lincolnshire

Abstract

This presentation was put together to summarise the outcomes of one of four parallel modules within a European project conducted in 2000-01 with a group of 13 managers of small food enterprises in the rural County of Lincolnshire, England. Within this project, led by Rebecca Herron and Dennis Finlayson, a structured programme of training, consulting and research evaluation was conducted by a team from the Faculty of Business and Management at the University of Lincoln, funded through a grant from the European Commission’s Social Fund. John Friend’s module introduced the Strategic Choice Approach to decision-making, complementing the other three modules by focusing on situational rather than systemic forms of complexity. He first introduced mutual consulting methods to enable the participating managers to work together in building profiles of particular decision problems on their current management agendas. Then one of the profiled problems was selected by voting for a demonstration of computer-aided consulting using the STRAD software package. John Friend then conducted follow-up consulting visits to four of the participating businesses for further trials of these interactive consulting methods. Detailed notes on two of these visits are appended to show the flexible way in which a computer-supported dialogue can be used as a consulting aid.