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Bas Warmerdam - Little Consultants
Refreshing Thinking Power for Complex Organizational Challenges
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Do you want to get stalled projects and collaborations back on track while making your work more enjoyable and engaging for yourself and your colleagues? As a professional, look at challenges in change, strategy, collaboration, leadership, innovation, workplace happiness—or even quantum mechanics—through the eyes of a ten-year-old. Discover creative interventions and innovative solutions that break through conventional thinking.
Author Bas Warmerdam has worked the last decade with ten thousands of ‘little consultants’ between the age 9 and 12 on problems in companies and government, in the Netherlands and abroad. In this book he shares inspiring examples and a method you could start using tomorrow. On your own or with your entire team. And no question is too complicated.
Little Consultants helps you break free from workplace rigidity and offers a remedy for 'terminal seriousness' in organizational challenges. It equips you, as a manager, project leader, or consultant, with the tools to bring fresh impulses to business and government challenges—so you can take action with a smile.
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Published in January 2025 | Paperback | 120 pages | ca. 20,000 words
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Bas Warmerdam is a consultant for strategy and organizations, and he founded ConsultingKinds ten years ago. A popular speaker who also gives workshops for international teams, organizations, and conferences, for groups of five to five hundred professionals from all levels within the organization. He lets them 'play' with their organizational challenges, despite its complexity. He provides a keynote speech called 'Think Like a Kid for Professionals' in which the method of his book is explained. These sessions are full of humor, interaction, and inspiration in a carefree and fresh manner, appreciated within a wide target audience, from experienced CEO's to freshly started junior project team members.
As a consultant, Bas works with colleagues in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium with large groups of little consultants to solve complex organizational challenges. He studied Biopharmaceutical Sciences and researched gene therapy and comparative genetics in London. He completed his Executive MBA in Rotterdam and has complemented his studies with international experiences at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Johannesburg. In his spare time Bas likes to be with friends and neighbors, make music, and coach an under-15 girls' football team. He likes to travel and enjoys comedy.
“This approach makes it playful, is refreshing, and offers great new and fun ideas. As adults we have the tendency to do things in the same manner but this provides new perspectives. It is great to have a fresh view on some serious problems. Recommended.”—Dennis de Mik, Launch Excellence Lead, Pfizer
“If we would apply 'think like a child' on adults the world would only know solutions.”—Margot Cooijmans, Director Philips Foundation Impact Investments BV and Philips Foundation“Bas shows in a wonderful way that complex challenges can be approached with 'childlike simplicity'. With an open view and lots of humor this leads to refreshing insights. Masterful in its simplicity.”—Paul Hartman, Activation Specialist, ASICS Benelux
“If you look like a ten-year-old, you will see simple solutions instead of complex problems. Bas Warmerdam shows in a relaxed, contagious, and convincing manner how professionals can learn to do this. Recommended!”—Albert Jan Kruiter, Founder of the Institute for Public Values“A fun, refreshing, and creative approach that evokes a different perspective to look at and think about the problems we work with on a daily basis. It literally gives you a different view. It is a great idea to look at the issues we are now writing reports about and having discussions on with a blank page. And then to approach them with Bas' open-minded way of thinking.”—Hindrik-Jan Knot, Head of the Project Pool of the Ministries of Economy Affairs, Climate and Sustainable Growth, and Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature, and Deputy Director Human Resources
“Bas' approach triggers a different way of thinking and creativity, and lowers thresholds for questions and conversations. Even with scientific challenges. And it is simply good fun and inspiring to challenge yourself to think like a child.”—Patrick Rensen, Professor Metabolic Aspects of Vascular Diseases, Leiden University Medical Center
“The author show with this book how we are stuck in our own context. To break free from this helps me to look differently to challenges and approach them with fun again. Organizational issues and development challenges have become fun to start tackling again.”—Andreas de Graaf, Municipal Secretary
“This book is a must-read for every adult. With creativity, knowledge, and courage Bas lets ten-year-olds provide inspiring answers to complex issues of the 'big people' the lead to very refreshing perspectives.”—Mirella Jacobs, Program Manager Participation and Polarization
“With lots of humor and fresh insights Bas brings out the child in you, making you more creative and effective to solve challenges.”—Antoinet van Scherpenzeel, Project Manager
“A very refreshing and inspiring method that resonates on a personal level as well as on a professional level with me. I love these creative yet simple approaches and techniques that Bas offers, they really speak to me. I shared this approach with enthusiasm with friends and colleagues, and I am contemplating ways to further apply these techniques.”—Eva Polk, Project Manager Clinical Data Science at the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation
Introduction
1. What if you were allowed to dream?
2. A different view leads to fresh solutions
Part I. Organizational Challenges Through the Eyes of a Ten-Year-Old
3. Getting started
4. Working with your team or organization
Part II. Using the Refreshing Thinking Power of Little Consultants
5. Your own little consultants and living room consultancy agencies
6. Extra tips to determine the essence and dynamics of the challenge
7. Extra tips to translate your challenge to a child's vision
Part III. Think Big, Start Small
8. Peak behind the curtain: involving little consultants on a large scale
9. The sky is the limit
Afterword: getting started
About the author
Acknowledgements
Sources