Welcome to The Kantor Institute.
pathways to change
Founder and Project Partners
The Kantor Institute works in partnership with independent consultants who bring their expertise to bear on the fulfillment of its broad purpose by collaborating on one or more specific projects.
David Kantor, founder
Over the past fifty years, David Kantor, Ph.D., has been instrumental in bringing his unique model and counseling expertise to families, couples, organizations, leaders and interventionists as they work to achieve success through generative relationships with others.
David began his career as a clinical psychologist and lecturer in Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations. From 1965 to 1975, he was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and served as the Director of Psychological Research and later as Chief Psychologist at Boston State Hospital.
He also founded and became director of the Boston Family Institute, the first systems training program in Massachusetts, The Kantor Family Institute, and The Center for Training in Family Therapy at Boston State Hospital.
David has also served as a Charter Member of the American Family Therapy Association, an Approved Supervisor, Clinical Member, and Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, a Diplomat of the American Board of Family Psychology, and as an editor and referee for the Journal of Family Process.
In the 1980s and 90s, David began introducing his models to businesses, top-level executives, and organizational consultants, among them Arthur D. Little, Innovation Associates, MIT’s Dialogue Project, Origins, and Dialogos. From 2000 to 2009, David served as a Thought Leader and Partner at Monitor Group, where he developed innovative products, such as Leadership Model Building, a leadership development program; O-Deck, speech-coding software; and the Kantor Profiles, a suite of assessment instruments.
During his career, David has trained over a thousand systems interventionists and has written dozen of articles and several books, including research-based Reading the Room (Jossey-Bass, 2012), out now on Amazon, Inside the Family (Jossey-Bass, 1975 & Meredith Winter Press, 2003) and My Lover, Myself (Riverhead Books, 1999), producing a rich breadth of work that grounds his communication theories and practices today. David feels that his most important contributions to organizational theory and practice spring from two sources: his Model of Models and from his trainees themselves.
Robert Hanig, project partner
Robert Hanig is the Founder of RLH Consulting as well as Founding Member of the Society for Organizational Learning and The Global Academy for Systemic Change. He was formerly a partner with Dialogos International, LLC., a Vice President at Innovation Associates, Inc., and a Vice President at Arthur D. Little (ADL), where he led the Leadership Practice. At ADL, Robert directed both the companies’ public training offerings and in-house programs for clients focused on large system change. Robert’s recent client list includes: The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, Prudential PLC, BP, Genzyme, AT&T, DuPont, SABIC, Kimberly-Clark, The Leadership Development Centre of New Zealand, and the International Finance Corporation.
Mr. Hanig has written various articles as well as contributed to books such as The Dance of Change published by Doubleday and co-authored by Peter Senge, with whom Robert works with extensively. His article in the June, 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review describes his key contribution to First Level Leaders, a worldwide leadership development program at BP.
Currently, Dr. David Kantor and Robert Hanig are preparing for their “Leadership for Sustainable Change” program of four weeklong sessions over a six-month period. Based largely on Dr. Kantor’s latest book Reading the Room as well as his and Mr. Hanig’s emerging work in the area of Intervention and Large System Change, the program will be delivered by them both as well as a number of guest faulty who are leaders in their respective fields. Learn more by reading the invitation here.
Shani Harmon, project partner
Shani is a Partner at The Trium Group, a boutique consulting firm that uses leadership development and organizational engagement to help companies achieve their most important strategic goals.Trium is a team of former strategy consultants who recognize human dynamics as the critical lynchpin between what organizations hope they achieve and what they actually achieve.
For the past eleven years, she has been working with executives in the technology, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, higher-education and non-profit sectors to make hard strategic choices and motivate and equip their organizations to act upon them. During that time, she led a multi-year customer experience transformation at a major pharmaceutical manufacturer working closely with the Chief Marketing and Medical Officers to create clarity and drive cross-functional alignment.
Shani is a long-time collaborator with David Kantor. Prior to joining Trium, Shani was a Senior Partner Project Leader for The Monitor Group and David’s partner in designing the curriculum and coaching practice for the Leadership Model Building program. They also collaborated to build the accompanying psychometric instruments and Observation DeckTM, a software tool which allows for the real-time coding of structural dynamics.
Currently, Shani and David are working together on an instrument which provides insight into how an individual’s behavior changes as the stakes go up. This tool is designed to help senior leaders manage themselves and their teams effectively when it matters most. They expect to make the instrument broadly available by the end of 2012.
Sarah Hill, project partner
Sarah Hill is Director of Dialogix Ltd, an independent UK based consulting company and leader in the use of Generative Dialogue and Structural Dynamics.
She specializes in the design and leadership of major whole-system cultural change interventions and trains leaders and coaches to become accomplished Dialogic Practitioners and Structural Dynamics Interventionists in their own right.
Sarah holds a PhD and has published articles on collaborative research and multi-stakeholder dialogue in prisons.
In her role as Project Partner with KI Sarah is leading work to:
Operationalize Model Building
Develop a new Model for Change based on her work with UK Police Forces
Design and deliver the ‘On Being an Interventionist’ and KI accredited ‘On Developing Interventionist’ Programs
Promote and direct the use of the Behavioral Propensities Profile in Europe
BC Huselton, project partner
B.C. is President of Strategic Model Building, an enterprise devoted to increasing clients’ competency in building and effectively using their own intervention models for change.
B.C. has been a business partner in the development of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, a member of the Design Team for the creation of the Society for Organizational Learning, Chief Operating Officer of Dialogos and Co-Founder of Leadership Model Building LLC with Dr. David Kantor. He has 28 years of extensive international business experience designing and utilizing system dynamics strategies that addressed complex change and transformation. Over the last 14 years (1998-12), BC has focused his business on Leadership and Team Model Building and the development and application of the Kantor Meta - Model for Model Building and Intervention
He has been featured in The Fifth Discipline Field Book, The Systems Thinker, Fortune, and a variety of news publications. He has appeared in a CNBC Profiles of America Series and PBS television specials addressing the significance of a systemic approach for planning large-scale change.
B.C. has a long standing relationship with The Kantor Institute, working with Dr. David Kantor in designing, building and field testing Change and Intervention Models using the Kantor's Meta Model for Model Building. He is currently the primary operational interface for the Institute and manages KI core content and materials to support client interventions and program projects.
Tony Melville, project partner
Tony Melville is also a Director of Dialogix Ltd, who brings the experience of a thirty-four year career in the British Police Service with ten years as a Chief Officer. He has developed and led programmes to change the structures, behaviors, relationships and ways of working in the Police . As he drew upon and used David's concepts, both he and the organization experienced extraordinary results. Having learnt and applied the art of being an interventionist, he is now committed to helping others discover new ways of thinking together and leading in a way that creates change that lasts.
He has an MA in Organizational Development and is a graduate of the UK Police Strategic Command Course and the British Prime Minister's Top Management Program.
As a Project Partner he has joined David and Sarah working to operationalise model building and develop a new model for change.
Kathryn Stanley, project partner
Kathryn is a committed Organizational Psychologist who has been facilitating change with companies to make them healthier places to work since 1997. She has facilitated large scale change projects with fortune 500 companies including Yahoo!, Avery Dennison, and Raytheon as well as non profits such as Hull Life Saving Museum's Maritime Apprenticeship Program, Mental Health Legal Advisor's Committee, and Goodwill Industries. Her work has centered on developing change capacity, communication competence, and strategic thinking with leadership teams under pressure to evolve their organizations. Her research focuses on assessing radical innovation readiness and executive presence. Kathryn is a Professor at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology in the Organizational and Leadership Psychology department. She developed and taught the core courses for the masters program in the organizational psychology masters programs and is teaching in the PsyD. program. Her book, Which Bird Gets Heard? How To Have Impact Even In a Flock was published in 2007 along with her Strength of Presence Inventory (SPI) that has helped over 800 executives increase their ability to be heard and lead change. Kathryn holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP).
Lisa Stefanac, project partner
Lisa Stefanac is committed to mobilizing a community of practitioners and interventionists to change the world through the application of Kantor’s theories and practices in the contexts of organizations, teams, families, and interpersonal relationships.
Lisa began her career at Dialogos International LLC, where she was an integral member of a team that provided leadership development and organizational change consulting while using many of Kantor’s theories to organizations such as The World Bank and BP. Subsequently, she provided negotiation and conflict management resolution training programs through Insight Partners for clients such as Merril Lynch and the Program On Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Lisa has also coached emerging leaders in David Kantor’s theories and practices of face-to-face communication and intervention through her boutique consultancy, ReDefine Global. Additionally, she served on staff at the Stanford Business School assisting in the delivery of the Interpersonal Dynamics course, where she facilitated 180+ hours of interpersonal dynamics action learning with MBA students.
Recently, Lisa completed her MBA studies at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where she was selected as a LEAD facilitator of their flagship leadership development program for MBA students. She proactively introduced many of Kantor’s ideas to her classmates through this LEAD program. She was selected as an Endeavor MBA Associate, serving in Johannesburg, South Africa as a summer consultant to the CEO and executive team of Call Force, where she analyzed call center attrition and advised the CEO on initiatives to improve employee engagement. She is the recipient at the University of Chicago of the Global Awareness Award and the Herman Family Fellowship, an award recognizing high potential Women Entrepreneurs.
Lisa is passionate about making a difference in the lives of others and is a 4+ years member on the board of directors of Camp Fire USA, Eastern Massachusetts Council, an organization dedicated to promoting the development of leadership in youth. Lisa completed the 2005 New York City Marathon and in the summer of 2009, she summited Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in the African continent.
