Gilbert Steil

In the middle of a Australian planning meeting back in 1991, Gilbert Steil witnessed something remarkable: a strident union leader, who only two days earlier was adamant that three people were required to replace a pump in the middle of an oil refinery, changed his mind. He was now certain that one person could do the job, if properly trained.

Gilbert Steil realized that this was not due to a rational argument; the union leader had known both sides of the rational argument for decades. Something else was going on. That something else was a temporary shift in identity; a shift from identifying with the union, and being responsible for its health and the health of its members, to an identification with the broader Australian oil industry, which was at risk of losing a competitive struggle with other countries. Gilbert Steil would later call this shift in identity, and the resultant change in priorities and the willingness to see the world differently, the “collaboration response.”

Within a month, Gilbert Steil decided to form Gil Steil Associates, a strategic planning consultancy dedicated to creating strategies that emerge from subtle shifts in the identities of the key stakeholders of an organization or a community. Steil realized that the collaboration response made possible the discovery of true common ground, something better than compromises hammered out by negotiations.

Being a strategic planning consultant, whose specialty was the discovery of common ground, was Gilbert Steil’s second career. His first career was engineering management in the computer industry, where he began as a programmer, and ended as a senior executive.

Gilbert Steil holds degrees in mathematics (from Case Western Reserve) and social psychology (from American University). For a decade he taught organization and group behavior at what is now Rivier University.

His first book, The Collaboration Response, sums up everything he learned about the discovery of common ground from 1991 to 2017.

For more information, see www.gilsteil.com, or www.thecollaborationresponse.com.