Our Heritage
The Coverdale Organization was established in 1965 by Ralph Coverdale. The first US organization was founded in 1968.
A pioneer in experiential and inductive learning and a forerunner in organizational development, our passion for constant innovation, insight and excellence continues to grow.
Coverdale has developed from a UK training organization into a well-established international consultancy and has helped provide organizations and their people with the vision, creativity, commitment and skill necessary to bring about sustainable change, performance improvements and enhanced bottom line results.
Hundreds of thousands of people in over 80 countries worldwide have been touched by the methods Ralph Coverdale developed.
Ralph Coverdale was a former Jesuit novice, soldier, psychologist and management consultant. Ralph was one of the most striking and influential figures the UK has produced since the Second World War, yet to the public and even some of the business world, he was almost unknown.
After leaving the army in 1947 Ralph went to Oxford, where his supervisor was the renowned experimental psychologist, Bernard Babington-Smith. It was during his Oxford days that Ralph developed and refined his theories on how people think and work to get things done. He believed passionately that thinking and management were skills that could be developed, seriously challenging the orthodox view of the time regarding people having fixed skill sets, and locked IQs. Ralph and Bernard worked together for many years after the formation of the Coverdale Organization and developed Coverdale Learning, which is a highly developed form of learning through action - and has been subsequently described as action or inductive learning.
Ralph was a man of great insight and passionate beliefs, and was strongly driven by the view that co-operation to mutual benefit was infinitely more productive than conflict and competition. Ralph Coverdale died in 1975 aged 56. His peers recognized him as the man who 'invented' coaching and was a pathfinder in the field of inductive and experiential learning.
For over 45 years Coverdale has continuously updated and enhanced the approach based on latest empirical research.
