About Us

Cutting Edge Coaching & Consulting

We don't hire post-grad MBAs to rebrand PowerPoint presentations so you can hear what you've already told us repeated back to you. We bring coaches and consultants with backgrounds in industry and who have a passion for organizational science and performance improvement (not framework certifications) to help you do the hard things (not pretend to do them for you).

We are not for everyone, we are not trying to be. We are here for those organizations who actually want to do great work, especially when it is hard.

What's In A name?

Red Queen Consulting comes from two important places. The first is "The Red Queen Hypothesis" from Leigh Van Valen, proposed as a tangent of his Law of Extinction. Perhaps over-simplistically, the Red Queen Hypothesis states that there is a constant "arms race" between co-evolving species as they compete within ecosystems. This results in those species "running as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place" (to paraphrase Lewis Carroll).

The second reference is a corollary of Van Valen's Law of Extinction, known as Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (also known as the First Law of Cybernetics). Ashby's Law states "When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial) the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system." This reflects Van Valen's finding that co-evolving species must continue to evolve to compete, or the result will be extinction (and, in some cases, the collapse and extinction of the entire ecosystem - a complex system's view of the network effects of extinction events).