JON THORNE
During his 5 years playing sports at Leeds Beckett University (Carnegie campus), Jon discovered that he was a little short in one or two of all the athletic abilities to make a top world class athlete. Not much, but enough to mean he would need a lot of luck, in terms of training and no injuries to make it. Jon also discovered that his best attribute is to read a game situation and think on his feet to find ways to turn an adverse situation to an advantage. This meant his best chance of being an international athlete was to play sports where his ability to read the game and think on his feet gave him the biggest advantage. But when he left Leeds he bumped into coaches who would drop him from the team as soon as he didn't follow instructions to the letter. He was disciplined for thinking on his feet. Especially when it worked.
Meanwhile, in Jon’s working life, he was discovering that employers valued his ability to think on his feet more than his technical qualifications. Jon developed a career turning around struggling multi-million pound projects doing something that had never been done before. Jon has never had a job that was being done by a predecessor. He is always the first. During this time the type of work Jon did, became known as agile project management.
When Jon’s children were being harmed by following the educational pathway, Jon gave up his career to home educate. Jon based his children's education on learning in an agile way. Not learning by following a mapped out curriculum, but learning when the route forward is unclear. During this time Jon setup and grew St Albans Lions basketball club to over 300 players and coached at Kardale Netball club. He learnt how to combine his agile project management skills with his sports skills to coach agile thinking in sports. He became an agile coach in sports.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonthorne/
