Learning that shapes work to enhance lives

Alento helps organisations find better ways to work and learn together. We enable people to have clearer thinking about how work is organised, and stronger skills for relating to people — so the quality of work and the quality of working life improve.

We design and facilitate development initiatives, management skills workshops, and tailored interventions for teams. We develop people’s ability to make sense of organisations and interdependencies and improve working relationships.

What Alento offers

Alento helps clients to build core capabilities such as sense making, problem solving, negotiation, decision making, collaboration and resilience. These abilities strengthen clarity of purpose, alignment of priorities and help clients navigate the opportunities and challenges they face. Broadening perspectives, by looking at the whole not just the parts, helps clients to see and address the structures and dynamics that shape and influence the effectiveness of their organisations, relationships and themselves.

We help clients consider and improve not only how they work together, but how they learn together, a fundamental capability for adapting and thriving. Equipped with enhanced ways of thinking, they are better able to weigh the impact and implications of actions and decisions over time, across all their significant relationships.

Leadership development

Companies are made of relationships between resources, people, knowledge, technology and wider stakeholders, and exist to create a benefit or service for others. Central to leadership is understanding these relationships, and how to sustain and develop them in a dynamic setting.

Our leadership development work supports clients to:

  • explore and develop personal agency and influence
  • appreciate how relationships shape opportunities and create value
  • learn how to coordinate work and decisions
  • gain insight into how learning and change happen

Organisational learning

There are three distinct but related capabilities:

  • Specialist and technical capabilities relating to the product or service they provide
  • Leadership and management capabilities which enable and sustain the company to provide what it does (includes central services e.g. Finance, HR and IT)
  • Adaptive capabilities relating to the ability of the organisation to grow and change

We help clients review how well they develop these capabilities, learn from experience and continue to respond to their dynamic environment. We also offer design and recommendations for developing their learning architecture and practices.

How Alento works

Alento's approach is rooted in an appreciation of the living, natural environment, which offers rich insights into how to grow and adapt within dynamic, highly interdependent settings.

Alento creates conditions for learning, rather than offering ready made solutions - where people can think together, notice more, and act with greater alignment and agency.

We draw on learning methodologies, leadership theory and the specific narratives of each client’s context. We work collaboratively with clients, building on their own insight and experience. We help them to enquire and reflect on their context, the season they are in, the horizons ahead, about what is going on in their relationships, and in themselves — and to move forward with greater clarity, confidence and care.

In complex conditions, progress rarely comes from certainty but from:

  • clarity about what is influencing the situation
  • courage to exercise agency and negotiate
  • openness to difference and newness
  • attentiveness to timing, pace, and relationship

Why this matters

Many of today's challenges stem from the intricate dynamics of multiple social and technical systems in which we are immersed. Companies can feel under pressure to continually react and accelerate, but more speed and change do not necessarily create better results, and can lead to low productivity, burnout and demoralised, disengaged workforces. These have become all too common.

It’s natural to be shaped by the mindsets and behaviours of the places we work in, and doing things differently can feel incredibly difficult. Learning and change require clarity about what and how to learn, and when and why to change. It involves contextual insight, knowing when to consolidate and when to grow, being clear on priorities, opportunities and constraints, and having the capacity and commitment to learn and adapt.

As the integration of AI amplifies potential and risks in our ways of working, we need to be able to exercise judgement, collaborate and redesign work wisely. At Alento, we focus on the human capabilities that technology cannot replace: responsibility, relationship-building, ambition and the ability to learn together. Rather than competing with technology, or reshaping ourselves around it, we believe the priority is to develop people in the ways that matter most — in service of each other, our organisations, and the world we share.

About Alento

Alento is a learning and facilitation practice that works with clients to strengthen and evolve their capabilities. Our work is led by experienced practitioners in organisational learning, leadership and work design. Where helpful, we collaborate with trusted partners to bring complementary perspectives and capabilities.

Our work supports clients to be:

There are known paths of capability development, and unknown journeys of exploration and change. Alento can help with both: designing and facilitating learning processes that help people become more capable, considerate and hopeful — even in uncertain times.

About Sarah O'Connor

Sarah is an organisational learning specialist. She set up Alento to focus on helping companies learn and grow, and works with a small group of trusted associates depending on the project.

Sarah began in international development and entrepreneurship education, working with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and philanthropic networks. She moved to the Balkans to support enterprise and employment projects in a post-communist, post-conflict environment and worked with a university to establish an accredited business course — a rich experience in adapting learning programmes to a different context, mindset and audience.

Returning to the UK, she worked at Cranfield School of Management in Customised Executive Development, designing and delivering leadership and management programmes for corporate clients across diverse sectors and geographies — during which time Cranfield ranked in the Financial Times’ global top 10 providers for Customised Executive Development.

She then moved into Organisation Development and Design with a private consultancy, working predominantly in healthcare, government and the charitable sector, where there was often a need for better convergence and inter-organisational dynamics. She has also worked in mergers and acquisitions and as a non-executive director.

Setting up Alento, she now specialises in learning and work design, providing learning services that enhance people’s thinking and relational capabilities to create quality work and quality of working life.

‘Sarah is dedicated, self-motivated, methodical, and very capable. Results driven, experienced and efficient team player.
Sarah will find a way to weather any storm with a smile.’
Head of Training and Development, Nestlé

‘Sarah has an innate ability to identify client needs, is comfortable working at the most senior levels in client organisations and is exceptionally attentive to detail.
She presented with gravitas and confidence and most importantly listened to clients.’
Head of Customised Executive Development, Cranfield School of Management

Get in touch

If you’re curious about working together — or simply want to explore whether a conversation might be useful — click below.

Make Sense. Build rapport. Shape work to enhance lives.