John is a partner in Beckford Consulting, Visiting Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London and in the Centre for Information Management at Loughborough University. He is Non-Executive Chair of RISE Mutual CIC (Domestic Abuse Prevention) and a Non-Executive Director of the social enterprises Fusion21 Limited (Procurement) and CoreHaus Ltd. (ModularConstruction. John is President of the Cybernetics Society.

John holds a PhD in Management Systems and Sciences (Hull), is a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society, a Member of The Institute of Management Services, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

John is author of: ‘Quality’ (Routledge, 4^th Edition, 2017), ‘The Intelligent Organisation’ (Routledge, 2^nd Edition, 2020), ‘The Intelligent Nation’ (Routledge, 2021) and numerous papers and articles.

Through Beckford Consulting, John has been applying his knowledge of stakeholder engaged, information led adaptive organisation design, learning and transformation for over thirty years. His international experience extending across national and local government, infrastructure systems, energy, water, social housing, paper making, waterways, railways, ferries, banking, financial services, logistics, food production, steel production, chemicals, pharmaceutical research, property management, social care, healthcare and tertiary education. John frequently acts as mentor to key individuals.

Since 2009 John has been at the heart of the application of systems ideas to the challenge of national infrastructure developing approaches to systemic modelling of national infrastructure systems. John helped to develop the model for the UKCRIC research collaboration and the systemic adaptation element of the TRaCCA (Tomorrows Railway and Climate Change Adaptation) research commissioned by RSSB and Network Rail. He developed and applied the systems model of GB Railway and challenged the basis of performance measurement. He has undertaken a number of significant research projects considering the resilience and viability of the UK National Infrastructure on behalf of both government departments and infrastructure owners drawing on his expertise in applied systems thinking and has driven substantial innovation, change and research projects internationally with a wide variety of organisations in government, private and public sectors.