Christopher Gilchrist has just joined North Highland as Vice President of Research and Intelligence, bringing with him a wealth of expertise in strategy, customer insights, and data-driven decision-making. In this role, he will lead the firm’s intellectual property strategy, driving innovation and actionable intelligence to help organizations navigate complex market dynamics.
Gilchrist joined North Highland after four years at Forrester Research, where he served as a principal advisor, guiding clients on market strategy, industry economics, and corporate governance. Prior to that, he spent six years at PwC as a director, advising on market risk, regulatory strategy, and economic performance. His expertise in strategic advisory and academic research has positioned him as a thought leader in workforce transformation and operational excellence.
Beyond his professional experience, Gilchrist holds a bachelor’s degree in science from the University of Oklahoma and a master’s degree in science from Columbia University, where he also holds a faculty appointment. His research explores the future of organizations and performance in the post-industrial era, contributing to academic initiatives at Brown University and the University of Vienna focused on the future of work.
North Highland, the leading change and transformation consultancy, specializes in helping businesses achieve lasting progress by integrating data-driven insights, workforce strategies, and operational transformation. Founded in 1992, the firm has built a reputation for putting people at the heart of every decision, ensuring that organizational change translates into sustainable performance and long-term value creation.
In an exclusive interview with Tekedia’s Samuel Nwite, Gilchrist reveals how he plans to enhance North Highland’s research capabilities, leveraging qualitative and quantitative methodologies to provide clients with actionable intelligence. He discusses his vision for the Research & Intelligence team, the role of cutting-edge insights in business transformation, and how organizations can thrive in an increasingly complex market landscape.
Tekedia: Was Joining North Highland an Easy Decision for You?
Absolutely. North Highland’s commitment to transforming the understanding of transformation through pragmatism aligns seamlessly with my research in post-industrial economic strategies and the future of organizational development. I was particularly drawn to North Highland’s emphasis on collective intelligence and interdisciplinary problem-solving, which I see as critical for organizations navigating today’s complex economic and technological landscape.
The opportunity to build a research and intelligence function that not only informs client strategies but also helps shape the firm’s intellectual capital made this an easy and compelling decision.
Tekedia: How do you plan to integrate your diverse experiences from PwC, Forrester, and Columbia University to shape North Highland’s research and intelligence strategy?
- Each of these experiences has uniquely shaped my approach to research and advisory work:
PwC: Consulting at scale taught me the importance of integrating financial, operational, and strategic considerations into every observation, consideration, and recommendation. It reinforced the need for risk-informed, economically viable solutions that balance short-term execution with long-term resilience. - Forrester: Providing a deep grounding in narratives like market foresight, technology evolution, and industry behavior. I aim to bring that same level of evidence-backed market-leading positions to North Highland, ensuring our clients are always a step ahead in market positioning and strategic execution.
- Columbia University: Exploring theoretical underpinnings of post-industrial work and organizational development, which will be crucial in framing North Highland’s perspective on the evolving nature of firms, industries, and economic systems.
By integrating these perspectives, our team will shape a forward-looking, interdisciplinary research function that anticipates emerging economic shifts, informs our consulting approaches, and enhances North Highland’s ability to lead clients through complexity with clarity.
Tekedia: What key lessons from your roles at Forrester and PwC will you apply at North Highland?
The biggest lesson is that better recipes outperform additional ingredients when it comes to performance. This reorientation places priority on developing, not just producing.
- From PwC, navigating complexity in highly regulated industries and translating economic and regulatory trends into strategic imperatives for clients. This means helping clients build financial elasticity, manage risk proactively, and adopt capital-efficient innovation strategies in uncertain environments.
- From Forrester, developing methodologies and approaches to identifying inflection points before they happen—whether in market dynamics, consumer behavior, or technology adoption for clients.
This means integrating foresight into decision-making and embracing operational interdisciplinarity as the key driver of resilience and adaptability.
Ultimately, our research and intelligence function is not just observing the future, but actively shaping it.
Tekedia: How will your academic research at Columbia University influence North Highland’s insights and solutions?
My academic work focuses on how organizations must evolve in the post-industrial era—shifting from rigid hierarchies to adaptive, intelligence-driven systems. This aligns with North Highland’s focus on durable transformation, and I plan to apply these insights in three ways:
- Developing new models of organizational development based on how firms balance capital allocation, technology investment, and workforce transformation to increase resilience.
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Guiding clients in operational interdisciplinarity, ensuring they break down traditional socio-technical systems to create high-performing parity between existing and future ways of working.
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Embedding post-industrial principles into our consulting frameworks, helping organizations transition to the future of work by reorienting to a new understanding of transformation.
Our goal is to move beyond legacy transformation models and equip clients with the ability to self-evolve in response to economic, technological, and societal changes.
Tekedia: How will your leadership in research and intelligence support North Highland’s people-centric ethos?
At its core, our research is about understanding the gradual progression of people, behaviors, and decision-making patterns as environments become more complex in pursuit of greater performance. Our research and intelligence function will support this philosophy by:
- Ensuring insights are the product of better questions surrounding the productive tension between existing and new ways of working.
- Embedding interdisciplinary methods within our consulting practices to emerge the appropriate balance between how our clients form their futures and the capabilities that inform it.
- Enabling a new mental model that transforms the understanding of transformation to reset the invest thesis to one of organizational development instead of organizational production.
Our goal is not to just inform strategy—it is to empower the execution of strategy more effectively by redefining the frontiers of success at every level.
Tekedia: What does enhancing North Highland’s collective intelligence capabilities mean in practice?
It means transforming how the firm generates, synthesizes, and applies knowledge—not just internally, but across client engagements. Three priorities will define this effort:
- Developing a dynamic research value-network that integrates independent and objective market-leading perspectives into North Highland’s consulting toolkit, representing a broader pool of knowledge, expertise, and intangible assets that can be converted to client value seamlessly.
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Leveraging intellectual capital as a means to collectively interpret better solutions and delivery without the need for large divestment and reinvest cycles that tend to cause notable lags in value generation as human, structural, and relational capital formation co-evolve with the market.
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Cultivating a culture of knowledge-sharing and co-creation, embedding sense and response mechanisms that increase our effective use of market experience to reinforce future solutions and delivery – the ability to mature our institutional memory.
Ultimately, it’s about making North Highland smarter, faster, and more adaptive in delivering value to clients.
Tekedia: How do you plan to foster innovation within North Highland’s research methodologies?
Innovation is an institutional capability, not an incremental initiative. It is the intent of research to increase our capacity to innovate while maintaining sound management practices.
- Bringing academic rigor to industry solutions by deconstructing the core factors of organization development and reconstructing those factors in novel ways.
- Embracing learning and unlearning as a form of delivery by harnessing creative destruction in a single, competent motion.
- Embedding interdisciplinary practices to allow more holistic, durable value to emerge from the process of recontextualization instead of reinforcing existing context.
As the capacity to innovate expands and becomes more effective, the residual effect from outcomes – not the outcomes themselves – becomes the main driver of sustained value creation.
Tekedia: What are the biggest regulatory challenges businesses face, and how can North Highland help?
Regulatory uncertainty is one of the biggest sources of business risk today, particularly around:
- Globalization versus protectionist regulatory regimes
- Knowledge infrastructures and the protection of intangible assets
- Sovereignty and governance of digital environments and virtual borders
We are proactively mapping regulatory and geopolitical shifts to strategic risk models, ensuring clients aren’t just compliant but positioned for advantage in volatile regulatory landscapes.
Tekedia: What emerging trends will most impact organizational development in the coming years?
- The rise of organizational interdisciplinarity—rigid functions will give way to dynamic, cross-disciplinary systems that flip operational intent from current work driving intended organizational competencies to current organizational competencies driving intended work.
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The transition from industrial to post-industrial models, requires new operating structures, arrangements, and processes that orient capabilities to develop labor and capital productivity rather than to orient current labor and capital productivity to produce.
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The humanization of industry/business—organizations are and will continue to organize differently, transforming from processors of information to processors of knowledge as technology advancement continues to dislocate humans from current tasks and displace the skills from the future of work.
We are leading the market with this position as the barriers to success are no longer procedural, but psychological – the organization’s ability to acknowledge, assimilate, and apply new knowledge at a requisite pace.
Tekedia: How will you leverage North Highland’s global network, Cordence Worldwide?
- By tapping into Cordence’s regional expertise and global perspective, we can:
Build a decentralized intelligence model that captures communities of practice to reinforce our goal of bolstering an expertise-based value-network for our clients. - Develop globally informed but locally relevant knowledge assets for clients navigating the ever-growing scope of complexities by utilizing knowledge transfer as a form of delivery at scale.
- Leverage cross-firm collaboration to bring the full breadth and depth of the firm and its value network to each client without pause.
Tekedia: What is your ultimate goal as Head of Research and Intelligence?
To sustain North Highland as the preeminent consulting firm for transformation.
Success will be measured by:
- Extending our expert value-network access of top-tier, global thought leadership to every engagement.
- Expanding our intellectual capital to differentiate service offerings that only we can deliver in the market.
- Formalizing our intellectual property to sustain competitive advantage and market independence.
Overall, we aim to define the future of value-based consulting through our ability to emerge service value for our clients at the intersections of existing and expanding models for adaptive delivery. To the market, we are not a house of brands, where each engagement requires us to have a different identity. Rather, we are a branded house that is willing and able to co-evolve with our clients – realizing their vision at a requisite pace.
