Dr. Niels Agger-Gupta is a former organizational consultant, evaluator and researcher specializing in helping graduate students do extraordinary change work in their worlds. Agger-Gupta is a specialist in organizational and community leadership and change, organizational re-design, leadership decision-making, program design and evaluation and healthcare change, including cultural and linguistic competency, and staff engagement and empowerment. He uses action research, appreciative inquiry, phenomenography and large group methods, including world café and interview matrix. He has supervised more than 50 graduate projects, theses and dissertations in a broad range of areas with many using the generative lens of appreciative inquiry.
Experience
Agger-Gupta is program head for the Graduate Certificate in Leadership and thesis coordinator for the School of Leadership Studies. He teaches in the Master of Arts in Leadership program, and co-developed the Graduate Certificate in Organization Design and Development. He has been a member of the Royal Roads Research Ethics Board since 2008. He joined Royal Roads in 2004 as an associate faculty member in the former Knowledge Management program, was appointed adjunct faculty in 2005 and began supervising capstone projects and theses in 2005. He became a core faculty member in 2007 and associate professor in 2012 and was program head of the Master of Arts in Leadership program between 2010 and 2013.
Prior to Royal Roads, Agger-Gupta was an organizational consultant and taught organizational behavior at University of Phoenix. As a scholar-practitioner with Fielding’s Institute on Social Innovation (2002 to 2007), he provided consulting services for Santa Barbara and Los Angeles County government agencies and non-profits on strategic planning, organizational vision, values re-alignment, evaluation, organizational improvement and cultural and linguistic competency in health care, typically using an appreciative inquiry framework. He was executive director of the California Healthcare Interpreters Association (2000/2002) and provided consulting for the Calgary Health Region in Alberta, establishing regional interpreter services (1997/2000), following a career as a consultant with the Alberta Multiculturalism Commission from 1987 to 1998.
Education
2001
PhD in Human and Organizational Systems
Fielding Graduate University
1999
Master of Arts in Organization Development
Fielding Graduate University
1985
Bachelor of Education
University of Calgary
1978
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a minor in Theatre Arts
University of Saskatchewan
