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, dialogue, engagement, empowerment, and Reconciliation and decolonization.
He uses action-oriented inquiry, appreciative inquiry, and large and small group methods, including world café and interview matrix. He has supervised more than 100 graduate projects, theses and dissertations in a broad range of areas with many using the generative lens of appreciative inquiry.
Experience
Agger-Gupta is acting-school director for the School of Leadership Studies (since 2022), and is the interim-program head for the MA in Leadership – Health Specialization. He teaches in the Master of Arts in Leadership program, and also co-developed the Graduate Certificate in Organization Design and Development.
Niels has been a member of the Royal Roads Research Ethics Board since 2008. He joined RRU in 2004 as an associate faculty nember in the former Knowledge Management Program. In 2005, Niels was appointed adjunct faculty and began supervising capstone projects and theses. He became a core faculty member in 2007 and associate professor in 2011 and was program head of the Master of Arts in Leadership program (2010-2013), and the Graduate Certificate in Leadership (2016-2019).
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 (1987-1999).
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
