Convivial Ideas was founded in January 2021 by Frank Buechele. With more than 15 years experience in leadership roles, and having spent over a decade in team building and transformation, Frank is passionate about laying the foundations for successful teams.

Team success relies, more than anything else, on team members being aligned and working effectively with each other and with their stakeholders and customers. To achieve this we must recognise and celebrate diversity of the team and ensure that communication is effective. Technology can be an important amplifier of team performance.

Frank Buechele

Since 2012, Frank has been building and transforming teams, enabling them to become more effective and customer-focused. Although he has adopted a range of agile approaches, it was his study of Permaculture that initially led him to develop ways of working with teams that maximise every team member’s contribution. Frank has experimented with a range of approaches and media to create multidimensional workshops that are immersive, inclusive and engage a range of learning styles. He is a trained facilitator of the LEGO® Serious Play® method.

Prior to starting Convivial Ideas, Frank led the Digital Student and Teaching Services Stream at Flinders University. In this role he enabled a student-centric approach to technology delivery in partnership with key university stakeholders by using an agile approach. Previously he has worked at University of Adelaide in a similar Learning & Teaching related technical leadership role to transform the university’s online learning platform. He worked at RMIT University in Melbourne for 15 years in a range of technical and leadership roles.

Before joining universities Frank worked in several technology and education related start up businesses, building an intuition for developing flexible, reusable and adaptable solutions.

Dan Addington

Dan was Program Manager at Blake eLearning, the company that developed Reading Eggs and Mathseeds, and was responsible for the program strategy of global apps used by millions of children daily.

At the University of Adelaide, Dan’s teams were responsible for the learning and teaching applications that students interact with, as well as all of the public facing marketing sites. Prior to that, Dan worked as a Product Manager at Yahoo!7 developing the online strategy for Better Homes and Gardens, and managing relationships with Pacific Magazines, and Channel 7. In start-up land, Dan developed sales software which enabled companies to rapidly scale up their sales teams.

Dan is particularly interested in helping organisations work through change, as well as coaching individuals and teams through challenging situations.

Outside of his consulting work, Dan also runs a boutique horticulture business creating naturalistic bush gardens, and is an active member of Biodiversity Mclaren Vale, a not-for-profit focused on regenerating creek lines in the Mclaren Vale and Willunga Basin region.