Karl Perry
Karl Perry is a Leadership Coach, Team Facilitator and Trainer, Organisational Performance Consultant and a HPtE Practitioner. Not a theorist who occasionally consults, not an academic who studies conflict from a distance — a practitioner who works in the space where employment relations are lived, where the tension between what organisations need commercially and what the people inside them need humanly is felt every day.
Karl has coached hundreds of leaders at every level — from front-line team leads to senior executives — helping them surface the assumptions driving their decisions and develop the thinking capability of those they lead. It was in that coaching work that the Perry Approach took shape: leaders kept bringing conflicts they saw as binary choices, and the Evaporating Cloud became the tool that showed them a third option existed. The methodology in this book was forged in those conversations as much as in formal facilitation sessions.
Karl is an Accredited Human Synergistics International Practitioner, certified across the full suite of culture and leadership diagnostics — including the Life Styles Inventory™ (LSI), Group Styles Inventory™ (GSI), Organisational Culture Inventory® (OCI), Organisational Effectiveness Inventory™ (OEI), Leadership/Impact®, and Management Effectiveness Profiling System™ (MEPS). He also holds a Black Belt in Thinking from the Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes.
His work sits at the intersection of Theory of Constraints, organisational psychology, and employment relations. The methodology he's developed — High Performance through Engagement (HPtE Strategy®) and The 3Cs Model (Commercial Responsibility, Customer Value, Culture) — has been shaped through years of practice across aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, and public sectors. It's been tested in rooms where unions and management genuinely disagreed, where the stakes were real, and where getting it wrong had consequences.
The Perry Approach to the Evaporating Cloud Method emerged from that practice. It didn't start as a book concept or a training programme — it started as a way of working with conflict that actually worked. The ten-phase process documented in these pages has been refined through hundreds of live Evaporating Clouds, each one teaching something new about how conflicts hold together and how they can be dissolved.
As well as writing this book, Karl has developed Rising Above the Clouds - The Course, built customised AI agents like RIC (the Rapid Improvement Coach) to support practitioners through the method, and established The Conflict Club — a weekly live practice community where practitioners work real Evaporating Clouds together.
His mission: to help people turn conflict into their competitive advantage
The Practitioner's Perspective
Karl's approach to conflict is fundamentally different from conventional dispute resolution. Where most approaches seek compromise — splitting the difference between competing interests — the Perry Approach seeks synergy: finding configurations where all the legitimate needs are honoured simultaneously. It's what happens when you surface the assumptions that make a conflict appear unresolvable and discover that many of them don't hold.
This conviction — that conflict contains intelligence, that tensions are growth engines rather than problems to minimise — runs through everything Karl does. It shapes how he facilitates, how he trains, and how he's written this book.
The Course and The Conflict Club
The book teaches the method. Rising Above the Clouds - The Course is where it becomes a practice.
The course wraps this book with short video introductions, downloadable templates, chapter quizzes, and practical assignments — structured to keep you moving and give you feedback along the way. It also includes RIC (the Rapid Improvement Coach), a customised AI agent Karl built specifically for this methodology. RIC guides you through the Perry Approach one step at a time, coaching you through each phase with your own conflict — so you're never working alone.
And then there's The Conflict Club — the weekly live practice sessions where it all comes together. Every week, course subscribers bring real conflicts from their work and lives and build Evaporating Clouds together, live, in real time, with Karl and fellow practitioners. You learn as much from watching other people's clouds being built as you do from working your own. That's where the method moves from understanding to capability.
The course is a subscription with no fixed term. You access everything — the guided learning, RIC, and the weekly Conflict Club sessions — for as long as you need.
Ready to practise? Subscribe for as long as you need.
Connect with Karl
- LinkedIn: Karl Perry
- The Course: Rising Above the Clouds - The Course
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