Dr. Freeman has emerged as one of the leading consultants in multiple fields (risk management, management process optimization, regulatory compliance, trade, international development, and entrepreneurship). She is widely known and highly regarded as a critical thinker who can be relied on to deeply mine gems of wisdom that are revealed by seeing problems through the unique prism of focusing on the connective tissue between functions, systems, policies and procedures. The relative strength and bonding of such connective tissue holds the key for identifying and solving most problems within organizations.

Dr. Freeman’s life’s work as an international consultant working in over 120 countries for leading institutions has revealed that organizations face barriers in accomplishing their goals because of weak and underdeveloped connections between things (systems, policies, procedures and people) within their organizations. Evaluating the strength and bonding capacities of such tissue is not a job for Artificial Intelligence (AI); it’s a job for humans that can apply REAL lived experience to understanding the phenomenon. Such a Consultant must know where to look and how to conduct the investigations. ChatGPT cannot answer such questions, though it can be helpful in more routine and common matters; it takes a human being with the level of experience of Dr. Freeman who has the right compass and Geiger counter and can effectively leverage the tools of qualitative and quantitative inquiry.

While the consultant assignments undertaken by Dr. Freeman have varied greatly, the common thread between them is the request of clients to help optimize what they are doing and how they are doing it. With a laser focus on the goal of optimization, Dr. Freeman always delivers the best possible result for the client subject to prevailing constraints.

Having been lauded over decades for her ability to reveal novel insights into problems and their solutions, clients have said, for instance:

“Sharon, the work you have done has changed the trajectory of our organization”; “Sharon, after hiring some of the largest, most prestigious consulting firms in America, we never had a better consultant than you”; “Sharon, we have implemented your recommendations and they have moved our company closer to operating optimality across many support functions; “Sharon, the manuals you have written to explain and codify our policies and procedures are among the most valuable assets of our company.”

Such commendations have their origin in the uniqueness of Dr. Freeman’s approaches that factor in her mantra, which is: “any single management approach can be designed brilliantly unto itself, but it cannot shine unless the entire ecosystem in it exists is optimized.” As an “ecosystem analyst”, Dr. Freeman identifies all key pillars and sub pillars and the spaces “in between” them to identify opportunities for optimization.

Throughout her career, Dr. Freeman has observed that a contributing factor to the problem that exists within most organizations is that no one’s job description puts them in charge of other people’s functions. No one is in charge of the “in-betweens”. While the heads of organizations and their boards are ostensibly in charge, in practice, they can only “see” what is given to them to oversee.

Dr. Freeman adds value by “seeing” where gaps and problems are because she is looking for them in the right places among the “in-betweens”. There is a reason she can do this. It is because she systematically asks the 7W(s)+H (what, why, who, where, when, whether, which, & how) questions whose answers reveal the Rosetta Stone for solving problems.