Charles Kiefer is an organizational consultant and co-founder of innovation-associates, the consulting firm he established with robert-fritz in the mid-1970s, with peter-senge among the early principals. Innovation Associates was the first firm to systematically apply what would become the learning-organization concepts to corporate clients, and Kiefer played a central role in developing and delivering that consulting work through the 1980s. His background in organizational development and his partnership with robert-fritz in applying structural dynamics to organizational settings gave Innovation Associates its distinctive synthesis of vision-based leadership and structural thinking.
Kiefer co-authored early published work with Senge on vision and leadership in organizations, including articles that appeared before fifth-discipline-1990 gave these ideas their canonical form. This pre-book publication record establishes Kiefer as one of the people who helped crystallize the shared-vision and personal-mastery concepts from consulting experience into articulable frameworks. The collaboration between Kiefer, Senge, and robert-fritz at Innovation Associates was a formative intellectual triangle: Fritz contributed structural dynamics and creative-tension, Senge contributed systems-thinking-fifth-discipline and the integration of the disciplines, and Kiefer contributed organizational development expertise and the capacity to translate these ideas for corporate audiences.
After Innovation Associates was acquired by Arthur D. Little in 1995, Kiefer continued developing his ideas about leadership and organizational effectiveness. He later co-authored "The Art of Possibility" with Benjamin Zander (attributing the concept to their shared work) and wrote about what he called "leader-as-creator" — the orientation toward bringing desired realities into existence rather than problem-solving from current realities. This creator orientation is directly continuous with the creative-tension and structural-tension concepts he developed with Fritz and Senge at Innovation Associates, extending them into a more explicitly philosophical account of the relationship between intention, structure, and action.