Dr. Cyrus Patten, EdD, LICSW

I've spent 24 years on one question.

What does it actually take for a person, or an organization, to change? I've worked that question from a lot of different seats. As a therapist and a clinical supervisor. As a professor of social work and of business. As a founder who has built and run companies. And as a consultant to the health, policy, and government institutions trying to change something that matters.

422%

average return on investment for clients

$28M

in organizational value generated

$32M

in workforce savings from reduced turnover

1,400+

job-years of healthcare employment preserved

Through Waypoint Advisory Group, my policy and systems-change firm.

What I do

Four seats. Same work.

Systems & change leadership

Waypoint Advisory Group

When a hospital or an agency or a state department needs to change something hard and expensive, they call me. Turnarounds. Restructurings. The research to figure out what's really going on, and the slow people-work that makes any of it stick. Twenty years of it.

vermontpolicy.com →

Clinical practice

Therapy & supervision

I'm a licensed clinical social worker, 24 years in, and I supervised other therapists for more than a decade. These days my clinical work is with men, one on one and in retreats, doing the work most of us were never taught to do.

The therapy practice →

Teaching & scholarship

Faculty & doctorate

I've taught social work at the University of Vermont and business at Champlain College, and I have a doctorate in leadership. Along the way I've trained hundreds of clinicians and leaders coming up behind me.

Building & leading

Founder, not just advisor

I've started and run two group practices and a handful of other ventures. I've made payroll, and I've laid awake over it. So when I sit across from someone in the hard seat, it isn't theory. I've been in the seat.

The short version

None of this was a plan.

I started as a therapist, learning the slow way how a person actually changes. Why we defend the exact thing that's hurting us. What it takes to finally put it down. Then I kept following that same question out of the room and into the organizations where it plays out on a much bigger scale.

That's what Waypoint is. When an organization is trying to change something that matters, the spreadsheet is almost never the problem.

Plans without trust don't get implemented. Processes without people don't stick. Data without relationships doesn't move anyone.

My job is the human part, the part that makes the rest hold. And I do it as someone who has actually run things, not just advised on them. I've built organizations, made payroll, sat in the seat that doesn't sleep, and taught the next round of clinicians and leaders to do the same. A man in my office or an institution in transition, the test is the same. Are people better off when I leave than they were when I showed up?