Bio
Les Winton has been a Social Researcher, Insighter and Strategic Consultant for many years, specialising in research, insights, strategies, engagement and outcomes.
His search for insights has blossomed over the past 4¾ decades through his activities as a social and market researcher, an evaluator of policies and programs, a master of stakeholder and community engagement, and a developer of marketing and communications strategies. He is an enthusiastic and genuinely inquisitive person.
On leaving Sydney Boys High School in the early 1960s, he spent some time with a Swedish steel company in Australia, before being called up for National Service, serving in Australia and South Vietnam in 1967/68. On return to Australia, he grew his hair very long and wandered off to university where he took part in a number of protest marches and obtained a Bachelors Degree in the social sciences, following this up some years later with a Master of Arts in Marketing Communication.
To stave off starvation while completing his first degree, he took a casual job coding questionnaires at Australian Nationwide Opinion Polls (later ANOP Research Services) for their very first opinion poll in 1971, subsequently embarking on a career in social and market research with the company which eventually led to a shareholding and executive directorship.
Wishing to change direction again, he started his own consultancy Artcraft Research (AR) in 1981 to encompass research-based program evaluation and community and stakeholder consultation and engagement to complement his market and social research activities, In 1998, he established the CANBERRA OMNIBUS SURVEY, which has grown to be a highly successful monthly vehicle for short surveys (some monitoring studies have been repeated over several decades) for various directorates and agencies of the ACT Government, along with all three utilities, many NGOs and NFPs. and a few selected commercial clients.
In 2006 Les added Winton Sustainable Research Strategies (WSRS) to reflect his growing interest in all things sustainable, and subsequently Amazing Insights (AI) in 2012 and Axis Strategic Consulting in 2018 to more or less encapsulate his career so far.
These days Les (and his consultancy generally) still revels in actively pursuing research and evaluation projects, while also enjoying the challenges of community consultation and engagement always with the yearning to reveal fresh insights and new and better solutions to perennial challenges.
Les is a long-standing Member of the Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS), through which he has Qualified Professional Researcher status (QPR); a long-standing Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute (FAMI) through which he has Certified Practising Marketer status (CPM); a Fellow of the institute of Managers and Leaders (FIML); a Member of the Australian Evaluation Society and of the International Association for Public Participation.
