Corporates
The operating model
your strategy assumes.
For executive teams rebuilding how their organisation runs. The strategy is agreed. The machinery underneath it was built for a slower world.
A clear strategy meets an older operating model.
Coordination multiplies, velocity declines. Most operating models were designed for conditions that no longer hold. Fixed roles, sequential approvals and annual planning cycles were rational once. They now sit between the decision and the market, and the cost shows up as delay that nobody owns and no report captures.
We fix that. A diagnostic of what your organisation needs to deliver the strategy it has already committed to, then counsel to build it. Diagnosis before design, always.
What we usually find
Five blockages, five different owners.
Each of these sits with a different owner, which is why they are rarely seen as one system. The diagnostic looks at all five together.
- Filtered information. What people know does not reach the decision that needs it, so choices rest on a partial picture.
- Decision lag. The external clock runs faster than the approval chain, and the gap is closed by a few people working around the system.
- Inherited structure. Roles, reporting lines and decision rights were set once and never rebuilt as the business changed shape.
- Tools adopted without intent. Each problem attracts a platform before anyone decides what it replaces, who it serves and what it must never do, so the stack adds surface instead of removing friction.
- Capability drift. Tasks are automated faster than judgment is built, and the loss surfaces two years later as a hiring problem.
Frame
Four domains carry the capacity to move.
Liquidity is the capacity to move resource, attention and authority toward the problem rather than hold them in place. Rigidity in any one of these four shows up as delay in the other three. Every mandate starts from a diagnostic against them, answering one question: what does this organisation need in order to deliver what it has already promised?
Capability
Skills, talent and how people are deployed.
From the fixed job → to the unit of skill
Workflow
Process, coordination and how work flows.
From presence as performance → to outcomes as currency
Information
Data, sensing and how the organisation knows.
From quarterly reporting → to continuous sensing
Decision
Governance, authority and how choices get made.
From hierarchical approval → to liquid governance
Who this serves
Three audiences inside the same mandate.
Executive teams
An independent answer to why a strategy underdelivers, from counsel with no delivery contract to protect.
The units that deliver
A diagnostic of what each function needs to deliver its part, and counsel to build exactly that.
The wider organisation
Shared language, tools and practice that outlast the engagement, taught to your own people.
How an engagement runs
One clear cycle. Five steps, taken together.
- 1ListenMutual fit, framing the question, agreeing the boundary of the mandate.
- 2DiagnoseEvidence from three altitudes: senior, middle and frontline.
- 3DesignPriorities and interventions, agreed with those who will carry them.
- 4AccompanyCounsel to leadership while implementation runs.
- 5Hand overCapability transferred, mandate closed as designed.
Every mandate is built to end. What stays is capability, not dependence.
Four ways to start
Pick the door that fits the decision you face.
- Commission a diagnostic. Six to eight weeks on one organisation, function or portfolio, with a clear written result.
- Retain standing counsel. Regular access to an outside adviser for the executive team, rather than a single piece of work with a start and an end.
- Run the programme. The two day executive programme, or a learning journey designed to your strategy.
- Start with one leader. Coaching for an executive carrying a change personally, as a way into the wider question.
Four commitments
What you can hold us to.
Diagnosis first
Nothing is designed, sold or delivered before a diagnosis both sides trust. The finding is commissioned on its own, so it is never shaped by what follows it.
Candour
We say what we see, including to the person who pays.
Evidence
Conclusions built from three altitudes of the organisation, never from the board pack alone.
Transfer
Skills and tools stay with your people, and there is an agreed end date from the start.
We charge no success fees. Implementation is scoped separately, after a diagnosis, and never bundled into it.
One conversation to agree scope. One letter to confirm it.
Most mandates begin with a diagnostic. First interviews usually start within three weeks of the scope letter.
Start a conversation