We work out what is actually wrong before anyone designs the fix.
Engagements follow the same three movements whatever the situation. The proportions change: some companies need most of the work in diagnosis, others already know the problem precisely and need the delivery to survive contact with the organisation.
Diagnose
Understand what is causing the problem, rather than what is presenting as it. Executive interviews, a review of how work and decisions actually move, root-cause analysis. Produces a named constraint, its cost, a set of priorities and a recommended intervention.
Design
Define what changes. Depending on the constraint that is an operating model, a decision architecture, a growth system, a transformation plan or a roadmap. It always includes the expertise the work will require and the measures that will show whether it worked.
Deliver
Assemble and lead the work. We stay accountable for the quality of the intervention and its delivery throughout, whoever is doing the work.
That is the shape of an engagement.
The scope, the fee and the exit criteria come out of the diagnosis, and you see them before you commit.
Bring us the problem →From Hero to Architect.
Inside delivery runs the method the firm was built on: diagnose, prioritise, plan, implement, adopt. The last stage is the one most work skips. A framework counts when it is still running long after the engagement ends, living in how the team works rather than in a document nobody opens.
The people on an engagement depend on the problem.
Sometimes that is our founder leading the work directly. Sometimes a senior specialist is better suited to a functional area, and we bring one in and integrate them. Depending on what the situation needs, delivery takes the shape of an embedded operator, fractional leadership of a function, programme leadership across several, or advisory alongside a team doing the work themselves.
These are ways of delivering, not products to choose between. What an engagement needs is an output of the diagnosis.
How expertise is selected: the expert network. One delivery shape in detail: fractional COO.
Every engagement is scoped to the problem.
What an engagement costs depends on what the diagnosis finds: the problem, the expertise required and the level of implementation. We set that out in a written proposal, together with what we own and what stays yours, before anything starts.
Start with the situation in what we solve, or go straight to it. Tell us what’s stuck →