Leading Where Your Attention Belongs
Building a distinctive organisation has no finish line. You are always working to improve it, to stay ahead of your competition and to take your clients where they want to go. Those are the problems worth your attention, and you would not want it any other way.
Organisations are messy, and so other difficulties always arise. These are the ones that pull you away from the work that matters most to you.
What sits in front of you most days looks like dozens of separate problems, each one urgent, each one unrelated to the next. There are fewer than there appear to be, because they are connected. Once the connections are clear, what felt like many resolves into a smaller number, each one easier to see and to understand.
See them clearly and your focus returns to where it does the most good, building the organisation only you can build.
What Connects The Problems You Are Seeing
Each problem in your organisation tends to start and end with people, and most problems are created unintentionally. AI solves an efficiency problem in one area and creates a people problem in another. Generic work is delivered without someone senior to catch it. Someone's attention is stretched so they make a decision with incomplete information. These issues begin in one place and the consequences arrive in another.
In many organisations, this happens because your people's expertise is self-contained within a function. But your organisation needs to operate across those functions. The person experiencing the consequence and the person closest to the problem are often in different parts of your organisation, with no reason to connect what they are each seeing.
The listening and the diagnostic read across those boundaries. Finding where each problem sits, how far its consequences have reached and which ones to solve first.
How I Work
I do this work because I like being inside a problem. The part that is often missed, working out why something is happening the way it does, is the part I am drawn to.
Every problem I work on teaches me something the next one needs, so I have never wanted to stop.
I have learned this from being inside large organisations. I held global and regional client and people leadership roles at WPP Media, Ogilvy, R/GA and Dentsu, and worked with senior marketing leadership for many global brands: Coca-Cola, Google, Uber, Kellanova and IKEA.
This experience is where I learned to see how organisations work both vertically and horizontally, and to listen for the issues that show up repeatedly in different places.
Listening well takes composure. What I bring is an ability to read the emotional temperature of your people. Taking the heat out of a situation and putting urgency back where things need to move forward.
This is the centre of how I work. Most of the answers you need are already inside your organisation, in what your people know and half-say and in what you already sense. The work I do is to listen closely enough to draw out what is already there and give it a form you can act on.
Where The Work Begins
Because the answer is drawn from your organisation, the design and solution we develop is built around you. What the work involves depends on what the listening and diagnostic find.
Through the work we do together, you gain a clear understanding of where each problem sits in your organisation, what they are connected to, and the order in which to address them.
The next step is an exploratory conversation. You talk through where you want your organisation to go and what is getting in the way. You share what matters most to you right now, and I share how I would approach solving your problems.
We both leave the conversation with a sense of how the work would feel and where it would begin.
The Intelligence & Culture Diagnostic
Your organisation's intelligence is everything it knows about itself, its knowledge layer: what your business model depends on, what your clients and consumers need and how all of this is applied to the work you produce. Your culture is the human layer: the experience, judgment and the wisdom your people carry in the relationships they build. This identity is built over years, but what your organisation understands about itself sits in disconnected platforms or is lost when someone leaves.
When AI is adopted with intelligence that is fragmented or depleted, and the people expected to use it are under pressure and lack clarity, the return on that investment becomes difficult to justify. The technology works, but the foundation it is working from doesn't.
The diagnostic measures the state of your intelligence and your culture. The patterns it covers are specific, recurring forms of depletion drawn from my direct observation across organisations of comparable scale and complexity. They are selected for their commercial consequence and surface what you have already sensed before the problem is named.
This diagnostic covers ten of thirty-one patterns. The full Intelligence & Culture Audit covers the thirty-one I have identified. What you receive here is a taster of the methodology. It gives you a shared language for the problems you are seeing and a set of questions to take to the people around you.
It takes eight to ten minutes. The accuracy of what you receive depends on the honesty of the responses you provide.