Engagements
Three ways in, each with an end
We do not sell a services catalogue. There are three engagements, each with a consequential question at its centre, a senior decision-maker who owns it, direct principal involvement, a written boundary and a decision at the end of it. Most relationships begin with a diagnosis.
What we are accountable for
We lead the diagnosis, design the target institution, establish the governance and remain accountable through execution. Delivery may combine your captive teams, the partners already working for you, and focused specialist capacity we assemble. We selectively build the governed components a programme turns on.
You retain operational authority, production access and the decision to go live. Those do not move, on any engagement.
- We do not stand up a parallel delivery bureaucracy beside your own.
- A bounded diagnosis or design mandate does not drift into open-ended implementation. Execution support is defined and contracted separately, with responsibilities named on both sides.
- We stay accountable for coherence across the programme, which is the thing that usually has no owner.
Executive Diagnosis
A focused examination of the problem beneath the visible problem.
Establish whether the visible problem is the actual constraint, and put a defensible decision in front of the people who have to take it.
- Best suited for
- For a chief executive, board or executive committee that suspects the presenting problem is a symptom.
- Executive sponsor
- Chief executive, board, or executive committee.
- Typical duration
- 2 to 4 weeks
- What it requires of you
- Access to the executives who own the question, the portfolio and its decision history, and whatever baseline numbers exist. Two to three hours of the sponsor's time.
- Why is the AI programme producing activity without movement?
- What is the real constraint on this organisation, and what is merely its shadow?
- Should this transformation continue in its current form at all?
Interviews with the people who hold the decision and the people living with its consequences, examination of the portfolio and the decision record behind it, and a structural reading of where authority, evidence and capability actually sit.
An executive diagnosis, a constraint map, the framing of the decision that follows, and a recommendation that includes what not to do.
The decision it enablesAt the end you can take one decision on stated grounds: continue, stop, reset, reframe, or sequence differently.
What is excludedNo target operating model, no build, no implementation plan. Those are the next engagement if the diagnosis says they should be.
Diagnosis ends when the decision is framed. It does not roll silently into a design or delivery engagement.
None. This engagement produces a decision, not delivery.
Most institutions either act on the diagnosis with their own people or commission Institutional Design. Either is a fresh decision, priced separately.
Institutional Design
The redesign of the machinery the diagnosis found wanting.
Produce an agreed target operating model, a governance architecture and a transition sequence the institution can actually execute.
- Best suited for
- For leadership teams ready to act on a diagnosis: the operating model, decision rights, governance and sequencing that follow.
- Executive sponsor
- Chief executive, chief operating officer, or the executive accountable for the transformation.
- What it requires of you
- An executive sponsor with authority over the operating model, access to the teams the design will change, and a decision on who will hold each new authority once it exists.
- What would this organisation look like designed around what AI now makes possible?
- Where should authority over AI-assisted work actually sit?
- In what order can the institution change without stopping?
Design of the target operating model and the decision and governance architecture, the organisational interfaces between them, the adoption approach that makes the design survive contact with the work, and a transition sequence costed against the institution's capacity to absorb change.
A target operating model, decision and governance architecture, organisational interfaces, an adoption approach, and a sequenced transition the institution can execute.
The decision it enablesAt the end you can commit to a target institution and authorise a transition sequence, with the governance route for each step already agreed.
What is excludedThe design is not an implementation programme, and it is not a systems integration contract.
Institutional Design ends with an agreed target model, governance architecture and executable transition sequence. Where execution support is required it is contracted separately, with explicit responsibilities. Design work does not turn silently into an open-ended implementation programme.
Available, and separately contracted. Where you want us accountable through the transition rather than handing it over, that is a Governed Intervention with its own scope, price and boundaries.
Your teams and existing partners execute the sequence, or a Governed Intervention keeps us accountable through it.
Governed Intervention
Accountability held through a consequential programme, from decision to evidence.
Stay accountable through a programme where governance, operating-model change and technical execution have to remain connected, and usually are not.
- Best suited for
- For a chief executive, board or transformation leader inside a moment that will not wait: a programme reset, a contested decision, a transition already under way.
- Executive sponsor
- Chief executive, board, or the executive who owns the programme.
- What it requires of you
- A named executive owner, authority to change the programme's governance, and access to the delivery partners already engaged.
- This programme has consumed two years and significant capital. What now?
- The board is being asked to approve something nobody has independently challenged.
- Who holds this together when the governance, the operating model and the build all report elsewhere?
Independent challenge and decision support, programme reset design, leadership alignment, and the governance thread held intact through execution. Delivery is done by your captive teams, the partners already working for you, and focused specialist capacity we assemble. We build the governed components the programme turns on where that is the fastest safe route, and say so in scope.
A programme with one accountable design, a governance route for each consequential decision, evidence produced as the work runs rather than assembled afterwards, and continuing counsel to the chief executive or the board.
The decision it enablesAt each gate you can authorise the next step on evidence you can inspect, and reverse it if the evidence changes.
What is excludedWe are not the systems integrator, and we do not replace one. Where a large build is needed, it is done by the people already equipped to do it, under a design we are accountable for.
We advise and hold the design together. You retain operational authority, production access and the decision to go live. We do not hold administrative rights in your live systems.
This is the engagement that includes it. Scope, responsibilities and the line between our work and your partners' are written down before the work starts.
The engagement ends when the programme can run without us, which is the condition it is designed against.
Five stages. One thread.
That is what an engagement is. This is what happens inside one.
Whichever of the three it is, an engagement runs through the same five stages. The thread is the point: the decision framework that approved an initiative, the authority under which it acted and the evidence it produced are one record, not three.
Diagnose
Structural and portfolio diagnosis: what the institution can execute, what it should build, and in what order.
Govern
Decision rubrics, enablement councils and routing stood up; authority, audit trail and provenance installed.
Execute
Modernisation and migration sequenced so the business keeps trading, and the governed components built. Your teams, your existing partners and specialist capacity we assemble, under one accountable design.
Adopt
ADKAR-based change programmes: certified champions, trainers, and AI fluency at every level of the organisation.
Prove
Results measured against your own baseline, in evidence a board or a supervisor can inspect.
How every engagement runs
Those are the stages. These are the terms, and they hold across all three engagements.
- The principals do the work. Engagements are led directly by the two of us and remain personally accountable from mobilisation through final handoff. Where focused specialist capacity is required we assemble experienced practitioners around the engagement; accountability is never delegated to a junior consulting team.
- A defined outcome, at a fixed fee. We contract to a stated end state with stated completion criteria, priced against a disclosed population and a written set of assumptions. Not open-ended billable hours, and not staff augmentation.
- Inside your structure, not beside it. We work within your existing organisation and alongside your captive teams and the partners already delivering for you. Where focused specialist capacity is needed we assemble it around the engagement and say so in scope, rather than standing up a parallel delivery organisation that has to be dismantled afterwards.
- Authority does not move. You retain operational authority, production access and the decision to go live on every engagement, including the ones where we are accountable through execution. We are answerable for the design holding together; you remain the institution.
- Boundaries written down first. What is excluded, what we depend on your teams and your partners for, and where our authority stops are all set out before the work begins, on the first page and not in an appendix.
- Why not a larger firm. The honest answer is that a global firm brings bench depth, procurement familiarity and someone to escalate to. What it rarely brings is the two people who sold the work still doing it in month seven. Fifty-five years of institutional and operating experience are in the room for the whole engagement, which is also why we take few of them at a time.
- Evidence, not status. Reconciled numbers, a provenance record of what the AI did and under whose authority, a documented exception register and a runbook. Enough for you to take the decision yourself, and enough to defend it afterwards.
What we will not do
In full, because it is the part that determines whether we are useful to you.
- We take no commission, referral fee or resale margin from any third-party vendor. No recommendation we make earns us money elsewhere.
- We do not hold administrative rights in your live systems, and we do not take the decision to go live. Those sit with you, your captive teams and your delivery partners.
- We do not settle a contested reading of your data or your records on our own authority. Where the evidence is ambiguous, it goes back to you with the ambiguity stated rather than resolved quietly.
- We do not produce a strategy deck in place of a delivered outcome.
- We do not hold scope open. Material change is priced and authorised in writing before it starts.
- We do not stand up a parallel delivery organisation that has to be dismantled afterwards, and we do not take on work a systems integrator is already equipped to do.
The engagement is structured so that the difficult questions (the missing documentation, the dependency outside your control, the exclusion nobody wants to name) are governed conditions with owners and dates attached, rather than risks discovered late. What you are left holding is capability your institution owns, not a dependency on us.
If this is the conversation you are having internally, write to either of us directly.
We take on a small number of engagements at a time.
If your institution is somewhere between AI ambition and AI evidence, that is the conversation this firm is built for. Write to either of us and we will tell you plainly whether it is work we should be doing.
Discuss a consequential decision