WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRATICE
What this looks like in practice.
From AI adoption to innovation to values. From weeks to months. From office populations to field staff who never sit at a desk. The method adapts. The result doesn’t: behaviour that sticks.
Giving an emerging strategy somewhere to actually take shape.
A national water utility, around 1,400 people. The board had a clear group strategy, but a lot of what needed developing was emergent rather than fixed, the kind of thing you discover by doing, not by announcing. The CEO and board kept asking, especially on the digital side, for new capabilities to be built in-house. You don't have to fold every one of those into the corporate strategy: you can develop something small, treat it as emergent strategy, test it for real, and make sure it sticks with the people who have to live it.
Starting with the teams customers actually meet, then earning the right to expand.
An energy retailer in a market where switching supplier is easy and a poor impression costs you the customer. The job was to get the sales, marketing and digital teams properly up to speed first, sharpening the everyday work that shapes how people experience the brand. So we didn't start organisation-wide. We started at business-unit level, where it mattered most.
When the official route stalls, fun is what gets people in the room.
A global technology company whose people are engineers, collaborative by instinct, but a good number genuinely doubtful about the new technology. The board had a group strategy and it was not landing. It moved slowly, people were unhappy with it, and the more official it was made, the more they resisted. The honest read was that this could not be driven from the corporate centre. It needed a bottom-up approach, and the centre was nervous about that, because bottom-up means letting go.
Learning you can do alone. The answer only comes together.
A large insurance group with a lot of sub-brands, where even people inside it did not always see the through-line. The job was to align innovation across that spread, and the quiet was part of the problem: capable people who stayed silent and siloed. So we brought them together, online and offline, around topics some already knew and some had never touched, and we put the current leaders in those fields in the room to run real dialogues rather than presentations.
Reaching the 80% that posh PowerPoints never could.
A telecoms company had built a strategy around new values, and people were not adhering to them. The standard adoption playbook had been tried: sandbox sessions, spaces to talk, encouragement to get active. But people had an instinctive wariness about all of it, and the deeper issue was who the company actually is. Around 80% of the workforce is blue-collar, in the shops and out in the field. They could not care less about a values deck, and yet the metrics were built on top of those values landing. So the gap was not motivation. It was reach.
Getting bankers to laugh, so they could let go and look forward.
A department inside a bank, heading into a reorganisation, in the summer. A reorg is heavy, and the dangerous part comes before it even starts: people sense it, morale dips, and collaboration quietly stops. They knew they needed something positive to carry the team through the moment, before and after, and were genuinely unsure how to create it themselves. So we built a live experience with a before and an after around it, designed less to inform than to shift how people felt going in.
Not convinced yet? Keep scroling.
Same method, wildly different problems. And if you already are convinced, here’s your next step.
The kings had to look ridiculous first, so everyone else could speak.
One of the largest media companies in Europe needed a new counter-strategy. Linear television was no longer working, streaming was the real threat, and the hardest part was human. The people leading the market had been its kings for years, and new kings were now suiting up. Admitting that out loud was exactly what nobody at the top wanted to do. So the work ran on two tracks. One was the regular layer, sessions on culture, commerce and everything around the shift. The other, and the important one, was about voice: physical events and places where people could put their own ideas in, in teams we regrouped on purpose, so the ones who stayed silent while the old bosses spoke finally had somewhere to be heard.
Getting shop staff to show up early, for an unboxing instead of a quota.
One of the largest retailers, in the one month that makes the year: the run-up to Christmas, when the sales have to happen. Coaching that frontline is genuinely hard. The shops are full of temporary staff, local leadership is thin, and the existing structures only ever measure how many deals you did. Inside those structures you cannot really have a conversation about doing the work differently. The only lever people reach for is more money, and the brief was the opposite: get people working together, learning from each other, copying what the good ones already do well.
Giving strangers something to show, then something to celebrate.
A programme in Saudi Arabia that brought together some of the best people in the world, a real mixture of Eastern and Western cultures in one room. The setting was very top-down and very formal, which makes it genuinely hard to get people developing their own ways of working and collaborating less stiffly. The format was a large hackathon, important enough that it was streamed on TV with a big event built around it, so we scaled it up to match. Underneath ran the usual platform layer, leaderboards and pre-learning done individually so people arrived ready.
THE TROUGH-LINE
Different country. Different floor.
The same daily habit.
A drumbeat, not a launch. And it spoke the local language.
A global engineering firm that needed new strategies for growth. Consulting had been hit hard, and raising prices was not a real answer, so a big part of the response was upskilling. We built a digital academy people actually wanted to learn in, interactive and hands-on, with formats like Lego Serious Play to get people building rather than just listening. But the part that made it work was not the academy itself. It was the rhythm we wrapped around it.
The outside story said leader. The inside truth said otherwise.
A global consultancy in a buy-and-build push, where the outside story and the inside truth had come apart. To clients, the leadership showed off how good the firm was. Internally, people did not believe it. The measurement culture did not help: progress tracked through old tools, individuals assigned a number for how much they had moved, which left people feeling counted rather than taken seriously. The pitch was all future tense, and the honest internal answer was, maybe, but not right now. Underneath sat a stack of taboos no one would say out loud.
Your industrie is different.
The mechanism isn't.
Tell us the behaviour you need to shift. We’ll show you what a programme could look like.
