Four ways in, one job
Consultancy, leadership training, coaching and workshops. Whichever door you pick, the job is the same: move the decision to the people who can see the work, and leave you with changes your own people keep running.
How we work: change built from the inside, left running without us
Consultancy
Senior, hands-on help when a programme is slipping, a restructure is fighting the work, or a decision will not move.
The programme that keeps slipping. The restructure that is fighting the work it was meant to help. The decision everyone can see and nobody can move. This is where we work: inside the situation, alongside your people, on one real problem at a time.
We do not arrive with a transformation programme, because transformation programmes are the thing that keeps failing. Organisational change spreads through networks of people who can see each other working differently, or it does not spread at all. So we find where the decisions actually live, move them closer to the people who hold the facts, and set conditions the change can grow under.
You will know it is working within weeks, because the test is visible on the ground: decisions moving faster, fewer escalations, the people closest to the work more able to act. One test tells you if a change is real: does it survive the first time somebody with the power to reverse it disagrees? You can call it in advance, not read it off the outcome. And we price our own removal into the plan. If the change needs us in the room forever, it has not worked.
Read more: Nobody transforms anything
Talk about consultancy
Leadership Training
Leadership development for people who run real organisations, practised on their own live situations.
This is the programme we deliver to senior leaders in UK central government: directors and deputy directors responsible for national programmes, learning to lead the organisation they actually have, not the diagram of it.
No framework to memorise and no certificate wall. Working sessions on the judgement senior roles actually demand: where a decision belongs and how to move it there, what buying more control genuinely costs, why the last transformation did not stick and what spreads change instead, how to set conditions for four thousand people the way a good incident commander sets intent for a crew.
Everything is practised on your leaders’ own live situations, so what they learn is judgement they can use the following week, not something left behind in the training room.
Read more: Who changes the rules?
Talk about training
Coaching
Coaching for leaders inside hard situations, and peer coaching your teams keep running without us.
One-to-one coaching gives a senior leader a place to work the situation they cannot take anywhere else: questions built from your own words, ending each session on one move that is genuinely yours to make.
And we set up peer coaching that runs on rules simple enough to keep: questions only, no advice, every turn ends on a move, and every meeting opens with what happened to the last one. Small groups of people who actually work together, coaching each other with discipline. It costs nothing to run, needs no expert in the room, and the longer it runs the better it gets.
It works because the people closest to the problem usually hold the answer. Our job is to run the conversation well, not to hand over ours.
Read more: Who is really holding it together, and what that costs you
Talk about coaching
Workshops
Facilitated rooms that end with one real change the room chose and has the authority to make.
Most workshops end with a wall of sticky notes and a photograph nobody looks at again. Ours end with one constraint, set at the start and meant: we leave with one real change this room has the authority to make, and a date to answer for it.
From retrospectives and away-days to hundred-person sessions, the craft is the same: put the whole shape of the work where everyone can see it, let the people who can see it choose the change, and make sure the room actually holds the standing to enact what it chooses. A session without that standing is a suggestion box dressed as a workshop, and we will tell you so before we book the room.
Read more: Decisions belong where the facts are
Talk about workshopsHow these combine
These are not four products on a shelf. Most work starts wherever the problem is loudest: often a piece of consultancy on one stuck situation, sometimes a workshop that surfaces what is really going on, sometimes a run of coaching for the person carrying it. From there the others tend to follow the work, so consultancy leaves peer coaching behind that keeps running, training gets practised on the live problem the room actually has, and a workshop hands its one real change to the people who then coach each other through it. It is Chris in the room throughout, so the shapes blur into one piece of work with no handover between them. Plenty of engagements only ever need one of them, and where they combine, they combine to fit your situation, so yours may run in an order none of this describes.
Some teams start smaller still, by reading the book across the leadership team first: copies for your team, direct from us.
Before you book a call
Do you use a framework or methodology?
No, and that is a considered position. What travels between organisations is intent, conditions and practice, so we start from your organisation, never somebody else’s model.
How quickly will we see something real?
Weeks, not quarters. We start on one live problem with visible stakes, and the early test is concrete: did it survive the first time somebody with the power to reverse it disagreed? If nothing observable has shifted in the first month, we raise stopping before you do.
What does it cost?
Engagements are shaped around the problem: from a single workshop or coaching arrangement to senior consultancy over months. We agree the shape and price on the discovery call, and the call itself is free and carries no obligation.
All questions, including the book, speaking and the Five Passes
If we are not the right fit
If you want a certified rollout of somebody’s branded operating model, or a wall-to-wall change effort with a portfolio of workstreams, we are the wrong people, and we will tell you so on the first call. Who we suit, and who we do not, is set out in full on Who We Suit.
Bring the problem that is keeping you up
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. If we are not the right help, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
Book a call with Chris