Advisory - We work the problem with you, not for you

When you need this instead

An assessment tells you where you stand. Sometimes that is the whole job. Sometimes you already know roughly where you stand, and the problem is that nothing moves.

Projects rarely stall on bad analysis. They stall on the human parts: assumptions nobody checked, people already doing the work of three, information that never reached whoever needed it, and resistance that is never said out loud. No model reads a room. That is the part somebody still has to do, and it is what this is.

How it runs

How this actually goes

1

We start where you are

Not where you think you should be, and not where a maturity model says you should be. If you are crawling, we will not hand you a marathon plan.

2

We map how it actually works

Your operations, your value chain, and how decisions really get made. Built through conversation and from your own material, not from instrumentation you have to buy first. Visual enough that your team can write its own SOPs from it, which is what most of them end up doing.

3

We show you where the value is leaking

What you do, what you can prove, and the distance between them. Which assumptions have never been tested. Where effort goes that does not come back. That distance is the work, and it is often cheaper to close than people expect.

4

We build the plan with you, not for you

In the room, with your people in the conversation. We map the objections the work will meet, who holds each one and what it is protecting. A plan your team helped write is a plan your team is more likely to run.

5

Your teams carry it

Heads of department present where they are and what they have moved, in their own words. Capacity stays with your people rather than leaving with us.

6

It adapts

New information, market shifts, work you have closed. A strategy that cannot change tends to become a document.

What that looks like

Venues Ōtautahi, Christchurch

Waste diversion: 20% to 93%

One hour of problem discovery and mapping. Fifteen minutes of group coaching with the operations team. A forty-five minute site audit. The team wrote their own SOPs from the process maps afterwards, and kept going without us.

"Shifted waste culture across operations. No weeks of workshops needed."

The method

What we bring into the room

The 5 Spheres of EmpathyFrom the self outward to the people who inherit what you build. It decides who gets considered, and the spheres most often skipped are the ones that produce the surprises.

Defensive EnergyReading where someone's guard actually sits. It is why "they agreed" and "they will do it" are different findings.

RAIDRisks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, held as a live register rather than a slide. A risk with no owner is one you have decided to accept without saying so.

The Cobra EffectTesting every recommendation for the chance that acting on it produces the opposite of what it intends.

Crawl, Walk, RunStaging ambition so it sticks. Skipping a stage is the most common way a programme dies quietly.

FacilitationSessions your team actually talks in. Most of the useful material is in the room already and has not been said yet.

The method is published. You can read it at 5spheresofempathy.com before you engage anyone.

What it costs

Scoped on the work, not sold by the hour. Engagements have run from a single half-day session to a programme across several departments. We will tell you what we would look at, what it would take and what it would cost on the first call, and if we are not the right fit we will say so then rather than three emails later.

If the first session does not leave you with something you can act on, say so on the call and you do not pay.

Talk to a Strategist

Not sure where you stand yet? Start with an Assessment.