These are time-bound engagements for specific inflexion points where concentrated judgement support is required.
Unlike ongoing advisory, these engagements have a defined scope, clear timeline, and singular focus on navigating a particular transition or decision with irreversible consequences.
The structure is intensive. We meet more frequently than a retainer would support, work is concentrated around specific milestones, and the engagement concludes when the decision is made or the transition is complete.
STRATEGIC INTENSIVES
Contexts where intensive support matters
Crisis or organizational fracture
Addressing acute challenges that threaten organizational stability, reputation, or viability. These require rapid assessment, decisive action, and careful consequence mapping.
Capital event with time pressure
Fundraising rounds or major investment decisions that require intensive preparation, stakeholder management, and clear thinking under pressure.
Major transition
Leadership succession, restructuring, pivot, or fundamental business model change. High complexity, compressed timelines, multiple stakeholders.
Two formats
Strategic Intensives take two forms depending on what the moment requires.
The Executive Intensive
A single structured day for leaders who need clarity at a defined moment. One consequential decision. Seven dimensions.
- Context — What is actually happening, beneath the presenting version of it.
- Architecture — How the decision sits within the broader structure of the organisation and its relationships.
- Decision — What is actually being decided, and what the available choices genuinely are.
- Economics — What this costs, what it returns, and what it trades.
- Narrative — How this decision will be explained — to the board, investors, the team, the market.
- Consequence — What happens if this goes well. What happens if it does not. What cannot be undone.
- Execution — What the decision requires to become real, and who owns what.
Who this is for: Leaders facing a specific consequential decision who need structured thinking space and a rigorous thinking partner. One day, one decision, seven lenses. Often serves as the entry point into a longer advisory relationship for leaders who have not worked this way before.
Multi-Week Intensive
Concentrated counsel across a defined period, structured around a specific high-stakes moment. Typically two to three working sessions per week, moving between diagnostic thinking, consequence mapping, decision preparation, and communication readiness.
Who this is for: Leaders navigating moments that are too complex for a single day but too bounded for an ongoing retainer. Capital events. Transactions. Restructures. The situations where the work has a clear beginning, middle, and end.
How an intensive is structured
Diagnosis first
We establish what is actually true — what the situation is, what the real risks are, what is being avoided, and what the decision actually requires. Most Intensives reveal in the first session that the presenting problem is not the real problem.
Working sessions
Focused on the specific decisions, trade-offs, and preparation required. We move between thinking and testing, between mapping consequences and building the case.
Conclusions and preparation
Consolidating the thinking, preparing for the moment, ensuring the decision or the communication or the structure is as clear and as defensible as it needs to be.
Written outputs where useful include
- Consequence mapping of key decisions and trade-offs
- Decision frameworks aligned to the specific context
- Narrative preparation for investor, board, or public moments
- Documentation of agreed decisions and next steps
These are tools to support your thinking. Not reports filed and forgotten.
Scope and availability
Scope is agreed at the outset and does not expand without a deliberate conversation. This matters because scope creep in advisory work usually signals that the original diagnosis was incomplete — and the right response is to name that, not to quietly absorb it.
Availability for Intensives is limited. If a significant decision or event is approaching, the earlier the conversation, the more useful the work.
Strategic Intensive
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