The Method
We interrogate before we propose.
This page is the long version of the drawing on the home page. It is what actually happens between the first conversation and the point at which you have a working answer you can defend to your board.
The first thing we give you is not a recommendation.
Every engagement arrives with a brief, and most briefs are a conclusion wearing the costume of a question. That is not a criticism of the people who wrote them. A brief is written by whoever felt the symptom first, under pressure, in the vocabulary they had. It is evidence. It is not instruction.
So our first deliverable is a restatement: the problem written down in a form precise enough to be wrong. Precise enough that you can read it and say no, that isn’t it — which is the most valuable sentence anyone says in the first fortnight, and the one that almost never gets said because most restatements are too vague to disagree with.
We do not quote the work until the restatement is agreed. Quoting before then would mean pricing something neither party has defined, which is how engagements come to be renegotiated in month four.
We ask, and we do not go deeper until the question is answered.
The drawing on the home page is not an illustration of the method. It is the method, at three levels instead of however many the problem turns out to need.
- Interrogate
- We test the brief itself. What is claimed, what is assumed, what is measured, who measured it, and what they were trying to find out when they did. Most of what an organisation calls a problem is a symptom with a confident vocabulary.
- Locate
- We trace the symptom back through the system that produced it, one level at a time, ruling branches out and writing down why. We stop when the trail stops moving. That is the root; everything above it was weather.
- Build
- The people who located the problem build the thing that resolves it. Analysis, model, platform, process — whatever the root actually requires, rather than whatever we happen to own a licence for.
- Operate
- We stay through the part where it has to work in front of real people on a Tuesday. Then it runs without us, and we leave.
Every branch we rule out is written down with its reason and it stays in the record. When you are asked in six months why the answer was this and not that, the answer is a document, not a memory.
What actually happens.
Week one is reading and asking. We want the artefacts, not the summary of the artefacts: the actual reports, the actual definitions, the actual thing the system does when nobody is watching. We will ask your people questions that sound naive. Some of them are naive. The naive question is how you find out that two departments have been using the same word to mean different things for three years.
Week two is the restatement, the trace behind it, and the branches we ruled out. You get all three, in writing. If the restatement is not what you brought us, we say so on the page rather than in a meeting, because a finding you can only receive verbally is a finding somebody is managing.
You will know by the end of week two whether there is a problem here worth funding. So will we.
“There is nothing here” is a finding, and it is billable.
This is the part of the method that is uncomfortable to write down, so we are writing it down.
Sometimes the trace ends somewhere that does not need us. The problem is real but small. The problem is real but somebody else’s. The problem is not a problem — it is a definition, or a report, or a decision that has been deferred so long it has started to look structural.
When that is the finding, we say it, the engagement concludes, and you have paid for a diagnosis rather than a project. That outcome costs us the follow-on work. It is supposed to. A firm whose economics punish it for finishing early will not finish early, and you will never be able to tell from the outside whether that is what happened to you.
The scope is fixed to the outcome, not to the calendar.
We set scope against a defined outcome, agreed before the work starts, and we do not bill by duration. An engagement that runs longer than we estimated is a cost we absorb for a diagnosis we should have made faster.
That is not a promise about our character. It is a structure, and it is on the page so you can hold us to it. It also explains the rest of this document: if we are the ones who pay for the extra weeks, we have every reason to take the first question seriously — which is the whole method, stated backwards.