Our work follows five moves: GROUND, SENSE, POSITION, SCOUT, MOVE. First, we look at the machine you’ve built: your technology, people, operations and constraints. Then we read the weather around it: the social, environmental, political and technological forces that are changing the game.
We figure out where you actually stand, what kind of world you are trying to create, and where your real leverage might be. From there, we go looking for the adjacent possible: new products, customers, capabilities, markets and ways of working that might already be hiding inside the business.
Then comes the important part: MOVE. Ideas are cheap. Experiments and validation activities is where the rubber meets the road. We turn promising possibilities into small, falsifiable tests with clear reasons to continue or kill them. Sometimes the answer is a new product. Sometimes it’s a new market, a new organizational shape or a radically simpler tech stack.
(In the process, you might also realize that the thing you thought was the business isn’t the business at all.)
If you’re at a crossroads, bring us the mess, the half-formed idea, the stalled company, the strange opportunity, the thing that doesn’t quite make sense yet. We’ll GROUND it, SENSE it, POSITION it, SCOUT what comes next, and MOVE when we have something worth moving on.
FAQ:
Do we need to know exactly what problem we have before we contact you?
No, and it’s often better if you don’t. “Something isn’t working anymore” is a perfectly good starting point. GROUND is partly about figuring out what the actual problem is before rushing to solve anything.
What kind of companies do you work with?
Mostly founder-led, technology-oriented companies from startup to around 100 people. We’re particularly interested in creative and cultural businesses and the strange things that don’t fit neatly into a category.
Do you need us to have a big budget?
No. We’re specifically interested in finding the smallest viable move. During GROUND we look at your technology, people and resources; during MOVE we look for ways to test the next hypothesis without burning through capital.
What happens when we start working together?
We move together through the five pillars of our framework and keep an eye out for the unexpected, the promising and the surprising. In our experience, the right answer is always simple, elegant and, in retrospect, obvious.
How long does an engagement take?
There is no magic six-week transformation package. (We wish there was.) Some problems can be cracked in a few conversations and others need experiments, research and time in the field.
What do we actually get at the end?
It might be an organizational operating map, an Umwelt map, a set of adjacent opportunities, or a series of experiments with explicit kill criteria. More importantly, you should leave knowing what to do next, why you’re doing it, and what evidence would make you stop.
Ready for an initial no-cost consultation to see if we might be a good match? Visit the Contact page to drop us a line.