Why a consultancy keeps a lab

Most consultancies show you their credentials. Degrees, logos, the names of the firms where the partners used to work. It tells you where they have been. It tells you nothing about how they think, and how they think is the only thing you are buying.

This lab is the alternative. Every piece on it is a working cut of an instrument we actually use: a strategy session reduced to three questions, a valuation model reduced to the three numbers that matter, a personality map from 1985 with a language model behind it. They are deliberately small. You can play with each one in a minute. That minute tells you more about how we approach a problem than a page of biography would.

What a toy teaches

A toy has to be honest. It cannot hide behind a slide deck or a workshop; it either does something when you touch it or it doesn't. Building toys out of our own methods forces a question we would otherwise avoid: what is the smallest version of this that still works? Often the answer is embarrassing. Half of a method turns out to be ceremony, and the other half fits in three questions.

It also teaches the other way. People use a toy differently than they use a method. They type the wrong thing in, they ignore the instructions, they try to break it. Every one of those is information about the problem we thought we were solving.

What the full versions do

Behind each toy is the thing it was cut from. The three questions are one session of a daily practice that tracks a leadership team's attention over months. The valuation slider is one input of a model with five methods and a weighting you can argue about. The one thought plane is a quarter of a map that, overlaid on a second map, shows two people where they will misread each other.

None of that is on this site, on purpose. If a toy makes you want the instrument, write. The conversation that follows is the actual product.