A written statement of the question
A one-page statement of the question the engagement is supposed to answer, agreed on with leadership in a working session and signed off before the rest of the work begins.
Advisory & Assessments
A second opinion that earns the weight of the decision it informs — by being grounded in evidence, delivered by people who have done the work, and useful to the team that has to carry it forward.
On this page
§ 01 ·
The report is the artefact; the opinion is implicit; the position is hedged. We deliver a position. The opinion is the deliverable; the report is the evidence for the opinion; the position is stated clearly and traceable to the artefacts.
The work is shaped by the rigour of the process and the willingness to take a view. The four phases the firm uses to do this work are described on the How we work page.
§ 02 ·
What an advisory deliverable looks like
A high-grade advisory deliverable is a position, traceable to evidence, useful to the team that has to carry the work. A generic consulting report is a catalogue of observations, organised by section, without a position. The two are not the same kind of artefact, and the work that produces them is not the same kind of work.
A generic report
A generic report is a catalogue of observations, organised by topic, with a finding list and a recommendation. The recommendation is the conclusion of the report. The observations are the evidence. The position is implicit.
- Findings are organised by topic, not by importance to the question.
- Recommendations are hedged across the report's own evidence.
- The reader has to do the synthesis.
- The report is the deliverable; the position is the reader's work.
What we deliver
A high-grade advisory deliverable is a position, traceable to evidence, useful to the team that has to carry the work. The position is the conclusion. The evidence is organised around the position. The reader does not have to do the synthesis.
- Findings are organised by importance to the question from the framing phase.
- The position is stated clearly and traceable to the evidence.
- The reader gets the synthesis; the writer has done the work.
- The position is the deliverable; the report is the evidence.
What you walk away with
A flat list of the artefacts an advisory engagement produces. The full shape of the engagement: what each phase looks like in practice, is on the [How we work](/services/methodology/) page.
A structured evidence base
A set of documents, diagrams, incident reports, decision records, and conversations with practitioners, organised by the question and traceable to source.
A written position
What the firm believes, why it believes it, what would cause the firm to change its mind, and what it recommends. The position is the deliverable; the rest of the report is in support of the position.
A handoff pack
The position presented to the team that will carry the work, in language they can use, with the artefacts they can build on. The firm stays available for the questions that come up after the position is delivered.
The transition
The engagement ends when the client's team is carrying the work and the firm's role has moved from operator to occasional advisor. The transition is a scheduled milestone, not an open-ended retainer.
§ 04 ·
What each phase produces in an advisory context is on the How we work page. The work described above is the advisory work that runs on top of the shape.
§ 05 ·
Patterns we design our practice to avoid
Six failure modes we have seen repeatedly, across advisory engagements of every size. Each one motivates a specific choice in how we work.
A position is a position only when the question is narrower than the brief. A broad question produces a report.
Evidence without a question is documentation. It is useful to have; it is not advisory work.
A hedged recommendation asks the reader to do the synthesis the writer was hired to do.
A topic-organised report is a report the reader has to reorganise before they can act on it.
A position the carrying team does not understand is a position nobody can implement.
An advisory engagement that ends with the delivery does not survive the next priority cycle. The handoff is the work that decides whether the position is acted on.
The best advisory work I have seen looks boring from the outside. The position fits on a page. The evidence is structured. The carrying team is in the room from the framing session. Nothing about it is exciting. And that is how you know it is working.
§ 07 ·
Common questions from clients
The questions we hear most often, in the order they tend to come up.
An internal review is conducted by people who report into the system they are reviewing. The reviewers have context, history, and relationships that are part of the system. The review is constrained by what the reviewers are able to say and by what the organisation is able to hear.
An independent assessment is conducted by people who do not report into the system. The reviewers bring the context they have built across other engagements and the willingness to take a view the internal reviewers cannot take. The assessment is shaped by what the reviewers believe, supported by what the evidence supports.
Most advisory engagements run between three and nine months. The framing phase is six to twelve weeks; the evidence and synthesis work is the bulk of the engagement; the handoff is sized to the work the client team is taking on, typically one to three months beyond the synthesis.
Engagements are priced against the written statement of the question produced in the framing phase. The cost depends on the engagement length, the size of the team the work needs, and the depth of the evidence base. A typical range for a multi-phase engagement sits in the low-to-mid six figures; the final figure is set in the scoping call after the framing phase has produced its written statement of the question.
The first 30 days are the framing phase. A working session with the executive sponsor, a series of structured conversations with the people who will own the engagement on the client side, and the production of the written statement of the question. By the end of the first 30 days, the client has a one-page artefact that scopes the rest of the engagement.
When the question is one the client's own team can answer with the context they already have, when the decision is being made for political reasons and the advisory work is the cover, or when the question is so broad that no position is possible. The framing call is the right place to surface this.
§ 08 ·
Evidence & references
Public frameworks and writing that inform the firm's practice.
The Pyramid Principle
Barbara Minto, Minto International, 1987 (later editions 2002, 2008)
The structured-thinking discipline: position first, then the evidence, then the supporting detail — in that order.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
The clearest single articulation of why the framing phase matters. The questions we ask in the framing phase are designed to surface the cognitive biases the brief was written to avoid.
Decisive
Chip & Dan Heath, William Morrow, 2013
The 'WRAP' framework (widen options, reality-test assumptions, attain distance, prepare to be wrong) is the most useful single set of techniques for the synthesis phase. The stress-test step before the position is presented is the same discipline the book describes.
Getting to Yes
Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton, Penguin, 1981 (3rd edition 2011)
The principled-negotiation framing — separate the people from the problem, interests from positions, options from commitments — runs through the synthesis phase the same way it runs through a negotiation.
The Art of Strategy
Avinash Dixit & Barry Nalebuff, W. W. Norton, 2008
Game-theoretic thinking applied to negotiation and decision-making. The framing-phase discipline of asking 'what would have to be true for this position to be wrong' is the same discipline the book describes as anticipating the other side's best response.
Want to talk advisory?
If you are weighing a major decision, commissioning an independent review, or strengthening the governance of a programme that needs a second view, the firm is useful at that boundary. A short conversation is the right next step.
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