Insights (blog)

Not a tool. Not a framework. A practice. And once you see the gap, you cannot unsee it. There is a discipline missing from organisations. Strong ones have a strategy function. A finance function. An HR function. A communications function. They have people whose job it is to think about where the organisation is going, whether the numbers add up, whether the right talent sits in the right roles, and whether the message is landing. What few organisations have is a function — or

Every governance course teaches what a board should know. No one teaches cognitive diversity, or how to design a decision room with science behind it. Walk into an MBA classroom or a director-readiness program and you will find a thorough syllabus. Finance. Strategy. Risk. Legal duties. Stakeholder management. Students leave able to read a balance sheet, interrogate a strategy, and name their fiduciary obligations. They are taught what a competent board should know. There is

Average B2B cold email reply rates have fallen to around 3.4% in 2026, down from 8.5% a few years ago. The standard fix — signal-based personalization — is now table stakes, and it's stopped being a differentiator. There's one variable almost no one optimizes: not what's true about your prospect, but how your prospect decides. This post explains decision-aware messaging, why it lifts reply rates, and how to run it across your whole list instead of one message at a time. The

Most teams don't fail because they make bad decisions. They fail because they make decisions the same way, with the same mix of thinking, every time. Decision Profile Mapping changes that. It shows you how the people in your organisation actually approach decisions — and where the mix is going to let you down. This is a guide to what mapping does, how to run it, and what to expect at each stage. Written for the leader who's been asked to drive it, or who's wondering whether i

Sit in on any leadership meeting and you will hear highly capable people disagreeing — not because they want different things, but because they are weighing different things without realising it. A Guardian and a Visionary can both be fully committed to the same strategic goal and still generate friction that reads as conflict, because one is instinctively asking "what could go wrong?" while the other is asking "what becomes possible?" Without a shared decision language for t

When a decision goes badly, the first question asked is rarely "was this the right call?" It is almost always: how did we get here? Leaders who can answer that question — who was involved, what they each brought, what evidence was considered, and where the gaps were visible before the decision locked in — are in a fundamentally different position from those who can't. Defensible decisions are not ones that always succeed. They are ones where you can show your work. Defensibil