Before you brief anyone, work out what you are actually buying.
Most executives who reach us are not in crisis. They have a result to reach, or ground the organization has not covered before, and a leadership team already committed to running the business. What they want is someone they can trust to be right, and an answer that is not the obvious one. That is four different purchases, not one — and all four begin the same way, by testing what the organization has decided not to question.
01FOUR WAYS IN
The same problem supports four different kinds of work.
Which one fits depends less on how serious the problem is than on how settled the answer already is, and on who has to be able to do the work afterwards. Each is real work in its own right. None is a lesser version of another.
1
Innovation training
The organization is gathering information. Nothing is committed yet, and the first job is a shared vocabulary among people who do not currently have one.
What it settles
What the discipline is, what good looks like, and what the organization would be taking on.
What it does not
Anything about your operation. A course teaches a method; it does not diagnose a business.
2
Facilitated workshop
There is a specific problem, a real deadline, and a team who should learn the method while solving it rather than afterwards.
What it settles
A worked answer to the problem in front of you, produced by your own people with us in the room.
What it does not
Whether the problem you brought is the one worth solving. A workshop accepts the brief it is given.
The result matters, the answer is not known, and the constraint may not be where the organization currently believes it is.
What it settles
What is actually holding the outcome back, a design that removes it, and what that design is expected to be worth.
What it does not
The implementation, and the measurement after it. Both belong to your organization, and the evidence does not move past Designed until you report back.
The capability has to remain after we leave — not the documents, the capability.
What it settles
People inside the organization who can run the system, make the decisions, and keep improving it without us.
What it does not
Speed. Building capability takes longer than buying an answer, and it is the more expensive choice in the short term.
The four are how you engage. What We Do is what the work is about, and tiers three and four are delivered through those services. Most of this work begins at one tier and moves — a training group that uncovers a real constraint has learned the most useful thing available to it.
The ladder is not ours. Harvard Business Review published Arthur N. Turner's hierarchy of consulting purposes in 1982 on the same observation: clients buy near the bottom of it, and the value sits nearer the top. That ranks what a purpose delivers, not the four kinds of work themselves — none of the four is a reduced form of another. Which is why we will tell you which of the four we think you are buying, before you commit to it. Turner, HBR, September 1982
02WHICH KIND OF CHANGE
Four kinds of change, and the one you are probably in.
Most briefs arrive already categorised, and the category you name first is often not the one you have. Read these as positions rather than definitions — the question is which one describes your week, because the four fail for different reasons and are reached by different work.
Product and service
You want a position your competitors have not reached — one that opens a profit stream rather than extending a line, and that your existing capability can actually deliver. The need it answers is usually one your customers have and have not put into words.Mainstream ideation widens the options first. We fix the resource envelope and search inside it — Systematic Inventive Thinking's closed world. A concept you cannot resource is not a concept.
Process
You need a step change in cost, capacity or speed that your own improvement programme has stopped producing, and an honest answer on whether this is optimization or whether the sequence itself has to go. Zero-waste and net-zero targets usually arrive here, priced as capital projects.Most process work improves stages. We examine the order they run in, because that is where the time and the waste sit — and a step change is not reached by improving stages that are already competent.
Business model
You are looking for the next S-curve because the current one is flattening, a circular design that turns material cost into margin, or an ESG position your board can defend as a business decision rather than a disclosure.We use the CIRCO method from TU Delft for circular design, and strategic foresight for S-curve work. Neither is ours, which is why both are named. A green transformation changes what the business does; a green report changes what it says.
Digital transformation
You want AI or a platform to move a business number rather than produce a demonstration, and you suspect the last programme changed the tooling without changing the result. What you want to own afterwards is the design, not a licence.For us digital transformation is process transformation, with technology held in mind while the solution is designed. Most often we use what already exists and implement it creatively: it returns more, and the design becomes your intellectual property rather than a vendor's. What we do not do is digitalize a process you have not changed.
A brief that arrives as one of these and turns out to be another is the ordinary case, not an embarrassing one.
03PROOF
A solution not many people would have thought of.
Executives ask for a track record. Bold Group has run more than 500 projects across 46 industries and 30 countries, from Munich, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Mexico City. That is the group's scale, not work delivered by the Thai team. And scale is not the interesting part.
The more useful question is whether we found answers other people did not.
Bold Group facilitated the design with a hospital ward: a proposed handover intended to keep a patient supervised by changing where he waits, rather than by tracking him. A staircase manufacturer and an automotive film supplier developed a wrap intended to protect a finished surface through the weeks it is exposed. A finance team found that, for spend on company cards, its bank could produce the record its next software build was meant to capture.
The common feature is the one worth paying for. In each, the organization had already identified its answer — GPS wristbands, replacing damaged panels, a claims app — and the answer was not it.
That is not luck and it is not brainstorming. We search inside the resources the organization already holds — the crew, the equipment, the hours, the floor, the people already on the payroll — before we look at anything it would have to buy. Systematic Inventive Thinking calls that the closed world, and it is why the answer is so often already on site.
Every method we work with is named on How We Work with where it came from, because none of them is ours to claim. Where we hold standing in one we say so: two of our founders are certified CIRCO trainers, and foresight has been practised here since 2005. And each case states how far its evidence goes, no further than the record supports.
This is the part of working with us that clients find uncomfortable, so it is better stated now than discovered later. We may challenge:
a technology selected before the problem was understood;
a target with no baseline and no measurement owner;
a departmental solution to a constraint that crosses departments;
a workshop expected to produce transformation without the conditions for implementation;
a project team assembled from who was available rather than who understands the work;
a governance model that assigns responsibility without authority; or
an impact claim that cannot be traced to evidence.
None of this is disagreement for its own sake. Challenging the status quo is the position this firm was built on, and the cheapest moment to do it is before a plan that cannot produce the result has a budget attached to it.
05WHEN TO CALL SOMEONE ELSE
Five briefs we would hand on, and the version of each we would take.
All of this is legitimate work and some of it we would decline. The distinction is rarely the topic. It is whether the answer is already settled — because where it is, you need a specialist, and where it is not, you need a diagnosis.
You need an IT solution implemented
The requirement is build, configuration and integration against a specification you already have. That is a systems integrator or the platform vendor, and they will do it better than we would.If nobody can state what business result the system must produce, or the last one delivered exactly what was asked and changed nothing, that is our brief rather than theirs.
You want a specific method delivered
If you have settled on Design Thinking, Lean, or any named toolkit, buy it from the people who specialise in that tool. We do not sell a method as the answer to every problem.If you need the outcome — an unarticulated customer need, waste removed from an operation that must scale — and the method should follow the problem, call us.
You need a document for an assessor, and nothing else will change
Preparing evidence for an audit is real work and someone should do it for you. We are not that firm, because we cannot produce evidence of a practice an organization does not intend to adopt.If you want the practice to change and the documentation to follow from it, that is the engagement. The audit stays with an accredited body either way.
You want an event
A hackathon or an innovation day bought as the day itself needs an event organizer who is good at it. That is a different craft, and we are not better at it than the people who do it full time.If you have run the event before and nothing survived it, the problem is what happens to an idea on the Monday afterwards.
You may already have this internally
Large organizations increasingly staff transformation from inside. Where a capable internal team has the authority to act, using it is usually the right answer, and we would rather say so.Where that team cannot reach across the functions involved, or is too close to the assumptions to question them, call us.
Where we can point you toward a more suitable kind of provider, we will.
06START HERE
Tell us which of the four you think you need, or that you do not know.
The second is more common than the first, and it is the more useful place to start from: working out which purchase this is takes one conversation, and getting it wrong takes a budget cycle.