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Aieutics

Transformation fails when you work on the right things in the wrong order.

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The Diagnostic Question

Are you working on the right “layer”?

Every transformation challenge has a dependency structure. The startup building a sales engine before validating its value proposition. The corporate innovation team running pilots before confirming that procurement can absorb the result. The leader restructuring an organisation before diagnosing why the current structure fails.

The work itself is often sound. The sequencing is where it breaks. I help founders and corporate innovation leaders locate the binding constraint in their transformation — the layer where unresolved dependencies are silently undermining everything built above it.

→ Explore the framework

  • Several people inside an art installation with a web of hanging black strings on a white background, some sitting and some standing and talking.

    Diagnostic before prescription

    Most transformation consulting begins with a solution and works backwards to justify it.

    I begin with the dependency structure: what has to be true before anything above it can hold. This produces uncomfortable answers.

    The marketing strategy that can't work until the ICP is resolved. The organisational redesign that's premature until the operating economics are understood.

    I'd rather surface an inconvenient dependency than deliver a comfortable plan that stalls at implementation.

  • An abstract image of a web of interconnected black lines and loops against a light gray background.

    Evidence over intuition

    I spent years building data and analytics practices — teams of twenty to sixty people, managing P&Ls, proving commercial impact through measurement rather than assertion.

    That background shapes everything about how I work now. When I diagnose a founder's bottleneck or a corporate programme's structural weakness, the method comes from two decades of insisting that commercial claims survive contact with evidence.

    I have a low tolerance for strategy that can't be tested.

  • A complex network of interconnected black wires and small objects on a light background.

    Anti-hype as operating principle

    The current transformation conversation is dominated by technology-push framing: adopt this tool, implement this platform, become "AI-native."

    Most of this guidance confuses classification (what technology can do) with diagnosis (what your organisation actually needs). I work on the diagnostic side.

    If the honest answer is that your problem is structural and no technology will fix it, I'll say so. If the honest answer is that you're eighteen months early for the solution you're excited about, I'll say that too.

    → How I think and work

Spectrum Preview

From diagnostic tools to retained advisory.

The lightest way in is a diagnostic you can run right now. Three self-assessment instruments, each built from the Critical Path Layers framework, each targeting a specific layer where founders and innovation teams most commonly stall.

The ICP Clarity Diagnostic tests whether your buyer profile is specific enough to sell against. Eighteen binary questions across five dimensions — specificity, validation, decision-making unit, channel strategy, and coherence with your value proposition and pricing. Most founders discover their ICP is a description of a market, not a person. That distinction explains why pipeline isn't converting.

The Value Proposition Articulator tests whether your champion can repeat your value proposition to their boss in one sentence. Twenty questions across five dimensions, including value type alignment — whether the type of value you're articulating (financial, operational, strategic, positional) matches the type your buyer actually makes decisions on. When these are misaligned, the pitch feels right but the deal stalls.

The POC Lifecycle Diagnostic maps your proof-of-concept against the dependency structure and identifies where it's actually stuck. Most teams working a pilot discover they're operating two layers above their real bottleneck — building the demo when the governance question hasn't been answered, or scaling the integration when the internal champion lacks budget authority.

All three use the same logic: only what is concretely true today counts as yes. They're designed to reveal blindspots, not confirm plans.

Beyond the diagnostics, I run structured workshops and embed as a coach inside accelerator programmes. For specific transformation challenges, I take on retained advisory: inside the system long enough to trace dependencies across layers and redirect effort when the sequence breaks down. Entry depends on the problem, not the budget.

→ Explore the diagnostic tools at resources.aieutics.com
→ See the full engagement spectrum

Latest thinking

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  • The full articulation of the framework: why innovation work follows a dependency structure, and what happens when you skip layers.

    Read more here

  • The proof-of-concept that hit every technical milestone and still died in procurement. A structural diagnosis of why pilots fail at the organisational layer.

    Read more here

  • A playbook for founders and PE teams on replacing vanity metrics with evidence that tracks actual commercial traction.

    Read more here

  • Access the full archive here

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