The Black Box
GroupWe help ambitious people move interesting ideas into the world.
Understand Learn fast. Form a point of view.
We get close to the problem, the people and the evidence quickly. The aim is not to collect everything. It is to know what matters and what we believe about it.
Connect Join the dots. Shape the play.
We bring together the people, ideas and signals that are usually kept apart. Then we turn them into a small number of moves that could materially change the trajectory.
Create Build it. Make it real.
Strategy becomes useful when you can see, touch or test it. We prototype, launch and make the idea concrete enough for the world to respond.
Improve Measure. Manage. Improve at speed.
We watch what happens, learn from reality and change course quickly. Progress compounds when the feedback loop is shorter than everyone else's.
Most meaningful progress begins as something slightly unreasonable. A belief that the world could work differently. A technology that arrives before we have the language to explain it. A behaviour that looks strange until, suddenly, everybody is doing it. The easy thing is to wait for proof. By then, the interesting part has usually happened. We are drawn to the moment before certainty, when imagination still matters and a handful of choices can change the direction of everything that follows. Growth does not come from doing the familiar a little faster. It comes from seeing what others have missed, connecting ideas that have been kept apart, and turning possibility into something people can touch, use and believe in. We want to work with people optimistic enough to imagine a better future and impatient enough to start building it now. The future does not arrive fully formed. Someone decides to make it real.
What has our attention right now.
This is not a services menu. It is a live view of the questions, problems and possibilities we are spending time on.
Business strategy Trajectory and choices
Strategy is often mistaken for a longer to-do list. We are more interested in the few choices that alter the trajectory: where to play, what to stop, what to believe before everyone else does, and where an apparently small move might have an absurdly large consequence.
Growth Demand and behaviour
Most growth problems are not advertising problems. They are often problems of proposition, friction, trust, habit, distribution or timing. We help companies find the point where a change in behaviour creates disproportionate momentum, before they spend more money pushing people towards something that was not quite compelling enough in the first place.
People Energy and decisions
Org charts are wonderfully precise descriptions of how companies do not really work. We are interested in incentives, rituals, decision rights and the invisible routes through which work actually moves. Then we create more room for talented people to do the things only talented people can do.
Artificial intelligence Capacity and redesign
The interesting AI question is not simply, “what can we automate?” It is, “what should people do with the time we give back?” Washing machines did not abolish housework; they raised the standard of cleanliness. AI can create the same trap: more emails, more decks and more analysis, just faster. There is another tension too. LLMs are extraordinarily good at the probable and the familiar, so left alone they can pull work towards the norm. We are more interested in using AI to remove the ordinary so people can spend more time on the exceptional. Better decisions. Stranger ideas. Closer customers. Faster experiments. More room for judgment, taste and originality.
Education Learning and mastery
Education has a curious habit of using new technology to reproduce old classrooms more efficiently. We are interested in mastery, feedback, motivation and measurement. What changes when learning is designed around the learner rather than around the timetable, the worksheet or the average?
Health Access and action
Healthcare contains extraordinary expertise and a surprising amount of avoidable friction. We are interested in what happens between appointments: earlier action, better signals, easier access and behaviour in the real world. The opportunity is not another dashboard. It is helping good care happen sooner, more often and in more places.
Technology Possibility and adoption
Technology becomes interesting when it changes what people can do, not when it merely adds another feature to the procurement checklist. We like starting with the impolite question: if this works brilliantly, what becomes newly possible? Then we work backwards from that future rather than forwards from the feature list.
The world has enough people waiting to see what happens. We work with the ones trying to decide what happens next.