Succession crises
When the founder or long-tenured CEO is leaving and the leadership bench is thinner than anyone admits. We facilitate honest assessment and build a transition plan that doesn't rely on wishful thinking about internal candidates.
Our method
Four phases — none of them comfortable
We don't arrive with a slide deck and leave with a smile. Our engagements follow a deliberate arc that surfaces real friction before building real alignment. Each phase is designed to produce outcomes that outlast our involvement.
1. Diagnostic immersion
We spend two to three weeks inside your organization — shadowing meetings, reading between the lines of your strategy documents, and conducting confidential interviews with every member of your leadership layer. The goal isn't a report; it's a map of the invisible dynamics that shape every decision you make. We look at communication patterns, information bottlenecks, and the unwritten rules that nobody acknowledges but everyone follows.
2. Confrontation workshop
A facilitated two-day session where we present our findings — unfiltered. We name the avoidance patterns, the power imbalances, and the strategic contradictions. This is where trust is either built or broken, and we have a strong track record of building it. Teams discover that speaking plainly about dysfunction is the fastest route to cohesion. We use structured dialogue protocols that prevent defensiveness from derailing the process.
3. Architecture of accountability
Together, we redesign your decision-making structures — who owns what, how dissent is surfaced, and what happens when commitments slip. This isn't theoretical governance; it's a practical operating system for your leadership team. We create specific feedback loops, escalation paths, and review cadences that match your organizational tempo rather than imposing a generic framework.
4. Embedded follow-through
For ninety days after the workshop, one of our consultants attends your leadership meetings as an observer and intervenor. We hold the mirror up in real time. When old patterns resurface — and they always do — we name them on the spot. This sustained presence is what separates lasting transformation from a temporary burst of good intentions. By the end, the team has internalized the capacity to self-correct without external prompting.
What we solve
Six problems we're built for
If your challenge is straightforward, you don't need us. We specialize in the tangled, politically charged situations that resist conventional consulting approaches.
Post-merger integration
Two leadership cultures collide and nobody wants to be the one who adapts. We broker the cultural negotiation that determines whether the merger creates or destroys value in its first eighteen months.
Boardroom dysfunction
When the board and the executive team have stopped communicating honestly and governance has become theatre. We rebuild the relationship from first principles, redefining the boundaries of oversight versus interference.
Executive team fragmentation
Senior leaders who are individually brilliant but collectively incoherent. We diagnose the root causes — misaligned incentives, competing narratives, unresolved interpersonal conflict — and design interventions specific to each fault line.
Strategy-execution gap
The strategy is clear on paper but nothing changes on the ground. We trace the breakdown to specific leadership behaviours and decision-making habits, then reconstruct the chain of accountability that connects intent to action.
Diversity of thought failures
Teams that look diverse on paper but think identically in practice. We introduce structural mechanisms — devil's advocate protocols, pre-mortem exercises, and rotating dissent roles — that make cognitive diversity operational, not aspirational.
Measured outcomes
What our engagements have produced
We track results across every engagement. These figures represent aggregated data from our last forty-seven completed projects spanning five industries and three continents.
73%
Reduction in executive turnover within 18 months of engagement
4.1×
Faster strategic decision cycles reported by client leadership teams
89%
Of participants say the confrontation workshop was the most valuable development experience of their career
12
Countries where our consultants have delivered embedded follow-through programmes
Our stance
We are not neutral facilitators
Many consultancies pride themselves on being impartial. We don't. We take a position. When we see a leadership pattern that is damaging the organization, we say so directly — to the people responsible, in language they cannot misinterpret. This is not aggression; it is respect. We believe senior leaders deserve candour proportional to their authority.
Our team is deliberately small — seven senior consultants, each with at least fifteen years of operating experience in complex organizations. Nobody on our team has spent their career exclusively in consulting. We've run divisions, managed P&Ls, fired people, been fired, and navigated the political realities that textbooks gloss over. That lived experience is what gives our confrontation workshops their credibility.
Based in Montréal, we work in English and French with equal fluency. Our client base spans financial services, healthcare, technology, and the public sector. We are selective about the engagements we accept — if we don't believe we can produce a measurable shift, we'll tell you before we sign anything.
Questions we hear
Before you reach out
From the diagnostic immersion through the end of embedded follow-through, a standard engagement runs approximately five months. Some clients extend the follow-through phase to six months if the organizational complexity warrants it. We don't offer open-ended retainers — every engagement has a defined endpoint and success criteria agreed upon at the outset.
Our sweet spot is organizations with 200 to 5,000 employees where the leadership team numbers between six and fifteen people. We've worked with larger enterprises, but only when the engagement is scoped to a specific division or business unit. The method depends on direct access to every member of the leadership layer, which becomes impractical above a certain scale without segmentation.
Resistance is expected and, frankly, diagnostic. How a team resists tells us as much as what they resist. We design the workshop with psychological safety guardrails — structured turn-taking, ground rules co-created with participants, and the option for anyone to request a private debrief. In seven years, we have never had a participant walk out. Discomfort is not the same as harm, and our facilitators are trained to distinguish between the two in real time.
The diagnostic immersion and confrontation workshop are always conducted on-site. There is no substitute for being physically present when reading the dynamics of a leadership team. The embedded follow-through phase can blend in-person and remote attendance depending on your meeting cadence and geographic distribution. We will travel to wherever your leadership team convenes.
We charge a fixed project fee, not hourly rates. The fee is determined after a scoping conversation and depends on team size, geographic complexity, and the length of the follow-through phase. We provide a detailed proposal within one week of the scoping call. There are no hidden costs — travel, materials, and all consultant time are included in the quoted figure.
Reach us
Start a difficult conversation
Tell us what you're facing. We'll respond within two business days with an honest assessment of whether we can help — and if we can't, we'll point you toward someone who can.
