There are many routes into this work. Here is one that makes the logic of it clear.
I learned about lean manufacturing principles at KPMG with real enthusiasm. The seven wastes, the discipline of removing what does not add value, was insightful thinking for me at the time. I explored and applied it diligently.
But it took me many years to notice that the most consequential waste I kept encountering was not on the list. The seven wastes all assume you are making the right thing. They help you make it more efficiently. They do not help you notice when you are solving the wrong problem entirely.
Peter Drucker put this plainly: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Russell Ackoff similarly: “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become.”
That observation, once you take it seriously, changes what you pay attention to. Not just what is being done, but why. Not just how an organisation operates, but what assumptions shape what it can see.
Later I worked at 3Keel, a sustainability consultancy. That experience made the problem concrete. Even in a field explicitly concerned with doing the right thing, the questions underneath the metrics, what is being measured and why, often needed addressing before the metrics themselves became useful. You can be in the right place, at the right time, and still miss what matters if you are not asking the right questions.
I have pursued those questions across a wide range of sectors and contexts, drawing on systems thinking, organisational design, computational modelling, natural systems, and more recently the tools that AI has opened up.
What has developed over time is a diagnostic capacity. It is general, because it has been built on fundamentals rather than a single method. But it must always be applied to a specific question in a specific circumstance.
This is quite different to how conventional consulting works. A typical engagement takes a focused method and applies it broadly across clients. This work takes a broad capacity and applies it to one particular situation. That distinction matters. A method, by design, can only find what it was built to look for. A diagnostic approach can reach the thing the method cannot.
The trade-off is that this is harder to show in advance. There is no off-the-shelf framework to point to. The proof is in the work itself, which is perhaps the greatest challenge of offering it, and the reason this page exists.