The Real Hero.Independent minds. Making change happen.
What are you trying to make happen?
Something important. Something that won't move forward on another presentation alone.
We guide organisations to see differently so they can act differently.
An ambition meets reality
01
You see a possibility others don't yet see.
02
You need people to move, not just agree.
03
You're making decisions where the answer isn't obvious.
Decades of strategic experience. Across industries, cultures and continents. From global brands to governments and emerging businesses.
In the room
Where the work actually happens.
Fig. 01 · The cohort
Hazel and Iñaki with a full room of leaders.
Fig. 02 · Synthesis
Making sense of complexity, one wall at a time.
Fig. 03 · On the glass
Mapping a problem together, note by note.
Fig. 04 · The room
Close working sessions where decisions take shape.
Fig. 05 · After hours
A session still running once the room empties.
Fig. 06 · Looking ahead
Imagining 2030 with a room full of marketers.
Fig. 07 · In the circle
Leaders working through a shared challenge.
Fig. 08 · Google
With the team on site.
Fig. 09 · Ignite
A keynote for the Mondelez marketing team.
Fig. 10 · Oatly
Culture and brand, up close.
Fig. 11 · T. Rowe Price
On site, in the break between sessions.
Fig. 12 · Tokyo Summit
Cultural leaders at the World Cities Culture Forum.
The work · Perspective into progress
Sometimes the first change is what people see.
Cellnex
Telecommunications infrastructure · Global
Delivered work
Making the invisible visible.
An essential contribution. A story people could not yet see.
From the global narrative
Behind your futures.
Why it mattered
A major infrastructure company whose networks quietly support how millions of people connect, yet whose role was largely invisible to the people it served.
Our contribution
We helped Cellnex see its own contribution differently, and built a global strategic narrative connecting identity, purpose, societal contribution and future ambition.
What it made possible
A global strategic narrative, expressed through the line ‘Behind your futures’.
The challenge was to make an essential but largely invisible contribution meaningful and understandable. Our work brought strategic positioning and brand narrative together to create coherence around a complex organisation.
T. Rowe Price
Investment management · Global
Delivered work
Making the complex coherent.
A global organisation. Perspectives that needed to connect.
Why it mattered
An established global investment manager, with many teams, markets and points of view. Alignment depended on a shared way of explaining what the business stands for.
Our contribution
We created a unifying strategic brand narrative that connected fragmented perspectives into one coherent story the organisation could rally around.
What it made possible
A shared strategic narrative supporting organisational alignment across a complex business.
Our contribution was to create strategic clarity through a unifying brand narrative. The work connected different perspectives within the organisation, giving them a more coherent way to understand and articulate the business.
At the intersection of technology, behaviour and business
When the answer isn't obvious.
New technology doesn't remove the need for judgment. It makes the questions of value, responsibility and human agency more consequential.
Holtium
Technology startup
Work underway
Helping an innovative business see—and express—its value.
More potential than ‘another software solution’ could express.
The opportunity
From a software proposition to a compelling commercial position.
Why it mattered
Holtium had built something distinctive. The challenge was helping others understand why it mattered.
Our contribution
We helped Holtium see its own value differently, so it could communicate that value differently.
Working with the team, we developed a clearer understanding of the value Holtium creates, then turned that understanding into a stronger commercial story.
What’s changed
A clearer understanding of its contribution—and a clearer way to communicate it.
You’ve transformed how we talk about Holtium and the impact we have.
Andrés, Holtium
The opportunity is to move beyond being perceived as another software solution and establish a more compelling strategic position. We are exploring the relationship between market proposition, commercial narrative and conversion, including the potential contribution of AI.
Dubai Future Foundation
Government foresight · Dubai
Work underway
Making the uncertain navigable.
When AI can act, who remains responsible?
What can be delegated?
Who remains accountable?
How do people remain the authors of change?
Why it mattered
As AI systems become able to act on our behalf, institutions face governance questions that have no precedent and no easy answers.
Our contribution
Our ongoing work combines strategic research, reframing and synthesis with collective sessions that help leaders explore the governance of autonomous and agentic AI together.
Where it's heading
We are helping turn open questions about delegation, agency and accountability into frames people can work with.
Our contribution involves facilitating exploration of legitimate delegation, human agency, institutional responsibility and governability. This is work at the frontier of technological and societal change, where a better framing can make difficult questions more navigable.
In the room and well beyond it
A different perspective. A different way of acting.
BITE
Food system change · Culinary teams
Delivered work
Making the sustainable choice the delicious one.
Not just communicating sustainability. Changing what people choose.
Trifecta Dish Lab
From competition to collaboration.
Why it mattered
Plant-forward food only advances when chefs, marketers and managers change what they actually cook, name and serve.
Our contribution
We turned behavioural insight into practical learning: a five-part virtual masterclass programme and the Trifecta Dish Lab, a competitive culinary format reframed as a collaborative experiment.
What it made possible
Participants reported applying new approaches within days. The collaboration continued into a subsequent programme involving the Culinary Institute of America.
BITE wanted to accelerate the adoption of plant-forward food. We reframed the challenge around real choices, designing learning experiences with behavioural principles, workplace exercises and practical commitments for culinary teams, marketers, chefs and managers.
Cultural Leaders Global Fellowship
World Cities Culture Forum · Dubai Culture Authority Association
Work underway
Helping the people who shape cities shape their futures.
Cultural leaders advancing real projects in their own cities.
20
Cultural leaders
15
Cities
Why it mattered
Cultural leaders shape how cities live and change, but leadership programmes rarely start from the projects they are actually trying to move forward.
Our contribution
We designed and facilitate an international fellowship for the World Cities Culture Forum and Dubai Culture & Arts Authority, anchored in each fellow’s real cultural project through gatherings, masterclasses, mentorship and peer exchange.
Where it's heading
The fellowship is underway with approximately 20 senior cultural leaders from 15 cities.
Rather than separating leadership development from work, the programme is anchored in the cultural projects participants are already trying to advance. Its ambition is to connect individual agency with institutional change through international exchange and carefully designed experiences.
A restless guide when the way forward isn't clear
Clarity to understand. Conviction to act. The ability to make progress.
Think
Enter the reality.
Understand the actual situation, not simply the problem as presented. Explore context, challenge assumptions and investigate behaviour.
A diagnosis built with your team, not handed down.
Decide
Put it under pressure.
Reframe the opportunity. Explore alternatives. Confront the difficult choices that turn uncertainty into clarity and conviction.
Narrative as an accelerant, not a substitute for a decision.
Do
Make it real.
Create the strategies, narratives, experiences and capabilities that turn decisions into progress. Start small, learn and adapt.
Designing the conditions. Measuring, learning and pivoting.
We don't arrive with a predetermined solution. We work with you to understand what's really happening, challenge what everyone takes for granted, and identify what will make a difference. The work may be a strategic narrative, a commercial reframing or a transformative experience. The point is what it makes possible.
Who's behind it
Independent minds. Working alongside yours.
Hazel Swayne
Experience Architecture & Culture Change
Designs and facilitates transformation programmes for leaders and teams
Experience design behind the Cultural Leaders Global Fellowship and BITE programmes
Hazel designs the conditions in which people change: the rooms, the stakes, the sequencing, the moments that make a new way of operating possible. She connects leadership development to the real challenges people are trying to move forward.
Her work sits where experience design meets organisational behaviour. She shapes the situations people find themselves in — the room, the sequence, the stakes — so that a new way of working becomes easier to try than the old one to defend.
She has designed and facilitated transformation programmes for leaders and teams, and built the experience behind the Cultural Leaders Global Fellowship and the BITE programmes, where every participant is working on something real in their own organisation and city.
She puts people in unfamiliar situations deliberately. Not for discomfort, but because that is where people discover what they actually think and what they are willing to do. The measure is not what is agreed in the room; it is what survives once people are back in it.
Her work joins narrative to behavior: what a team says it believes, and what it does on a Tuesday afternoon when the old habit would normally win.
Makes sense of complexity and turns it into stories that move people to act
Hundreds of programmes with complex organisations
More than 25 years helping organisations understand what matters, challenge assumptions and turn strategy into meaningful action.
Before focusing on leadership and organisational transformation, Iñaki spent 18 years in brand and business strategy, becoming a Partner and Strategy Director at an agency in Midtown Manhattan. His experience includes strategic work for P&G, Frito-Lay, Yum! Brands, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and other global brands.
His career has taken him across Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, including three years leading a strategy team working on P&G's Asia-Pacific business.
Today, he brings that commercial and international experience together with leadership, storytelling, future thinking and organisational behaviour to help people see challenges differently and act with greater clarity and conviction.
