Organisational challenges
The Spotted Ape
Where are teams stuck?
The same visible symptom can have different causes. Use these questions to find a useful starting point, not to score or diagnose your organisation.
Find a starting point
What is getting in the way?
The Planning Trap
There is a plan, but leaders have not agreed where to compete, why customers will choose the organisation, or what it will stop doing.
Analytical Paralysis
The evidence keeps growing while the choice, the assumptions and the next test remain unclear.
Knowledge That Does Not Reach the Work
Important knowledge sits in documents and repositories, while teams struggle to use it in changing work.
Tacit Knowledge Silos
Experienced practitioners know how the work gets done, but that knowledge is difficult to share or learn through practice.
The Innovation Disconnect
Promising ideas and experiments do not connect to strategic choices, operational capability or a next decision.
Executive Alignment
Leaders agree on aspirations but hold different assumptions about customers, competition, trade-offs or capabilities.
01 / Strategic choice
The Planning Trap
What it can look like
Planning documents describe targets, initiatives and resource allocations, but the leadership team cannot explain the connected choices intended to create a competitive advantage. Priorities accumulate; explicit exclusions do not.
Why it persists
Planning is often easier to coordinate around what the organisation controls than around uncertain customer response and competitive reaction. Analysis can refine assumptions without requiring anyone to make a trade-off.
The underlying issue
The organisation may have a plan without an integrated strategy: connected choices about ambition, competitive focus, advantage, the capabilities required and the management practices that support them.
A useful intervention
The Strategic Decision Workshop uses the Strategy Choice Cascade described by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin in Playing to Win to connect the team’s choices, clarify exclusions and identify assumptions to test.
02 / Assumption testing
Analytical Paralysis
What it can look like
Teams commission more research, compare another set of options and defer commitment because no available analysis appears to remove uncertainty.
Why it persists
Evidence can narrow a question, but it cannot choose the organisation’s goals or eliminate uncertainty about the future. Without a decision rule, another plausible alternative can always reopen the discussion.
The underlying issue
The team may lack a working hypothesis and a clear account of what evidence would change its mind. Deductive and inductive analysis matter, but so does abductive reasoning: asking what might be true, then testing it.
A useful intervention
The Strategy Prototyping Studio helps teams create alternatives, identify the conditions each alternative requires, and design bounded scenarios or experiments that can inform a choice.
03 / Knowledge flows
Knowledge That Does Not Reach the Work
What it can look like
The organisation has manuals, reports and training materials, yet teams cannot reliably bring relevant knowledge into a new customer problem, changed process or unfamiliar situation.
Why it persists
Repositories preserve explicit information, but access alone does not create the context, relationships or practice needed to apply it. As conditions change, stored answers can become less useful without a way to interpret and revise them.
The underlying issue
Knowledge is treated mainly as a stock to store and distribute, rather than also as a flow created through work, exchange, feedback and adaptation.
A useful intervention
The Knowledge Sharing & Organisational Learning Lab maps where useful knowledge resides, how it moves between people and work, and where teams can learn by making and testing in a bounded setting.
04 / Tacit practice
Tacit Knowledge Silos
What it can look like
Work depends on the judgement of a few experienced practitioners. Their expertise is difficult to express as instructions, new colleagues have limited opportunities to observe it, and teams repeat avoidable discovery.
Why it persists
Much practical knowledge is situated: people notice cues, make adjustments and coordinate with others in ways they may not be able to explain in a document. Conventional training can describe a practice without recreating the conditions in which it is learned.
The underlying issue
The organisation has not designed enough opportunities for observation, participation, peer exchange and reflection around real work.
A useful intervention
The Knowledge Sharing & Organisational Learning Lab identifies practitioners, relationships and recurring work where knowledge can move through communities of practice, shared tasks and creation spaces.
05 / Experimentation
The Innovation Disconnect
What it can look like
Teams generate concepts and run pilots, but promising activity does not change a strategic choice, build a capability or establish what the organisation should test next.
Why it persists
Exploration can become detached from the decisions it is meant to inform. Conversely, an existing strategy can constrain experiments to small improvements that never test whether the original assumptions still hold.
The underlying issue
The learning loop is incomplete: a hypothesis is not connected to a meaningful strategic question, and results do not lead to a decision to continue, adapt or stop.
A useful intervention
The Strategy Prototyping Studio connects knowing, making and playful reframing. Teams prototype plausible futures, surface assumptions and agree what an experiment could help them learn.
06 / Shared choices
Executive Alignment
What it can look like
Leaders express similar ambitions but disagree in practice about which customers matter, how the organisation will compete, which capabilities to develop or what risks it will accept.
Why it persists
Broad goals can conceal incompatible assumptions. A meeting may record agreement without exposing the trade-offs or clarifying who owns the decision and the next test.
The underlying issue
Alignment is treated as consensus on language rather than a shared, revisable set of choices and an understanding of what those choices require.
A useful intervention
An Executive Offsite or the Strategic Decision Workshop makes differences in assumptions visible, tests critical hypotheses and records the choices, open questions and owners that follow.
Scope before solution
A starting point, not a diagnosis.
These patterns can overlap and have different causes in different organisations. An initial conversation helps establish the decision or work system involved, who needs to participate and whether a workshop is a sensible next step.