Ventures
Two vehicles. One method: operating models hold when they are designed around observed behaviour, not prescribed process.
Enterprise transformation consulting: AgiliTea Ltd (UK)
AgiliTea is the practice I deliver through. We work with leadership teams and boards in complex, regulated environments, redesigning the decision systems, operating models and execution rhythms that determine whether an organisation can act coherently under pressure.
We do not deploy frameworks. We start from how leaders actually decide, how teams actually coordinate, and where the friction really sits between intent and execution. That usually means decision rights, portfolio prioritisation, funding mechanisms and leadership cadence, in that order, because changing the ceremony without changing who can say yes achieves nothing.
Sectors: pharmaceuticals and life sciences, FMCG, healthcare, government and public sector, telecoms and digital platforms. Clients have included Novartis, Bayer, Sandoz, JTI, Westminster City Council and Croydon Council.
Peace Through Prosperity
The self-funded social innovation lab I co-founded with my wife Sahar. Over 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs across eight countries have built businesses through it, employing other people and staying open after we leave.
Its youth arm, Enabling Grassroots Change, runs alumni teams across Angola, Ethiopia, Türkiye and Pakistan, and publishes The Grassroots Playbook: 17 validated community projects, 37 pages, free, in six languages, designed to run with no budget at all.
Everything we validate, we open source.
What a mandate usually looks like
Most of the work is embedded rather than advisory, and runs six to twenty-four months or longer, at a level adjacent to the executive committee. Long enough to see a decision system change, and to still be there when it is tested.
Shorter executive stabilisation work happens where a programme is failing now and the question is what to stop before anything else can start.
Occasionally a permanent director-level role is the right answer, usually where an organisation has concluded that the capability needs to live inside rather than be bought in repeatedly.
What does not work, and what I turn down: a short diagnostic with no mandate to change anything. Producing a report about a decision system you have no authority to alter is an expensive way to document a problem the organisation already knows it has.
Why the community work is on this page
Because it is not a side project, and filing it as one would misrepresent where the method came from.
Grassroots systems have no titles, no budgets and no formal authority. That makes them the cleanest available view of how leadership, accountability and decision quality actually form, before hierarchy and incentives arrive to obscure them. A pattern that holds on a pavement in Karachi with no budget behind it tends to hold in Basel with a great deal of budget behind it. The reverse is not reliably true.
What I learn there goes directly into how I design governance that survives pressure at Novartis, Bayer, JTI or a London borough.
Enterprise consulting pays for it. Grassroots research keeps it honest.
Find twenty minutes for a virtual tea and let us work out whether there is something here.