Strategy with Integrity
Strategy work for founders and leaders who want what they build, measure and reward to match what they say they value. It brings twenty years of design and product leadership, co-founding a company and systems thinking together, so the mission doesn’t quietly bend around the incentives.
Where strategy and values drift apart
Startups, growing companies and purpose-driven organisations tend to hit the same gaps.
- The mission sounds different in the pitch deck, the all hands and the sprint board.
- You’ve just raised, and the targets that came with the money are starting to steer the roadmap.
- The numbers are going up, and something about what you’re building feels less trustworthy for it.
- The roadmap is really a list of requests from whoever asked loudest or most recently.
- Research happens after the decision has been made, to back it up.
- The people closest to your customers saw the problem coming, and nobody asked them.
- Targets are set before anyone asks what the team can actually carry.
- Your best people are tired, and the plan assumes they’ll keep finding more.
These usually get treated as execution problems. More often the strategy is rewarding something different from what the organisation values, and people are doing exactly what the incentives ask of them.
Value, reward and consequence
Every decision in this work runs through three questions, and integrity is when the answers line up. To find where a gap is coming from, I use the same three layers as the Coherence Framework: state, story and structure.
What you say matters
Your mission, values, pitch and strategy. I take them at their word to begin with, because that’s the standard the rest of the work is measured against.
What your strategy encourages
Your targets, metrics, roadmap, funding terms and incentives, and what they actually ask people to do. This is where the real strategy lives.
What it sets in motion
What those rewards lead to two or three steps out, for your customers, your team, the communities you touch and the living world. Most harm in purpose-driven work is a consequence nobody chose.
What I help leaders ask, and why
Design taught me to stay with the problem before reaching for a solution. Co-founding a company taught me what growth pressure does to good intentions. Systems thinking taught me to look at what a strategy rewards and what it sets in motion.
Organisations often solve the problem in front of them rather than the one causing it. Starting from the problem, not the solution, is the oldest lesson in design and still the most skipped.
Every target and metric is an incentive. If you don’t decide what your strategy rewards, the numbers will decide for you.
Every item should trace back to the strategy and to a real need. If nobody can say why, it’s usually there because someone senior asked for it.
The people most affected by a decision are often the least consulted, and they tend to see the risks first.
A choice that lifts one number can quietly erode trust somewhere else. Thinking two or three steps past a decision is where systems thinking earns its keep.
Activity is easy to count and outcomes are harder. Good measures show whether people are better off, not only whether they clicked.
A strategy that ignores capacity burns out the people delivering it, and a burnt out team can’t deliver any strategy well.
From listening to a strategy that holds
Listen
Conversations with your leadership, your team, your customers and the people affected but rarely consulted, so the strategy starts from what’s true.
Map what you reward
A clear picture of what your targets, metrics and incentives actually encourage, where they pull against your values, and what they set in motion.
Rebuild
A strategy story your team believes, a roadmap tied to it and to what the team can carry, and measures with guardrails that flag harm early.
Hand over
Simple rituals and templates that keep it honest once I’ve gone, and check-ins to see that it holds.
Shaped around where you are
Some organisations need the whole thing, and some need one part of it done well.
Strategy projects
All four stages over six to ten weeks, for a leadership team at a turning point.
Reward map sprints
Three weeks to see what your strategy really rewards, ending in a half day session with your leadership team.
Leadership offsites
One or two days working through your strategy story and what you reward, together.
Coaching and team training
One to one support for founders and leaders, and training for product and design teams in research, roadmaps and measuring what matters.
Where it sits alongside other work
Most strategy work treats the incentives as a detail of delivery. This work starts from the assumption that what you reward is your real strategy, whatever the documents say.
Value is the starting point
Most strategy starts from market position and growth, with values treated as branding. I start from what you say you value and what you actually reward, and work outwards from the gap.
Goals get questioned too
Goal setting helps teams line up and move faster, and assumes the goals are right. I ask what each target encourages people to do, and what it sets in motion two or three steps out.
Values follow through
Values work puts the mission into words. I follow those words into the roadmap, the targets and the metrics, which is where values are kept or quietly dropped.
Organisational design asks how you should be arranged to deliver a strategy. This work asks whether the strategy, and what it rewards, matches what you stand for. The Coherence Framework sits between the two, looking at how you run.
Twenty years, from the bottom of the ladder up
I’ve sat in most of the seats around a product and a business, which is why I treat strategy, what gets built and what gets measured as one joined up practice.
Designer
Starting at the bottom of the ladder, learning how brands and products are made by making them.
Marketing
Seeing the other side of the product: how people find it, what makes them care, and what the numbers say.
Web developer
A hybrid role bridging design and tech, clearing the bottlenecks that open up when the two don’t speak the same language.
Product design and leadership
Since 2018, leading product and product design from startups to enterprise, including crisis tools adopted by 22 government departments.
Co-founding SIX
I co-founded SIX, Australia’s first platform to bring ethical investing and shareholder activism together, and as chief product officer led the product from its first concept. It was grounded in user research and data from the start, and it taught me to think through every part of a business, from its processes and partners to the people it serves and the targets it has to hit.
Scale amplifies what’s already there
I’ve built products at national scale under crisis conditions, and I’ve seen what happens when speed outruns alignment. The product ships, the numbers look good, and the cost lands on the team and on the people the product was meant to serve.
That’s why I don’t treat strategy as a plan for going faster. A roadmap is where an organisation’s values meet what it actually builds, and its targets are where they meet what it rewards. When those line up, teams do fewer things better and the people closest to the customer get listened to. It’s the question the Coherence Framework asks of how an organisation runs, asked of what it builds and how it grows.
Bring it to your leadership team
I work with founders of mission-led startups, leaders of not-for-profits, social enterprises and values-led businesses, and product and design leaders inside larger organisations.
Tell me what you’re working on and where it feels out of line.