Change & Culture Consulting
When strategy fails, it’s rarely because it was the wrong strategy.
It’s because no-one translated it into language the people expected to engage with it and deliver it could understand.
I’ve spent the last 30 years working with corporate networks and boutique companies; advising clients and being the client; I’ve gained experience in PR, business communications consulting, employee engagement and brand positioning across different countries and cultures.
I’ve seen the same failure play out, organisation after organisation: something important not being communicated well, or not communicated at all.
That repetition is its own kind of training. It builds a diagnostic instinct for exactly where translation breaks down, and what it takes to fix it.
Root & Reason is that instinct, turned into a practice.
Who is this for?
I work with organisations navigating structural or cultural change (restructures, mergers, leadership transitions, culture resets, brand repositioning) where the strategy is set but the story isn’t yet.
This is change communications work, and it runs in two directions: helping employees understand and act on change internally, and helping external stakeholders understand and believe in it.
Same translation problem, two audiences.
Complex into simple. Simple into compelling.
MULTIPLE SECTOR EXPERTISE, ONE DISCIPLINE
FMCG, Not-For-Profit, Financial Services, Technology
BUILT DELIBERATELY
Four years in the making, being laser-focused on where I can best add value.
PARTNERSHIPS, NOT PROJECTS
Change communications that holds through the full arc, not a one-off deliverable.
If your strategy is sound and people are still not getting behind it, that’s not a strategy problem. That’s a translation problem and that’s exactly what I work on.
APPROACH
Most change communication goes wrong before a single word is written
Because no-one properly diagnosed the problem first. That’s where I start.
Leadership usually knows something isn’t landing, so the instinct is to communicate harder: more town halls, more employee newsletters, bigger external campaigns.
That rarely fixes it, because the breakdown is rarely where it seems to be. It’s further upstream: in what’s actually being asked of people, what’s changed for them, or what hasn’t really been decided yet even though everyone’s being told it has.
What an engagement looks like..
Engagements run in three stages:
1.
2.
3.
Audit and diagnosis
Before anything is written, I look at what’s actually happening: what’s changed, what hasn’t been decided yet, where the breakdown really sits. Once that’s clear, we agree the way ahead together.
Narrative and message-building
This is usually done through a client workshop, discussing and debating at least three potential narrative directions before landing on the right one.
Delivery
What this looks like depends on what’s actually needed. Sometimes the narrative and messaging work is the final deliverable. Other times it becomes an internal playbook for teams to work from, or an external communications strategy to carry the narrative out into the market. I scope this to what the organisation needs, not to a fixed package.
I work this way as a partnership through the full arc, not a single handover. Change doesn’t happen in one workshop or one document. It happens over the months after, in the moments where people are deciding whether to believe what they’ve been told.
When to bring me in..
This work is for organisations experiencing some nature of change:
Restructures. People don’t yet understand what’s changing or why.
Leadership transitions. Trust has to be rebuilt, not assumed.
Mergers. Two cultures and two narratives need to become one.
Culture resets. The old story no longer matches where the organisation is going.
If the strategy exists but isn’t yet believed (internally, externally, or both), that’s the gap I work in.
Before deciding what to say, it’s worth finding out why the strategy isn’t landing.
That’s where we’ll begin.
ABOUT
Why Root & Reason exists
Thirty years ago, I started working in communications.
Within a few years I was leading a small consultancy doing upstream strategic communications work, often pitching directly against the Big Four consultancies and winning on the strength of the thinking, not the size of the firm.
That was the standard I set for what the work should feel like.
A few years ago, I took two senior roles expecting to work at that level: strategic, close to the real decisions. In both, the opportunity turned out narrower than the role. The strategic mandates I’d been brought in for weren’t there to win, so the work became executional rather than strategic.
That was the pattern: capability on one side, scope of opportunity on the other, and no amount of good work closing the gap from inside someone else’s organisation. The next move wasn’t going to be a different employer. It was going to be removing the mismatch entirely.
I took my time to build Root & Reason, making sure I was clear on the work I wanted to focus on, where I want to add value and where I can have meaningful impact.
Not a thoughtless leap, a carefully considered construction.
This time, the terms are mine. I’m staying narrow: the specific work I know I’m good at, and that actually moves something for a client rather than just occupying time.
Fewer engagements, real impact, work I’d stand behind.
Underneath all of this is one belief: most of what gets called a “strategy problem” is actually a scope-and-translation problem. The thinking is sound, but either the mandate was never big enough to use it, or it was never carried to the people who had to act on it. I’d seen that gap from the inside, in my own career, before I ever started closing it for clients.
Root & Reason is built to close it properly, for organisations that need a real, lasting solution, based on thorough diagnosis, not on an assumption.
That same instinct, finding the real problem before treating the symptom, is also what led me to build Food Shrink, my nutrition consulting practice. Different domain, same diagnosis-first approach.
If that’s the kind of thinking your organisation needs, let’s talk.
CONTACT
The best first step is a conversation, not a form.
If you’re navigating a change where the strategy’s ahead of the story, tell me a little about what’s going on. I’ll come back to you within two working days to set up a time to talk properly.
A few things that help, if you have them to hand:
What’s changing, and roughly what stage you’re at
Who needs to understand or believe it (internally, externally, or both)
What’s prompted you to look for help now