Six engagements,
told honestly.
Every case below is real in shape and anonymised in fact: details altered, identitiesmerged, numbers rounded to the honest lie of a rounded number. Confidentiality is the first deliverableof this practice — which is why these read like parables and are cited like law.
The merger paper that had to survive a partnership vote
A mid-sized firm, a proposed merger, and a partnership deeply divided before the paper was written.The diagnostic found the real problem in an afternoon: the draft argued merger logic while the partners'real question was identity. We rebuilt the paper to answer the question the room was actually asking —'what survives?' — before the question of scale. The vote passed with the dissent genuinely heard ratherthan merely counted. What lasted: the firm now writes every transformation paper to the 'what survives'standard first.
Ninety minutes recovered from every audit committee
A regional practice whose committee papers had grown to eighty pages of workings in search of arecommendation. The audit found the ask buried at median page thirty-four. We rebuilt the house paper toa one-page position standard, workings attached; ran the House Voice Programme for the senior cohort.Within two quarters, average committee pack length fell by half and the managing partner's summary — 'weargue at the start of the meeting now' — is the best testimonial the practice never published.
The proposal that lost politely, twice
A boutique consultancy had reached the final two on a flagship public-sector framework twice — andlost both times to a rival everyone privately considered duller. The intensive found the pattern in thefirst hour: every section opened with method rather than outcome, so the panel met the firm's diligencelong before its thinking. We re-architected the proposal outcome-first and rehearsed the presentationagainst the panel's likely boredom. Won the third attempt. What lasted: the firm's proposal template nowbegins with a section titled 'What you get', and the rival has noticed.
A handover argued in advance
A professional-services partnership facing its first contested succession in a generation asked forhelp with the incoming managing partner's first hundred days — specifically, with the papers andaddresses that would define it. We built the succession voice deliberately: the first address topartners argued around three commitments, each stated once and never repeated into noise; the firstcommittee cycle restructured to start with the ask. Two years on, the partner reports the return of asensation she had thought lost to the role: evenings.
The style guide that finally died
A sixty-page style guide, eleven years old, cited by nobody, enforced by two true believers and oneenforcer with a red pen. The organisation knew it had failed; the guide's own introduction broke itsfirst rule by paragraph three. We replaced it with a single worked page — five principles, each with abefore-and-after from the organisation's real documents — plus a House Voice Programme to make the pagemuscle memory. The enforcer has retired the red pen to writing better first drafts instead.
The standing red pen
A professional-services founder, twelve years into a business built on personal persuasion, faced thescaling problem every founder meets: the firm's voice lived in her and could not be delegated. Theon-call arrangement gives her a fixed day each month — part editor, part sounding board — and gave thefirm its first written arguments: why we scope this way, why we decline that work, what we promise thatothers will not. Her summary of the arrangement, after eighteen months: 'I bought a red pen and got aninheritance for the business.'
It is never (only) the writing.
In every engagement the presenting symptom was prose and theunderlying condition was unargued structure: a position never stated, a trade-off never owned, an asknever fronted. Fix the argument and the sentences, stubbornly, fix themselves. That is the whole method —the rest of this site is footnotes to it.