💫 CHANGE CATALYST
One problem, DEC⦻DED
No six-week discovery. No predetermined process. No predetermined answer.
Sometimes you don't need another transformation programme, strategy project or workshop. You need to understand what is actually going wrong.
DEC⦻DED is the Humans In The Machine live business problem clinic: a focused way to bring us something that hurts, feels stuck or simply doesn't make sense, and examine it before committing to a response. The concept was explicitly developed as a high-level way of unravelling a problem rather than beginning with a predetermined service or solution.
🔍 Why it matters
“Everyone's busy. Nothing important is moving.”
Problems rarely arrive neatly labelled.
Growth can hide broken economics. A strong product can struggle to find a market. Technology intended to remove friction can create more of it. What looks like a marketing, people, product or operational problem may be the visible consequence of something happening somewhere else.
The danger is jumping from the symptom straight to the solution.
DECODED creates a pause between the two. We start with the pain being experienced right now, unravel the problem at a high level, and work out what deserves attention before adding more activity, capability or complexity.
Because lasting change isn't simply about adding capability. It is about creating greater capacity from the interdependencies already inside the business.
👥 Who is this for?
DECODED is for founders, owners, leaders and teams dealing with a business problem that refuses to fit comfortably inside a functional box.
Particularly when:
everyone can see the symptom, but nobody agrees on the cause;
considerable effort is producing surprisingly little movement;
the obvious solution has already been tried;
different functions have different explanations for the same problem;
something important has become dependent on too few people or systems;
you suspect the brief you've been given isn't actually the problem.
You don't need to know what kind of consultant, specialist or intervention you need.
That's partly the point.
🔮 What we explore
We start with one live problem, not a predetermined methodology.
These are the problems we often hear from founders seeking support, expressing pain and distress and where we can help:
💢 "Everyone loves the concept, but nobody is actually paying for it or using it."
💢 "We’re burning cash way faster than expected, and we don’t know why."
💢 "We poured money into marketing and hiring, but our users leak out the back door."
💢 "We built an incredible product, but we have no repeatable way to get in front of buyers."
💢 "Users keep complaining, but shifting our product roadmap feels like giving up on our vision."
These are the problems we often hear from owners seeking support, expressing pain and distress and where we can help:
💢 "When we decide to invest in new systems, the cost is too high, the project team is bigger than my workforce and the long-term benefits are vague."
💢 "If I take a week off, everything grinds to a halt. I’m stuck working IN the business instead of ON it."
💢 "We hit $3M quickly, but now growth has flatlined and I can't accurately forecast next quarter."
💢 "Everyone is working at 100 mph putting out fires, but we aren't actually moving the business forward."
💢 "Every system upgrade we look at feels like an enterprise money pit with a vendor team bigger than my own staff."
These are the problems we often hear from corporate executives and leaders seeking support, expressing pain and distress and where we can help:
💢 “We cycle through growth and transformation leaders every 18 months, resetting strategy before any program reaches operational maturity."
💢 "Marketing promises an experience Product didn't build, CX handles the fallout, and HR is left trying to culture-hack a structurally broken workflow."
💢 "We agree on corporate strategy in the boardroom, but the second an initiative spans multiple budgets and reporting lines, momentum falters."
💢 "Every time we introduce a new strategic initiative, it gets swallowed by BAU operational noise because teams are incentivized on legacy BAU metrics."
💢 "We spend years and millions planning transformation and innovation initiatives. At launch, customer needs have shifted and usage craters."
From there, we look beyond the presenting symptom.
1️⃣ What's happening?
2️⃣ What's changed?
3️⃣ Where is the strain appearing?
4️⃣ What is connected to it?
5️⃣ What might everyone be assuming?
6️⃣ And where would intervention actually make a difference?
The purpose isn't to manufacture a grand transformation programme. It is to make the problem clearer, more coherent and more actionable.
🛠️ Engagement format: Live brief clinic
Bring us one real business problem.
No polished brief required. No six-week discovery phase. No need to squeeze the problem into one of our services before we have looked at it.
Tell us what's happening and how long it has been happening.
We use the clinic to decode what's really going on before you commit to a response.
From there, one of three things may become clear:
You can act on it yourself.
The problem becomes sufficiently clear that you know what needs to happen next.
We need to look deeper.
The presenting problem points to a wider interdependency worth diagnosing.
HITMxE can help.
There is a defined point of strain where targeted advisory support could create useful movement.
The point isn't to create dependency. It's to create agency.
💭 Final thought
The first answer is rarely the most interesting one. Organisations accumulate explanations for why things aren't working: the market, the customer, the technology, the team, the strategy, the process. Sometimes those explanations are right. Sometimes they're simply the closest visible symptom. DECODED starts before the answer. Bring us the problem. We'll start there. One problem, decoded.