Etiam si omnes, ego non
The old binaries no longer describe the field. Tomorrow is less predictable than it was, and the choice between the first and second option is often no longer sufficient. There is usually a third.
I come from Sweden, where the cold taught us to be prepared or be ill-fated. Cold country teaches what difficult markets teach: the terrain does not negotiate, and preparation is the whole of the work. Kept up long enough it becomes resilience, and resilience sits in the backbone.
My focus is people and the local environment. Strategy is rarely what fails; what fails is the ground it lands on — who decides, who is not in the room, how things are actually done in a given place.
The first option is usually the internal team. The second is usually a large firm. When both have been tried and the ground has not moved, I am normally the third — the one called to close the distance between the decision and the ground it has to land on.
The work is a bridge, and a quiet one: direct channels where they are needed, circumstances identified in advance, what is gathered reduced to a new path. Where there is no bridge, I build it.
And where something will not move, I build over it — and let the water that flows beneath make the peace.