ian mclellan
Intelligence. Culture. Identity.

Your business measures everything except the things you first notice.

The Intelligence and Culture Diagnostic turns noticing into knowing. It takes ten minutes and your report is on screen immediately.

Begin The Diagnostic →

From Noticing To Knowing

You know your business to the last decimal point. New business pipelines, margin, headcount, utilisation, all metrics you expect and measure. Your business also produces issues that surface weeks after you first sensed them. A senior person agrees with everything in a meeting they would once have argued with. The work produced by AI no longer feels like yours. Your people seem to laugh less than they used to.

Noticing something is not the same as knowing it. The space between noticing and knowing is where many of your problems sit. Measurement turns what you notice into what you know. Knowing returns your focus to where it does the most good, building the organisation you want to build.

What Connects Your Problems

Most problems start and end with people, and the majority are created unintentionally. AI solves an efficiency problem in one area and creates a people problem in another. Your people's expertise sits within a domain. The problems you need them to solve run across domains. These issues begin in one place and the consequences arrive later in another.

The diagnostic reads and measures across these boundaries. Finding where each problem sits, how far its consequences have reached and which ones to solve first.

Ian McLellan

How I Work

I do this work because I like being inside a problem. The part that is often missed, working out why something is happening the way it does, is the part I am drawn to.

I have spent my career inside large professional service organisations: WPP Media, Ogilvy, R/GA and Dentsu. I have held global business and people leadership roles, partnering with senior marketing leaders at global brands: Coca-Cola, Google, Uber, Kellanova and IKEA. This is where I learned to see how organisations work both vertically and horizontally, and to listen for the issues that show up repeatedly in different places.

Most of the answers you need are already inside your organisation. My work is to listen closely enough to draw out what is already there and give it a form you can act on.

The Diagnostic

The Intelligence and Culture Diagnostic

When you look at how your senior team is operating right now, how would you describe their capacity to think beyond the immediate pressure in front of them?

What does your answer tell you?

This is one of the questions the diagnostic asks you. It reads your answers together, and shows you the shape they make across four areas of your business: Culture and Leadership, People and Client Engagement, AI Adoption and Judgment, Operations and Process.

Ten minutes. Your report is on screen immediately. No obligation.

The report gives you clarity on the problems you have been noticing, and direction through the ambiguity around them. The conversation after it is where we shape the plan to solve them, together.

Sample diagnostic report: a four-area spidergram with group scoring across Culture and Leadership, People and Client Engagement, AI Adoption and Judgment, Operations and Process

Where Our Work Begins

The design and solution we develop is built around you. What the work involves depends on what the listening and diagnostic find.

The next step is an exploratory conversation. You talk through where you want your organisation to go and what is getting in the way. I share how I would approach solving your problems.

We both leave the conversation with a sense of how the work would feel and where it would begin.