Most people in the room want to move fast. Delivery Design is the practice of making sure fast doesn't become expensive. It starts before execution, and it's willing to recommend slowing down.
Request a 15-minute delivery checkThe hardest moment to question a strategy is right after it gets approved. The energy is high, the budget is committed, the team is mobilized. Nobody wants to hear that the conditions for delivery haven't been designed yet. That's exactly when it matters most to ask.
Delivery Design is a diagnostic and design practice that comes in at the moment of maximum enthusiasm and asks the uncomfortable questions before momentum makes them expensive to answer.
This is not change management. Not agile coaching. Not another framework to implement. It's a clear-eyed look at whether your organization actually has what it needs to do what you've approved, and it's willing to recommend slowing down when the conditions aren't ready.
How decisions get made when the original plan doesn't cover the new reality. How meaning survives handoffs between teams. How learning happens early enough to matter. How progress becomes visible to the people actually doing the work.
It's not a prescription for how to run your organization. It's not execution support or implementation management. It's diagnosis, honest, specific, and designed to give you a clear picture of what to fix and in what order.
The CLEAR framework identifies the five structural conditions required for change to hold under pressure. Most stalled transformations are missing at least two of them, and the absence is rarely obvious until you look for it directly.
Every engagement starts with diagnosis. What happens after depends on what we find.
A 2.5-hour working session, run as a webinar or in-person in Toronto, bringing together senior leaders from a small number of organizations facing similar delivery pressure. Each participant examines a real outcome they're personally accountable for against the five CLEAR conditions. The format is deliberately cross-organizational: hearing peers from different sectors name the same stalls in real time is more clarifying than any case study. All four outcomes are valid: proceed, pause and design, re-sequence, or stop. Honest diagnosis is the point.
If the diagnostic reveals conditions that need to be built, this phase designs them explicitly, decision boundaries, handoff protocols, learning loops, and progress visibility mechanisms. Not theoretical documents. Operating agreements your teams can actually use when facing real trade-offs under pressure.
Support for keeping the conditions intact as organizational reality pushes back. Spotting early degradation before it becomes a crisis. The goal isn't dependence on facilitation, it's building your organization's capability to recognize and design delivery conditions independently.
A large public utility invested significantly in an employee innovation platform, operating on a reasonable belief: employees know best what needs to change. The platform launched. Voting happened. Ideas accumulated. Almost nothing moved.
The problem wasn't the ideas. It was the conditions. There were no decision boundaries around which ideas could advance. No teams with authority and time to execute. No clarity on what the organization actually needed versus what was simply popular. The platform rewarded crowdsourcing, not delivery.
Through iterative redesign, building specific campaigns around identified organizational needs, establishing teams with real timelines and explicit decision authority, and creating roles that carried accountability, the platform became something genuinely different. Employees and partners across the organization now engage with a system that has the structure to turn ideas into actual change.
"We stopped asking people to vote for their favourite ideas and started building the conditions for the best ones to actually land."
Between 2011 and 2019, Boeing attempted a rapid upgrade of the 737 to compete with Airbus. Engineers used software, MCAS to compensate for larger engine placement while avoiding the need for additional pilot training. The competitive logic was sound. The delivery conditions were not.
Clarity was missing: engineers optimized for "no additional pilot training" while safety teams optimized for "prevent stalls." These goals conflicted directly but were never resolved, just hidden. Latitude was absent: engineers who raised safety concerns had no authority to stop or slow development. Exchange collapsed: MCAS wasn't disclosed to the FAA during certification. A risk analysis predicting additional crashes was never escalated after the first one. Adaptation was punished: after 189 deaths in the first crash, Boeing didn't ground the fleet, financial commitment made course correction feel too expensive. Results diverged: leadership saw certification achieved. Pilots saw an undocumented system and confusing emergencies.
A CLEAR delivery check in 2015, when stall problems with MCAS first emerged, would have immediately surfaced these fragilities. Any one of the legitimate outcomes (pause, redesign, extend timeline) would have been dramatically cheaper than $87 billion in losses and 346 lives.
"The conditions matter more than the talent. World-class engineering organizations produce catastrophic failures when delivery conditions are broken."
Strategy consultant. MBA, Rotman School of Management.
I've spent my career at the intersection of strategy and execution, at Accenture, Ontario Power Generation, and across a range of organizations navigating complex transformation. The pattern I kept seeing was the same: smart people, sound strategies, and transformations that quietly fell apart between approval and reality.
This work applies equally across sectors. Delivery conditions break in engineering firms, non-profits, public agencies, and healthcare systems for exactly the same structural reasons.
Delivery Design is my attempt to name that gap precisely and fix it systematically. I work with senior leaders who are accountable for outcomes that matter and willing to look honestly at whether their conditions are designed to support them.
This practice is currently operating through invitation-only diagnostic sessions. If your situation sounds like a fit, the best first step is a short conversation.
A short conversation to assess whether your situation is a fit for a diagnostic session. Not a sales call, a genuine qualification on both sides. If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you.
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