Six steps.Understand it first. Then redesign it.
The first three produce the map. The last three are what the map is for.
Ground
What the organisation already says about itself.
Before anyone is asked a single question, we build the organisation as it describes itself — so the first interview never has to open with “so, what do you do?”.
Nothing for you to prepare
One list — the roles, how many people are in each, which department — and whatever documentation you already have lying around. No data extraction, no system access, no IT project to schedule first.
Most of it is already public
Job adverts, annual reports, procurement policy and tenders describe an organisation better than most organisations expect. We read them; you assemble nothing.
Establish what goes in and what comes out
A citizen files an objection and a decision comes back. A tenant reports a leak and the leak gets fixed. Those chains are the spine of the map; everything else is how the one becomes the other.
So the first question is a real one
This is what lets an interview open with “the instruction says you close this in that system — do you?” instead of “describe your work”. It is the difference between a job description and an answer.
Job adverts are the richest public source there is, and structurally underrated. An advert describes a role in detail, names the systems it works with, identifies the adjacent roles, and gives away what is changing.
Annual reports, procurement policy, press releases and tenders do the rest — tenders in particular give away system migrations before they land.
Grounding also fixes what goes in and what comes out: the objection that arrives, the decision that leaves. We already know what an organisation does; what nobody can describe is the chain of work in between.
Whatever documentation you already have is read the same way, and the gaps it leaves become questions we take into the conversations. Nobody has to write anything new for us, and nothing is asked of IT.
Ask
Fifteen minutes. Everyone. In their own words.
We interview everyone in scope. Not a sample, not a steering group — everyone, at their own desk, in their own language.
Everyone, not twenty
Twenty interviews tell you what twenty people think, and somebody chose those twenty. Asking everybody removes the choice, and with it the reason the answer always comes back agreeable.
Fifteen minutes, on their own time
No diary to book, no room, no travel, no waiting for the one week everybody is in. It runs on a phone between two meetings, in nine languages, and people can stop and come back.
They will say things they would not say to you
It is anonymous to the employer, and everyone is told exactly that before they begin. That is not a courtesy. It is the reason the answers are worth having at all.
Participants get something back
Everyone who takes part can see what the conversations in their own role produced. People who get nothing back stop answering, and a method nobody answers is worth nothing.
Twenty consultant-led interviews run one after another, through a single diary. That is what makes an answer take a quarter of a year. Automated conversations do not queue, and each one starts from what the previous ones established — which is what turns a sample into everyone.
Participation is the whole game. At fifteen per cent response you have self-selection again, and the only advantage of the method has evaporated. So it is built for somebody answering on a phone between two meetings, in the language they think in, able to stop and come back.
Everyone who takes part can come back later and see what the conversations in their own role produced. It describes the role, never the person — you should recognise your work without finding yourself in it.
It is finished when everyone has been asked and every chain can be walked start to finish. A gap that survives is either a finding — nobody here knows what happens between intake and assessment — or a hole in our work, and the report says which.
Difference
Where what you expect and what happens come apart.
Expectation against reality, per process — and the contradictions between levels.
Expectation against reality
Which steps nobody has written down, and which steps you believe are happening that nobody does any more.
Handovers and waiting time
Where work leaves a department, what happens in the gap, and which roles carry knowledge alone.
Contradictions between levels
The board thinks X, the floor says Y. Until now there was no instrument that heard both at once.
The routes that are in no system
One person uses the system as designed. One keeps a spreadsheet because it rejects a case type. One phones a colleague because it beats the queue. Process mining cannot see any of it, and it is the first thing a redesign runs into.
Shadow tooling gets its own section: the spreadsheet, the group chat, the phone call. These are not failures to be stamped out — they are the load-bearing parts of the real process.
These routes are the material nobody else produces: anyone sampling one person per role cannot see them, and process mining cannot either, because a spreadsheet and a phone call leave no trace to mine. They are also where a redesign breaks, on first contact with the route the documentation never had.
They are reported like everything else — attached to a role, never to a name. “Four people in this role bypass the case system for renewals” is a finding about a process, and it is actionable. The same sentence with somebody's name in it is gossip, and it is not something a client ever receives.
Direct
The investment case, ranked and bounded.
With margins instead of false precision, and an explicit account of what we could not establish.
Ranked, and it says what it rests on
Every recommendation says how many people it rests on. A board can tell the difference between something nine people described and something that came up once, before it commits money to either.
Margins, not false precision
A number that shows its own margin of error is worth more than a number that merely looks precise.
What we could not establish
Which roles under-responded, which processes stayed out of reach, and where the conclusion is thin. You should know which parts of your own map to lean on.
Every recommendation says how many people it rests on, so a board can see how thick the evidence is before committing money to it — and can see when it is thin. A finding two people describe and one that nine people describe both belong in front of you. What you must never be handed is the two dressed up as the nine.
Redesign
AI designed in, not bought alongside.
If we designed this process today, knowing what a model can do, what would it look like?
Redesign
The process takes a different shape. Steps disappear rather than getting faster.
Leave alone
Some processes are good, too rare, or too judgement-heavy. A report that recommends AI everywhere is a brochure.
Delete
Some processes exist because a system from 2009 demanded them. They deserve to disappear, not to be automated.
What stays human, and why, is a mandatory part of every proposal. That is not a concession to the works council but good design: a process nobody understands any more fails on the first exception.
Build
On the process that runs, not the one you expect.
Off-the-shelf AI assumes a standard process. No organisation runs the standard process.
Built on observed reality
The solution follows the process that runs, including the spreadsheet, the group chat and the phone call.
The expensive part is already paid
Working out what the software should do normally dominates the cost. Steps one to five settled it.
What stays human, and why
A mandatory part of every proposal. A process nobody understands fails on the first exception.
We do not sell you the build
What leaves is an executable specification; who delivers it is your choice. An advisor who names his own build arm is no longer an advisor.
What leaves is an executable specification: what the software has to do, on the process as it actually runs. Who builds it is your choice — an implementation partner, a supplier you already work with, or your own team.
We do not sell you the build. An advisor who also sells the solution is no longer giving advice, and the organisations most likely to bring us in are the ones that build. Staying out of that work is what keeps us usable to them.
People tell an anonymous interviewer what they will never tell a consultant.
This is the section a works council reads first, and it is also the section that decides whether the answers are worth anything. Somebody who suspects their manager will read it back describes the process in the manual. Somebody who knows nobody can is where the truth comes from.
01
What you receive
Findings about roles and processes. What the work does, where it waits, what it goes around — never who said it.
02
What nobody can look up
There is no per-employee view. Not hidden behind a role, not switchable on request, not on a plan we sell you later.
03
What a manager sees
The same as everybody else. No team breakdown that resolves to one person, and no way to ask who gave a particular answer.
04
What we tell them first
Exactly what happens to their answers, in their own language, before they type a word. A promise made afterwards is not one.
05
What they get back
Everyone who takes part can see what the conversations in their own role produced. Nothing in it is carried by a single person.
You get what the work does. Never who said it.
Anonymity is usually sold to the works council as a concession. It is not one. It is the single thing that separates fifteen minutes worth reading from fifteen minutes of somebody reciting their job description, and it is the reason this method produces anything a survey does not.
What compoundsA map is worth more read against every other map in its sector than on its own.
What a large consultancy really sells is its basis for comparison. Ours is built one engagement at a time: after five or six in a single sector, which handover fails in every housing association rather than only in yours.
What carries across is how a sector is put together — what its roles are called, which systems keep turning up, which handover is always the one that fails. Your own map never leaves your engagement, the comparison is opt-in and agreed in writing at the start, and being first in a sector costs you nothing: it only means your comparison arrives with the second map instead of the first.