Kill, pivot or commit?
That is the question.
We help you get your answer – and move forward.
Crown & Reach is a boutique consultancy specialising in go-to-market diagnostics, team interventions and strategic redirects.We work with CEOs who've spent millions developing an idea that's stalled and want to stop throwing money at the symptoms.
For example ...
The global conglomerate that had to decide what to do with a four-year old startup they'd acquired. We helped them break out of their "data-driven Catch 22".
The global recruitment firm launching a new consultancy business line who were stuck in internal positioning debates. We helped them break the stalemate and accelerate their go-to-market.
The nonprofit facing strategic uncertainty where a traditional 5-year plan would be too inflexible. We helped them develop a strategy that could adapt to an uncertain future. (Read the case study)
The bootstrapped crypto/AI startup that had built an almost-right product for an almost-right audience. We helped them pivot a few degrees to find a market that's 100x more lucrative.
The 50-person business that needed to bring a failed multi-million-pound technology outsourcing project back in house. We helped them stop the bleeding and find practical ways forward – while maintaining business continuity.
The digital agency who'd been talking about productising an open-source CMS for two entire years. We helped them compress a year of learning into 6 weeks.
The SaaS company with loads of brilliant ideas that kept on failing in the market. We helped them develop a new process and evolve successful products.
The common theme? Everyone agreed that success should be within reach – but the well-trodden path just wasn't working.Why? Because they were all overlooking something crucial-but-hidden in their theory of success.
We are Tom Kerwin ...
Tom is a self-confessed technique fetishist who never stops looking for opportunities to get better results by doing things differently. After studying engineering at Cambridge University he co-founded and successfully exited two startups.Later he started helping organisations set up their innovation and experimentation practices from scratch, gaining experience growing and developing high performing teams.He's boiled down some of his hardest-hitting knowledge into Innovation Tactics, a card deck that's part of the riotously popular Pip Decks series.
and Corissa Nunn
Corissa has a sixth sense for cracks in the plan. She doesn't shout about it, but she just knows when a strategy's on shaky ground or a person’s in the wrong role.Her background in linguistics makes her a natural at translating corporate language into action.She's transformed messaging strategy for multiple orgs, turning confusion into clarity, and clarity into sales.Along the way, she's supported leaders through acquisitions, and coached teams to take them from reactive to proactive.
More than 30,000 people have our methods in their back pocket, courtesy of the Innovation Tactics Pip Deck, authored by Tom Kerwin.Pick up a copy today
About us
Sometimes it's crystal clear what needs to be done within an organisation. Sometimes it isn't. That's when uncertainty bites – and it's what we love to help with most.With over 20 years of experience at the coalface, we've been in your shoes.Unlike ex-military consultancies, the Big Four, or FAANG alumni, we've been leaders in normal organisations – ones that look a lot like yours.We’ve seen everyone nod along in the meetings... then stumble off in completely different directions. We've seen strong-in-the-deck strategies fall apart on contact with reality. We've seen business ideas that should be high ROI burn through millions with nothing to show. And we've turned those situations around.Along the way, we learned how to avoid costly nightmares and find paths to sustainable growth.So even if you're feeling a little uncertain about whether you need our help — or what exactly you need help with — we invite you to book a free diagnostic.
Book an exploratory call
In this 37-minute call, we'll explore your situation together and figure out if there's a fit.If we can help, great. If not, we'll point you toward someone who can - or give you something to try yourself. No pitch, no pressure, and sadly no pastries.
Work with us
1-3 DAYS | 1-3 TEAMS
Lightning Alignment workshop
For diagnosing how aligned a team currently is around a piece of work – and how to get more aligned.You come away from this with an immediate, actionable diagnostic about the level of alignment and – critically – the next things the team can focus on to accelerate progress.It starts with a Strategic Signal Diagnostic, then our custom built Align-O-Matic diagnostic tool.
2 WEEKS | 1 TEAM
Strategic Signal Sprint package
For urgent priorities that a team needs to grasp fast – so they can take high-agency action.In just two weeks, we help leadership teams map their strategy at exactly the right level of granularity, drop deadweight projects, and install a faster signal-to-move loop.No decks, no noise, just traction.
3–4 WEEKS | LEADERSHIP TEAM
Go-To-Market Sprint package
Compress 12 months of learning in the market into a focused 3-4 week sprint that shifts how you think about the constraints and opportunities in your market.We work directly with your leadership team to turn your internal narratives about how to sell your ideas into spiky provocations. Then we show those to people from your potential markets and gather rich signals about what's really going on. Then we work with your leadership team to process those signals into insights that give you ideas you couldn't have had.You get: leadership on the same page with informed thinking, plus a detailed report that exposes the constraints in your market and gives you lots of new, quick-to-implement ideas for making real progress.
2-6 MONTHS | 1-3 TEAMS
Right First Time package
A bespoke engagement for when the stakes are sky-high.Lots has already been invested into trying to get something off the ground. There’s a towering heap of sunk costs. Countless stakeholders are involved – some with totally opposite perspectives. Good strategies keeps getting derailed by misunderstandings.Maybe you’re facing the second (or fifth!) attempt to bring something new to market. Maybe it’s the tricky second-product problem, and you need to roll out a whole other value chain. Maybe you’re refactoring or redesigning something big and important.You’ve been doing everything “right” according to best practice. So why isn’t it working?Together, we'll co-create a custom plan to work closely with you over a period of months to help you crack it.You'll execute way faster, get more control over timelines, and avoid wasted effort.
4 HOURS | 1 PERSON | FROM £149
Master Multiverse Mapping Course
Want to dip a toe in the water before you commit?Try one of our most powerful tools for yourself with our online course. We offer a fully self-paced option as well as a hands-on option.Find out more: Master Multiverse Mapping
37 MINS | 1 PERSON | FREE
Book an exploratory call
In this 37-minute call, we'll explore your situation together and figure out if there's a fit.If we can help, great. If not, we'll point you toward someone who can - or give you something to try yourself. No pitch, no pressure, and sadly no pastries.
Or email us: [email protected]
Tentacles – the Crown & Reach Podcast
With over 100 episodes, our podcast is the best bad podcast out there. By which we mean: raw, unfiltered, unedited conversations. We talk about strategy, sense-making, and the blurry edges between work and all the other stuff. Because sometimes feeling your way through the fog – with limbs outstretched – is the only way to move forward.Listen nowOr search “Tentacles” wherever you normally get your podcasts.
Newer episodes also available through our YouTube channel, like this one:
The Reach - our newsletter
Join over 2,500 readers who get The Reach, our email newsletter, over on Substack.You can expect feature-length pieces that will tickle your brain in a mostly pleasing manner.
A few highlights:
Bunny ducking - Part 3 of the Vision Chasm series (how teams make great progress without agreeing a vision)
How to bend the curve of luck (take advantage of the asymmetry of adaptiveness!)
We need to talk about AirBnB (including a new 2x2 to visualise product risks)
Tumbling into the Vision Chasm (Part 1 of a series on strategy without a vision)
OKRs sound good but they don’t work (it’s not your fault)
Fear-driven development (The Time Machine exercise to understand perceived risks)
Signals > Stories > Options (our simplest powerful exercise)
How to do discovery and delivery at the same time … with Pivot Triggers
Stop polishing 💩 products with this one weird trick (inviting you to do a “Hard Test”)
Master Multiverse Mapping Course
Want to dip a toe in the water before you commit?Try one of our most powerful tools for yourself with our online course. We offer a fully self-paced option as well as a hands-on option.Find out more: Master Multiverse Mapping
How we work
We offer consulting, training and coaching. Based in the UK, we work with clients remotely and in person.Baked into all our methods, you'll always find:
A living strategy
You need to orient yourself towards the signals that matter. Stretch outward with real intelligence. Sense earlier, move smarter, learn from the edges. Fast. Like an octopus.Organisations that can think and act at every point of contact will outmanoeuvre those that can’t.
Antifragile prioritisation
Forget the impact/effort matrix. We help you make plans that give you the predictability you need, without sacrificing the flexibility you also need.
Adaptive alignment
Being aligned doesn't have to mean everyone sees the world exactly the same way. Our methods help teams spot the areas of greatest uncertainty so that they can move forward with confidence, and realign swiftly when plans evolve.
Distributed cognition
No more happy clappy workshops. No more expensive decks gathering dust.Once your teams can understand the unfolding strategy in real time, they can make high-agency decisions in the moment and bring you the signals you need from the frontline.
Get our thinking for free ...
... whether you prefer podcast or newsletter.
Book an exploratory call
In this 37-minute call, we'll explore your situation together and figure out if there's a fit.If we can help, great. If not, we'll point you toward someone who can - or give you something to try yourself. No pitch, no pressure, and sadly no pastries.
Contact us
Resources
Move fast and create value (without breaking things)
A masterclass in how the best teams deliver faster and under budget, not by doing everything faster but by working in a different way.Three architects, three iconic buildings, one crucial difference: how they handled uncertainty.You'll learn the hidden framework that separates triumphs from disasters.This is ideal if you're already good at shipping, and you don't know how you're going to squeeze much more speed out of your current operations without harming quality.
Sign up for more resources that will give you an edge at The Reach
Hand in Hand International – Case Study
How we helped a non-profit build a strategy that doesn’t fall apart when the world changes by taking a different approach to their 5-year plan.
The client
Hand in Hand International – a charity that equips under-served women with the skills and resources they need to earn more money and lift nations out of poverty. Based in London, they have a network of partner organisations in Germany and Sweden and across Africa.A team of 50+ energetic, purpose-driven people with a lot of ideas, who could easily find themselves pulled in too many directions.
Their situation – and the challenge they faced
It was approaching the end of 2025, and Hand in Hand International’s 5-year strategy was coming to an end. Time for the leadership to put their heads together and think about the next 5 years.Top of mind was the fact that the ink had still been drying on their current 5-year strategy back in 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit. As a result, they’d become very aware that sudden changes and increasing uncertainty in the world could easily upend all of their plans. They knew they needed to be more adaptive.Also, the team at HQ had also doubled in size since the organisation’s last strategy-setting exercise. The dynamic had shifted from everyone knowing what everyone else was doing by default to having different departments. There was now a need for more coordination to prevent anyone from spreading themselves too thin.
The purpose of our engagement
We were brought in to help Hand in Hand International figure out a new 5-year strategy that would provide a direction of travel, but without creating avoidable risk through too much rigidity.The strategy had to offer resilience in the face of unpredictable events. It had to be adaptive in ways that the old one wasn’t. If it kept them locked into targets that later turned out not to make sense, this would be a failure from the outset.It was also important for the strategy to be co-created with the wider team, and later down the line, with the board of trustees and the partner organisations across the Hand in Hand network.
The workshops
We designed exercises focused on a simple question: what's stopping Hand in Hand from doing what they want to do right now - and what can they do about it? Rather than working backwards from fixed five-year goals that become obsolete when the world shifts, and that create a chasm between the vision and the real work, we helped Hand in Hand to change what's possible in the present.We planned and facilitated two half-day workshops with the leadership team at Hand in Hand International, to take place in person on two consecutive days.The approach we designed was inspired by work from Dave Snowden, JP Castlin, and Jen Briselli.Ahead of the first workshop, everyone on the wider team was invited to give input in writing. This would provide an emotional valence to use in the kickoff exercise to shift into a different gear of thinking for the duration of the workshops.
WORKSHOP 1
Our starting point was the vector-based theory of change. Forget setting a target and yanking your way towards it. Instead, you look at patterns that are currently in existence and ask: which patterns do we want more or less of? How do we get more of the former and less of the latter? (Interestingly, the most valuable discoveries are often “we actually want fewer positive stories in this area because we have a higher priority elsewhere” – which happened to be true for Hand in Hand International.)We spent the rest of the day on affordance-mapping. This is a method for looking at the landscape of constraints, constructors and actants that an organisation is operating under. It lets you express your sense of agency in the world, consider the boundaries between the things you believe you can and can’t change, and think about how and why that is. You can then decide what actions you could take to shift the evolutionary potential of the present to make certain futures more likely than others.The reason for doing affordance-mapping is that it exposes the messy reality of an organisational landscape. It is not meant to be a neat diagnosis. At the end of the first workshop, Hand in Hand International were left with an enormous patchwork of taped-together sheets of flip board paper, about 3 metres square, covered in sticky notes.“Overwhelming” was the word – and that's the whole point of workshop 1.
WORKSHOP 2
With the team having subconsciously begun to digest the output of the first workshop overnight, the exercises on day two surfaced patterns and clarified options for action.The team picked out seven big constraints – the ones that loomed largest in their organisational landscape. They then came up with a range of micro-projects, each of which was designed to tackle one specific constraint.We then did a sorting exercise to narrow down the micro-projects that the team wanted to take forward.Through this process, the team also surfaced one big aspiration: a direction of travel that they knew they wanted to move in. As strategic scaffolding for the next five years, it would give them signals they could point at in the world and say, “this is how we know that we’re doing well and the world is doing well”.A large part of our job throughout the workshops was to gently pull the team out of tempting (but at this stage distracting) discussion-holes, such as nitty-gritty to do with funding, premature expansion plans and partner org dynamics. We explained that no two-day process could ever settle all the decisions they needed to make, and that our focus was getting to the framework that would make all those future decisions easier.
The outcome
Hand in Hand emerged with the infrastructure to adapt their strategy as the world changes. Unlike with their previous plan, they now have pivot triggers and feedback loops built in from the start, rather than rigid targets that are liable to break under pressure.
On a purely practical level, Hand in Hand International came away from the two day engagement with agreement on critical elements of their 5-year strategy:
One shared aspiration, giving them a direction of travel
The seven most critical constraints they would need to manage or navigate
Seven boundaries to enable their teams to explore freely but not stray too far off course
Five strategic pillars that crystallised their main areas of focus
40-50 provisional micro projects that they could flesh out and firm up with the wider team
And we delivered:
A strategy document, put together iteratively and collaboratively between Hand in Hand International and Crown & Reach throughout the engagement.
A blueprint for internal workshops the leadership team would facilitate themselves. The purpose of those internal workshops was to co-create the 5-year strategy with the wider team by firming up the plan for the micro projects. This would give the relevant team memberships ownership over the strategic decisions on which actions to take to influence the organisational constraints.
Follow-on workshop guidance around setting Pivot Triggers for the micro projects, in order to enable feedback loops and make their strategy truly adaptive. (This is a key shift away from traditional strategic planning.)
Complexity-friendly scaffolding for workshopping the strategic plans with Hand In Hand International’s trustees and partner organisations, distributing agency where it makes most sense.