JonathanPritchard
For Complex Problems

Upstream
Advisory

The same problem keeps showing up in different rooms with different names. That's a signal, not bad luck.
The Situation

The problem keeps
changing shape. The source doesn't.

Every quarter, a new version of the same problem. Different department, different context, different people pointing at different things. The post-mortem changes; the pattern stays.

Strategy layers get added. New processes, new hires, new tools. Each one addresses the visible symptom. None of them reaches the foundational assumption generating it.

The loop isn't a failure of execution. Something is causing it. Finding that something is a different kind of work than fixing the thing it produced.

What It Looks Like

The diagnostic lens,
on retainer.

I work with one principal (the CEO or the founder) on an ongoing basis. Monthly at minimum, more often when something's in motion. I'm in the room when the decisions get made, not called in after the pattern has already set.

Over time, what looked like separate problems becomes one premise operating in several places simultaneously. When that premise gets named and corrected, the loop stops generating new versions of itself.

The engagement produces a shift in what gets noticed. Problems that used to take months to surface start getting caught at the source.

Who It's For

You've built good systems.
The ceiling is still there.

  • CEOs who've built capable teams and sound processes and still find the same class of problem recurring; different faces, same bones.
  • Organizations that have done serious strategic work and gotten real results, and now suspect something more foundational is setting the next ceiling.
  • Leaders who want someone with a genuinely different lens in the room on a sustained basis: present during decisions, not summarizing them afterward.
  • Founders who've done a one-time diagnostic engagement and want to keep that capability active as the company moves into new complexity.

Ready to find what keeps
generating the problem?

Secret Link