Shape & Lead
The current model has hit its ceiling
What do we build next, and how do we fund it while today's business still carries us?
What do we build next, and how do we fund it while today's business still carries us?
The numbers are not bad. That is what makes it hard to say out loud. Growth has slowed to the pace of the market, cost is holding the margin where price should, and each new initiative seems to borrow from the core without adding to it. The last plan promised a step change and delivered an extension. The board has started asking about the next thing. The honest answer is that the next thing would have to be a different business, built while this one still pays the salaries.
Meanwhile the ground has moved under the plan. A tariff, an export rule, a carbon price, a workforce that will not operate the new tools, a community that no longer signs by default. Each of these was a footnote when the strategy was written. Several are now line items.
Two things, and they are usually decided separately when they should not be.
What the next model is: which clients, which offer, which economics, which partners, which permissions it needs. And how the transition is funded: what the current business must keep delivering, for how long, to pay for the one that replaces it, at which point the CEO and the CFO shift the weight from one to the other.
The failure we see most often is a good model with no trigger, far more often than a wrong model: the board approves a direction, keeps the old allocation rules and waits for a certainty that never comes. The strategy ages in the drawer while the environment it was written for keeps changing.
The work is Adaptive Strategy Design. Its premise is that a strategy approved once and reviewed yearly is already behind the world it was written for, so we build one that is designed to move.
We start by reading the pressure: the regulatory, competitive and structural forces hitting the sector, read as levers where the compliance team sees costs. Which constraints your competitors cannot convert. Which ones give you an advantage if you act first. For the CFO this phase produces a sensitivity model alongside the scan: what each pressure costs if you do not adapt and what each response requires in capital.
Then we design the architecture of the next model: market position, value chain, pricing levers, the capabilities to build or buy. Each option is tested against a three-year P&L and against an accelerated regulatory scenario, then ranked. We write the strategic rhythm with it: the review cadence, the signals from clients, employees, partners and regulators that are read alongside the competitive and financial ones, with the decision triggers that tell the executive team when to shift before the shift is forced. The executive team is in the room for the synthesis sessions, because a team defends the strategy it has argued over.
What leaves the room is a three-year blueprint with prioritised moves, owners and timing, resource allocation by quarter and P&L scenarios by option, written to feed the capital allocation cycle directly. We stay for the first review cycle, when the triggers are tested for the first time.
The case below shows why so much scenario work changes so little: the futures are described, the decisions attached to them are not. The adaptive strategy fixes the trigger in advance, so that the board acts on a signal instead of debating it after the fact.
The response is published and numbered; the signal that releases it is still a judgement, and the plan should say so.
ReadFabrice Macarty, Founder, CEO. He works with executive teams on the business models that technology and regulation are about to move. On this situation he holds the design of the next model and the capital logic of the transition: what funds what and when the weight shifts.
Philippe Bourrat, COO & Co-Founder. Twenty-eight years on growth strategy and customer intelligence for industrial and B2B leaders. He holds the client test of the next model: whether the clients it assumes exist and what they will pay.
Maxime Ferrand, Senior Partner. Sixteen years inside a large network operator, from engineering projects to Chief of Staff. He holds the transition itself: how the current organisation keeps delivering while the next one is built inside it.
Geopolitics sets the terms of strategy: a plan that assumes the map will hold is assuming its cost base will hold. The next model is designed for a map that moves.
Read the force in Our Approach: force 01The ceiling you have hit, the plan that extended rather than changed, the next business you can see but cannot yet fund. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.