Organisational design
Four paths in, depending on what you need — from ninety minutes on one question to three days on all ten foundations.
The process
Ten foundations, in order.
Every organisation in this sector was started by someone who could no longer live with the status quo. Most of the organisations that lose their way lose that passion first, and then spend years wondering why the strategy won’t hold. Love is not the soft part of the work. It’s the part the rest is built on — which is why Values is Foundation 01.
Every engagement starts in the same place: separating what is structural from what only looks personal. Most of what presents as a people problem turns out to be a design problem — responsibility that concentrated without anyone deciding it should, and now cannot move without something breaking.
The Foundations are the ten places where that shows up. Each is a question, and the answer is either explicit and agreed, or implicit and assumed. Working through them identifies where the organisation is misaligned and what it would take to resolve it — and an explicit design is the only kind you can change on purpose.
The order matters. A fish rots from the head down. Values come first because everything below inherits from them: a strategy that contradicts what an organisation actually values will be quietly ignored, and a governance structure built on an unstated culture will keep producing decisions nobody can defend. Start anywhere else and you spend the engagement treating symptoms.
Love
Who we are, and why
01
Values
Who are we?
02
Culture
What is the space we want to hold for our stakeholders?
03
Purpose
What is our vision for a better world?
Knowledge
How we are built
04
Strategy
What is our roadmap to success?
05
Structure
What legal form best enables our strategy?
06
Governance
How do we ensure we function cohesively?
Action
What we do, and with what
07
Operations
How do we get things done, day by day?
08
Communications
What is our story, and how do we tell it?
09
Capital
How do we resource the mission?
10
Scale
How do we ensure the success of our mission?
What happens next depends on what your answers reveal, and on whether
they're for your organisation or one you've backed.
Where you sit
Same process. Different role.
Leaders and executives
Your people are overworked, overburdened, and under-resourced.
Start with ninety minutes. If the problem is yours to solve, that is usually enough to see it. If it belongs to the organisation, three days with the team is the way through.
Foundations and program officers
You believe in the grantee, but their organisation is stuck.
It isn’t in your mandate to fix it, and another grant won’t. The Foundations run with the grantee, and you get a straight account of what your money is going into.
Impact investors
The idea was sound, and now your capital is trapped.
A venture built around one person is illiquid until that changes. The same audit, on a portfolio company: the unlock, not another board seat.
01 · Ninety minutes
A Quiet Word
Thought partner. Or partner in crime.
Ninety minutes
Schedule online, complete a brief questionnaire, and spend ninety minutes on whatever is most pressing. Come alone, or bring your team. Move fast. Break nothing.
— Clarify the pattern you're actually dealing with
— Identify the highest-impact change available to you
— Decide what to do about it, and in what order
— Name the resistance you will meet, and from whom
UNCONDITIONAL Money back GUARANTEE if claimed within 24 hours
02 · Commissioned
Facilitation and program design
Scoped to the brief · by conversation
Designing the process itself: how a program is structured, how a challenge or fund is run, how a coalition decides, how outcomes get paid for, how a conference is designed for maximum benefit. This is the work institutions and event organisers commission, and it’s a design job before it’s a facilitation job — the room only moves once the decision rights are clear.
Cameron’s facilitation is deliberately non-neutral. Where conventional facilitation seeks consensus, his approach surfaces the conflict that consensus is avoiding, on the grounds that unnamed disagreement is what most often stalls a mission.
— Systems analysis — where the constraints and leverage really are
— Program and process design — optimising for shared outcomes
— Facilitation of the decisions a group has been avoiding
— Coalition, alliance and multi-stakeholder design
Commissioned by GAVI, SDC, WIPO, the Gates Foundation, SOCAP, COBI, Bretton Woods 75
03 · Three days
The Foundations offsite
Three days · your team in the room · all ten foundations
Foundations, run as an offsite with the leadership team in the room. All ten worked through in three days, cleaning up the entire organisation in one hit. It's a proven process.
The alternative is doing it one layer at a time over a year, while the parts you've not reached yet keep pulling against the parts you have.
04 · Someone else’s organisation
The Foundations audit
For funders and investors · by conversation
You believe in the value of what they’re doing, but the organisation is stuck — and it's outside your mandate to address it. Grant-makers see it in the reporting; investors see it in a company they can’t exit because it can’t perform without its founder.
All ten foundations, run with the organisation you’ve backed and its leadership team in the room. What you get is a written account of what's structural, what's personal, and what it will take to turn things around; providing you with the opportunity to decide what further funding is conditional on. It's sized to sit inside the signature authority a program officer already has.
The audit is the move from organisation-centric behaviour to mission-centric behaviour — because mission trumps organisation every time.
Organisation design · enquiry
Tell us about the organisation.
Confidential · nothing goes to the organisation without you
Yours, or one you’ve backed. Whether it’s a program to design, three days with a leadership team, or an audit of a grantee or portfolio company — this is where it starts: the organisation, your relationship to it, and what’s stuck.
Where to start