Organisational design
Four ways in, depending on how much of the organisation needs to change — 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.
01
Values
Who are we?
Love
02
Culture
What is the space we want to hold for our stakeholders?
Love
03
Purpose
What is our vision for a better world?
Love
04
Strategy
What is our roadmap to success?
Knowledge
05
Structure
What legal form best enables our strategy?
Knowledge
06
Governance
How do we ensure we function cohesively?
Knowledge
07
Operations
How do we get things done, day by day?
Action
08
Communications
What is our story, and how do we tell it?
Action
09
Capital
How do we resource the mission?
Action
10
Scale
How do we ensure the success of our mission?
Action
What happens next depends on how much of the organisation the answers touch, and on whether it is your organisation or one you have backed.
Where you sit
Same process. Different door.
Leaders and executives
It only holds because your people keep holding it.
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. The 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. The capital is stuck.
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 · $350 · recording included
Schedule online, complete a brief questionnaire, and spend ninety minutes on whatever is most pressing. You get Cameron’s full attention and a recording of the call.
— Clarify the pattern you are 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
Money back, unconditionally, if claimed within 24 hours
02 · Commissioned
Facilitation and program design
Scoped to the brief · by conversation
Designing the thing itself: how a programme is structured, how a challenge or fund is run, how a coalition decides, how outcomes get paid for. This is the work the institutions commission, and it is a design job before it is a facilitation job — the room only moves once the decision rights in it are clear.
Cameron’s facilitation is deliberately non-neutral. Where conventional facilitation seeks consensus, this surfaces the conflict that consensus is avoiding, on the grounds that unnamed disagreement is what most often stalls a mission.
— Program and process design — how the work is meant to run, before anyone runs it
— Systems analysis — where the leverage actually is, and what is holding it
— Facilitation of the decisions a group has been avoiding
— Coalition, alliance and multi-stakeholder design
Commissioned by GAVI, SDC, WIPO and the Gates Foundation
03 · Three days
The Foundations offsite
Three days · your leadership team in the room · all ten foundations
The 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 is a proven process.
The alternative is doing it one layer at a time over a year, while the parts you have 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. Organisationally, they’re stuck — and it is outside your mandate to fix it. Grant-makers see it in the reporting; investors see it in a company that can’t be exited 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 is structural, what is personal, and what it would take — and a basis for deciding what your next dollar is conditional on. It is sized to sit inside the signature authority a program officer already has.
The precedent is the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance — an alliance that had stalled, where the Gates Foundation and GIZ commissioned this process rather than write off what they had funded.
Organisation design · enquiry
Tell me 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. A form rather than a calendar, because the case is above and the question is yours.
Where to start
If you know where the constraint is, three days will move it. If you don’t, ninety minutes will find it.