Most consultancies arrive with a solution. We arrive with questions, because the formulation of your specific situation is the most valuable thing we can give you, and it cannot be done in advance. Three short stages, run on repeat: Discover, Accelerate, Evidence.
What follows is a complete description of how we work: the method, the principles, the two founders, and the network we assemble around each engagement. By the end of it, you should feel that we already understand your situation.
Most digital health and organisational change work fails not because the technology or the idea is wrong, but because the behaviour around it was never properly accounted for.
Founders ship features instead of testing hypotheses. Academics build elegant tools nobody adopts. Innovation programmes generate slide-decks nobody acts on. Change programmes push frameworks through systems that were not ready for them.
The U·X·C method is what we run instead, drawing on behavioural economics, clinical psychology, organisational psychology and discursive research to address the human layer that every other approach treats as secondary. Applied across product, founder development and team formation in parallel, because in the work, those are not separate problems.
Formulation is the Psychology term for what happens before any intervention: listening carefully to what a client says, identifying what is missing from that account, and building a precise picture of what is actually maintaining the problem, before designing anything to address it.
Every client arrives with a story about what the problem is. We listen to that story carefully, and then we listen for what is not in it. The gap between what is being said and what is actually happening is almost always where the real problem lives. That gap is what the formulation names, and often it takes expertise to frame it.
Not a description of the symptoms: a map of what is keeping the situation in place, the organisational dynamics, the behavioural patterns, the capability gaps, the assumptions that have not been tested. Maintaining factors are what a good intervention addresses. Surface symptoms are what a bad one chases.
Why it matters: we do not decide what to do before we understand what is happening. This sounds obvious, yet it is almost never how change programmes, accelerators or consultancies actually work, because arriving with a predetermined answer is faster to sell and slower to deliver. We do it the slower way upfront because it is faster overall. What clients most often report afterwards is that the formulation felt both confirmatory and surprising at once: we named things they already sensed but could not articulate, then went further.
The U·X·C engine runs as a sprint cycle, not a waterfall. Each stage feeds into the next, and the evidence from the final stage re-enters the first, making every subsequent loop faster and more precise than the one before.
"What's actually in the way?"
Ethnographic research, jobs-to-be-done analysis, behavioural diagnostics. Product or IP hypothesis review, founder and team readiness assessment. The most important stage, and the one most consultancies skip in favour of producing a deliverable. Embedded for two to four weeks, returned as a six-page memo, not a sixty-slide deck.
"Ship. Coach. Adjust. Ship again."
The stage where it all compounds. Product, founder development and team coaching run together on the same sprint cadence, with the same people across them. Two-week sprints, real users in the loop from sprint one, behavioural patterns built into the design, not retrofitted after a pilot.
"Investor-ready, REF-eligible, board-ready."
What makes customers stay, commissioners act, and clinicians use the product past week six. One body of work, restructured for whichever audience needs to act on it next. Then the loop re-enters Discover, because no innovation is finished in one pass. No waterfalls, ever.
"What's actually in the way?"
Discover is the part most consultancies skip in favour of producing a deck. We treat it as the most important stage, because every wrong diagnosis costs months downstream.
It's that psychological safety for someone to lead an intense project, and still come out sane at the other end.
It's made me look at other areas of my work life and think about what I can do to make this more sustainable, and imagine myself in this role in ten years' time.
Without coaching from UXC there could have been a lot of hidden potential within our team that wouldn't be realised.
"Ship. Coach. Adjust. Ship again."
Accelerate is the stage that compounds. Product, founder development and team coaching all run together, on the same sprint cadence, with the same person across them. That parallel-run is the hard thing most engagements split apart.
"Investor-ready, REF-eligible, board-ready."
Evidence is what most engagements treat as a final deliverable, and we treat as the input to the next Discover. One body of work, restructured for whichever audience needs to act on it next. Then the loop re-enters.
The Evidence stage does not end the engagement, it informs the next Discover. What we learn about adoption, adherence and behaviour in cycle one shapes the hypotheses we test in cycle two. The work compounds, because the evidence loops, not because the contract renews. These are the five operating principles we hold to inside it, across founders, universities and NHS innovation work alike.
If we can't tell you which behavioural mechanism we're targeting, the technology is premature. We ask the mechanism question before we ask the build question, every time - be it consumer, team or market scale.
We sit inside the team, on the same sprint cadence. Advisory roles produce slide-decks. Embedded work produces shipped product, scaled founders and evidence that holds up.
Two-to-four-week Discover stages are non-negotiable. Formulation first, intervention second. The diagnosis is what we sell first, the deliverables earn their place after.
We are two founders with a curated network. We turn down work where we're not the right people, and we tell founders when their venture isn't ready. The honesty is what protects the method.
Most engagements end with a final report. Ours end with a diagnosis that re-enters the loop. Grant panels, investors, commissioners and peer reviewers all ask hard questions: we design evidence that answers them from the start.
Every engagement is led by Craig and Cordet, not delegated to junior consultants. Both are Chartered. Around that core, we assemble the specialists each project actually needs, drawn from a network of proven practitioners with real CVs. Nobody in our network is a self-proclaimed expert.
Chartered Clinical Psychologist. Holds three doctorates, including a PhD in Human Decision Making. Digital health innovator with products shipped into national and international health markets. Has coached teams from GP-practice level to NHS England national programme. Specialist in turning evidence into commercially viable product.
BPS Chartered Coaching Psychologist at Doctoral Level 8. Holds two doctorates: a PhD in social psychology and a doctoral-level coaching psychology qualification. a qualified nurse with direct NHS experience. Leads MDTsInAction, a Conversation Analysis programme on interprofessional team working. Specialist in the human dynamics of team formation and organisational change.
The same network we assemble around an engagement, mobilised at national scale when it mattered most.
When COVID hit, we led our whole network, psychologists, coaches and technologists, into a free wellbeing service for NHS staff. No budget. No commissioning cycle. Six weeks from idea to live, then sustained for five years and delivered entirely by volunteers. It is the clearest proof of what this network can assemble and lead, fast, when it matters.
The U·X·C loop runs the same way regardless of who we're working with. What changes is the starting point, the deliverables, and the specific expertise we assemble around each engagement.
The loop starts with a product-hypothesis review and founder diagnostic. Accelerate runs as two-week sprints alongside monthly coaching. Evidence produces the investor-ready foundation: market validation, adherence data, a substantially more robust deck.
Read the Founders brief →The loop starts with IP-to-product mapping and academic-founder readiness. Accelerate runs as spinout development alongside PI-to-CEO coaching. Evidence produces dual-purpose outputs: REF-eligible and investor-ready from the same body of work.
Read the Universities brief →The loop starts with an implementation-gap or team-fracture diagnosis. Accelerate runs as a change model alongside leadership development. Evidence produces commissioning-ready proof and, where required, peer-reviewed academic outputs.
Read the change brief →The first call is thirty minutes, diagnostic in tone, with a written read either way. We'll listen to your situation, tell you what we hear in it, including what might be missing, and give you an honest read on fit. If we're not the right people we'll say so, and ideally point you to who is.
Need a documented needs assessment for a grant, board case or internal sign-off? Ninety minutes with both founders, returned as a written report.
