The method
Formulate before you intervene.
Most consultancies arrive with a preferred solution. We start by building a formulation of your specific situation: what is happening, what is maintaining it, what resource is already there, and where an intervention is most likely to change the system.
01Why a method at all
Most work fails on the human layer.
The method draws on behavioural economics, clinical and organisational psychology and discursive research to address the layer every other approach treats as secondary. It is applied across product, founder development and team formation at the same time, because in the work those are not separate problems.
01
Ventures ship features instead of testing hypotheses
The technology works. Nobody changed their behaviour to use it.
02
Academics build elegant tools nobody adopts
The science is sound. The route to a real user ran through a committee.
03
Change programmes push frameworks through systems that were not ready
The model was fine. The system it landed on was already breaking.
02What a formulation is
A diagnosis classifies. A formulation understands.
A label describes the problem. A formulation explains the mechanism: it connects the presenting issue to the behavioural, relational, organisational and contextual factors keeping it in place, and identifies where change is actually possible.
We do not decide what to do before we understand what is happening. It sounds obvious, and it is almost never how change programmes, accelerators or consultancies work, because arriving with the answer is faster to sell and slower to deliver.
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One
What is missing from the account
Every client arrives with a story about the problem. We listen to it carefully, and then listen for what is not in it. The gap between what is said and what is happening is almost always where the real problem lives.
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Two
A precise map of the maintaining factors
Not the symptoms. The organisational dynamics, the behavioural patterns, the capability gaps and the assumptions nobody has tested. Maintaining factors are what a good intervention is aimed at.
A diagnosis means the same thing in every room. A formulation does not, and that is the point: it is built for one situation, so it can tell you where to push.
The distinction
03The formulation model
What set it up, what set it off, and what keeps it going.
The third is where the work is. The first two explain how a problem arrived. The third is what holds it there now, and it is the only one you can still act on. In the technical language: predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating factors.
The model
The presenting problem is rarely the thing that needs changing.
The measurable data is rarely the whole problem.
Adoption has stalled. A team has fractured. A funded innovation will not move. Most programmes go straight to a solution; we map the factors first, including the history that made it likely and the pressure that tipped it.
The perpetuating factors feed the problem and the problem feeds them back. Push harder on a system like that and the load lands on the part already breaking. In Devon that was the workforce. Nobody needed telling it was burnt out. They needed to know which part would shift if you pushed it.
So the intervention is aimed at the loop. Sometimes that is an established model, often it is something that has to hold several at once, and the evidence that follows describes your organisation rather than a template.
04The delivery loop
Then we deliver against it. User, eXperience, Change.
U·X·C is not a second method competing with the formulation. It is how the work gets done once the formulation has said where to intervene: three stages run as a sprint cycle rather than a waterfall, where what the last stage learns re-enters the first.
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U
Stage one · 2 to 4 weeks · the needs
User.
Ethnographic research, jobs-to-be-done, behavioural analysis, hypothesis and readiness review. What the people the work is for actually need, which is the stage most consultancies skip in favour of a deliverable. Embedded, then returned as a six-page memo rather than a sixty-slide deck.
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eX
Stage two · the engagement · the implementation insights
eXperience.
Where it compounds. Product, founder development and team coaching run together on one two-week sprint cadence with the same people. Real users from the first sprint, behaviour built into the design rather than retrofitted after a pilot. What we learn here is how the thing actually lands in practice.
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C
Stage three · implement with those insights
Change.
Implementing with what the first two stages taught us, and evidencing that it held: what makes customers stay, commissioners act, and clinicians still use it past week six. One body of work, restructured for whoever needs to act next. Then the loop re-enters User, because nothing is finished in one pass.
What the third stage learns re-enters the first. Every loop is faster and more precise than the one before. See it shaped to your journey.
05The same discipline, three scales
What it looked like. What was maintaining it. Where we intervened.
Three pieces of real work, at the scale of a product, a team and a system. The presenting problem differs every time. The move underneath does not.
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Product and adoption · EpSMon
The technology was never the hard part.
- What it looked like
- People with epilepsy were seen in clinic, then not again for months.
- What was maintaining it
- Risk changes in the gap between appointments, and nothing surfaced that change to the person living it or the clinician responsible.
- Where we intervened
- Self-monitoring that lets someone recognise rising risk early, rather than a better interface on the appointment. Read the case.
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Team and organisation · MDTsInAction
A team that meets, and still misunderstands itself.
- What it looked like
- Multi-disciplinary teams meeting exactly as designed, with decisions that kept not holding.
- What was maintaining it
- Overlapping domains of responsibility that each profession had been trained differently to handle, playing out in the talk itself and never named.
- Where we intervened
- Conversation-level analysis of real meetings, turned back into workshops the teams could run themselves. Read the case.
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Change and implementation · Devon
Pushing harder on the part already breaking.
- What it looked like
- Online consultation had been introduced across general practice with uneven success.
- What was maintaining it
- A workforce already at capacity, so every additional mandate landed on the part of the system with the least left to give.
- Where we intervened
- Change capability built inside the teams themselves, with the evaluation running alongside so each report could alter what happened next. Read the case.
06In practice
Formulate. Intervene. Measure.
The short version of everything above, and the shape an engagement actually takes. The discipline on this page is what makes the first word mean more than a scoping call.
01
Understand what is maintaining the problem
Behavioural, organisational and contextual factors mapped for your situation rather than matched to a template.
02
Design the smallest useful intervention, at the right level
Aimed at the loop the formulation identified: a product, a team dynamic, a leadership behaviour, an implementation process.
03
Find out whether anything actually changed
Behaviour, implementation and outcomes evaluated, rather than assuming the intervention worked because it was delivered.
Every engagement is led by a chartered psychologist, and senior people do the actual work.No pyramid, no handover to juniors once it is won
Craig and Cordet lead the work, with a network of specialists matched to your setting, evidence needs and clinical pathway. They are named to you before they start.
Meet Craig and Cordet More of the work07Start the conversation
Apply the method to your situation.
The best way to understand the method is to feel it. Thirty minutes with a senior psychologist, and you leave with the start of a formulation and an honest read on fit.
30 minutes · Senior psychologist · No preparation needed