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 can't be done in advance. Three short stages, run on repeat: Discover, Accelerate, Evidence.
Founders ship features instead of testing hypotheses. Academics build elegant tools nobody adopts. Change programmes push frameworks through systems that weren't ready for them.
The U·X·C method draws on behavioural economics, clinical and organisational psychology, and discursive research to address the human layer every other approach treats as secondary — applied across product, founder development and team formation in parallel, because in the work those aren't separate problems.
Formulation is the psychology term for what happens before any intervention: listening to what a client says, identifying what's missing from that account, and building a precise picture of what's actually maintaining the problem — before designing anything to address it.
Every client arrives with a story about the problem. We listen to it carefully — then listen for what isn't in it. The gap between what's said and what's actually happening is almost always where the real problem lives.
Not the symptoms — a map of what's keeping the situation in place: the organisational dynamics, the behavioural patterns, the capability gaps, the assumptions never tested. Maintaining factors are what a good intervention addresses.
Why it matters: we don't decide what to do before we understand what's happening. It sounds obvious, yet it's 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's faster overall.
A sprint cycle, not a waterfall. Each stage feeds the next, and evidence from the final stage re-enters the first — making every loop faster and more precise than the one before.
Ethnographic research, jobs-to-be-done, behavioural analysis. Hypothesis and readiness review. The stage most consultancies skip in favour of a deliverable. Embedded, then returned as a six-page memo — not a sixty-slide deck.
Where it compounds. Product, founder development and team coaching run together, on the same sprint cadence, with the same people. Two-week sprints, real users from sprint one, behaviour built into the design — not retrofitted after a pilot.
What makes customers stay, commissioners act, and clinicians use it past week six. One body of work, restructured for whoever needs to act next. Then the loop re-enters Discover — because no innovation is finished in one pass. No waterfalls, ever.
Every engagement is led by a chartered psychologist and staffed with exactly the expertise it needs — clinical, behavioural, academic, technical. The depth of a firm, without the overheads of one — at a fraction of a typical consultancy's cost.
Between the two founders alone: five doctorates, HCPC & BPS registration, peer-reviewed research and award-winning products — BMJ, HSJ Patient Safety and Building Better Healthcare among them. Engagements are led by the people whose names are on this page, not delegated down.
The best way to understand the method is to feel it. Thirty minutes, and you'll leave with the start of a formulation — and an honest read on fit.
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