Diagnosis precedes intervention.
A statement, for boards, leadership teams, and owners, of how the firm thinks about where business problems originate, where their solutions reside, and why the diagnostic has to precede the intervention.
This is the firm's intellectual position in full. It is the only page on the site whose job is to articulate how Esbee thinks rather than what Esbee does. If you have a situation you would like to discuss, the contact page is the right next step.
Talk to us →Four principles.
People are the densest and most consequential layer of any business.
Everything the financial statements eventually report has been transacted through human decisions and human work. The P&L is not a description of a market; it is a record of decisions taken, relationships maintained, work done, and opportunities converted or missed, all of which were contingent on the people who took those decisions, maintained those relationships, did that work, and converted or failed to convert those opportunities. The people layer is therefore the layer with the highest concentration of cause and the highest concentration of leverage. Any analysis of a business that does not interrogate this layer with care has interrogated the symptoms of the system rather than the system itself, and its recommendations will address consequences rather than causes.
In practice
A co-founding director at a technology business was leaving. The situation involved a shareholders' agreement, a minority equity stake, and the company's principal client relationship, each of which sat alongside the employment position rather than separately from it. The exit was concluded in six weeks, at forty per cent below the opening solicitor figure, because the analysis treated the commercial and people dimensions as a single problem from the beginning rather than as parallel tracks to be reconciled at the end.
Complex and high-stakes HR →The same people layer is the source of most problems and the source of most opportunity.
The diagnostic and opportunity observations articulated above are not two separate claims about two separate dimensions of the business. They are a single observation applied to two different questions. When a business is underperforming against its financial targets, the cause typically sits in the people layer: decisions taken that should not have been, decisions deferred that should have been made, relationships that have deteriorated in ways the accounts do not yet reflect, capability that was assumed to be present and has been found to be absent. When a business is reaching for a target it has not yet achieved, the leverage is in the same place. The same layer, examined from different angles, at different moments in the business's development.
Diagnosis precedes intervention.
Most advisory engagements begin with the intervention, because the buyer has arrived at the briefing with the intervention already determined. The brief specifies a restructure, or an HR audit, or a communications programme, or a training exercise, and the work that follows is the delivery of that pre-specified solution. Esbee begins with a diagnostic phase, because the intervention the buyer has pre-selected is, in a substantial proportion of engagements, the wrong one, selected against a partial or inaccurate understanding of where the actual cause resides. The diagnostic phase is contingent on the situation, the data available, and what the business is attempting to achieve, but it always precedes the recommendation, and the recommendation is shaped by what the diagnostic surfaces rather than by what the brief assumed at the outset.
In practice
A business engaged Esbee to design and implement a redundancy programme. The diagnostic surfaced an entirely different problem: a sales compensation structure that had been suppressing sales performance since launch, and a marketing function organised to serve sales rather than to serve strategy and product. The eventual intervention was a compensation redesign and an organisational change. No redundancies took place.
Operating model design →People decisions compound.
Every decision taken in the people layer accrues over time. A compensation arrangement made now sets the boundary of what the business can reach for in three years. A leadership hire made informally in the early days will be paid for in the restructuring that follows. A capability gap left unaddressed in year one of a hold period becomes the constraint the value creation plan runs into in year three. The corollary is also true: a structural decision made well now extends what the business can do over the longer term, and the value of the decision compounds for as long as the structure holds. The temporal dimension of people work is therefore not an accident of timing but the property that makes the work commercially consequential.
When the numbers do not behave, the roots run back to people.
When a leadership team interrogates its EBITDA, its gross profit margin, or its P&L and finds the numbers behaving in ways that resist the obvious commercial explanation, the cause is almost never confined to the commercial layer of the business alone. Revenue that should be growing is not. Costs that should be reducing are not. A target set at the beginning of the year is no longer within reach, and the analysis of the variance does not adequately account for the shortfall. These are the moments when the numbers are pointing at something that the numbers alone cannot resolve.
The structural observation that earns attention here is not rhetorical. Every business is a system, and the most complex component of that system, by a substantial margin, is its people. People in this sense is not simply the employee population, though that is where analysis typically begins and often stops. It encompasses the leadership and management cadres who make the decisions that the financial statements eventually record. It encompasses the stakeholder relationships that fund and govern the business and whose confidence is a condition of its continued operation. It encompasses the customer base whose buying decisions determine whether the revenue thesis materialises or remains a projection. And it encompasses the second-tier relationships that sit one ring out from the formal organisation: the families of the individuals doing the most consequential work, the sector specialists whose endorsement shapes how the business is regarded by its market, the influencers whose attention either amplifies or suppresses demand in ways the commercial plan typically accounts for only partially.
If the business is a system, the people layer is its densest component. The parts of any complex system that fail or strain disproportionately are the parts with the highest concentration of interdependencies, the parts where small decisions compound across time, and the parts whose internal behaviour is hardest to observe from outside the system. In business systems, that component is consistently the people layer.
The implication for diagnosis is direct: when something is going wrong on the financial reports, the discipline of examining the people layer is not an optional analytical step. It is the discipline most likely to surface the actual cause rather than the proximate symptom, and it is the step that the standard financial and commercial analysis most reliably omits.
When the strategy is set, the leverage also sits with people.
The diagnostic movement is one angle of the observation. When a leadership team is setting strategic goals or numerical targets rather than interrogating variance, the largest available source of leverage to achieve those goals sits in the same place.
Strategic targets are realised through human decisions and human work. The financial statement is ultimately a record of decisions taken and work done across the whole organisation, and the most consequential lever on either the quality of the decisions or the productivity of the work is the people who take them and do them. This is the opportunity-side version of the same structural observation, and it carries the same implications for where to direct attention and where to concentrate effort.
Compensation design that aligns reward with the direction the strategy requires materially changes the rate at which the organisation converts collective effort into results. The organisation that rewards what it says it values will move faster and more coherently toward what it says it values than the organisation whose reward architecture has drifted into misalignment with its stated strategic direction, often through the incremental decisions of hiring cycles and annual review processes that were not coordinated against a coherent structural view of where the business is trying to go.
Organisational development that builds capability where the strategy requires capability to be built closes the gap between the strategy articulated in the planning process and the strategy that is actually being executed in the field. Strategies fail more often from capability deficits than from strategic miscalculation, and capability deficits are almost always resolvable once they have been correctly identified and distinguished from motivation or structural problems, which require different interventions.
Behavioural science applied to customer decision-making changes the assumptions the revenue thesis rests on, because the revenue thesis typically assumes customers will behave in ways the commercial model expects, and customers behave in ways their own psychology and decision-making context determines.
Workflow design that puts technology and AI in service of the human work, rather than alongside it as a parallel system or in place of it as a supposed substitute, converts technical capacity into commercial outcomes in ways the technology alone cannot achieve. The workflow is the link between the tool and the result, and the workflow is a people design question.
These are not separate interventions operating in separate parts of the business. They are multiple expressions of the same principle: that the people layer carries the leverage, and that the right analysis of the people layer leads to people solutions to business problems.
Diagnosis, then intervention, in whatever shape the situation requires.
Every engagement at Esbee begins with a diagnostic phase. The diagnostic is contingent in its scope, depth, and duration, determined by the situation, the data available to the analysis, and what the client is attempting to achieve, but the structure is consistent: examine the people layer with care before recommending an intervention.
The active practice draws on a set of disciplines that the diagnostic deploys as the situation requires. These include organisational development, where the question is about how the organisation is structured and how capability is distributed across it; compensation design, where the question is about how the reward architecture is aligned or misaligned with the strategic direction the business says it is taking; operating model and capability work, where the question is about how consequential decisions are actually being made and where the capability to make them well resides; and the application of technology and AI to workflow design, where the question is about how the organisation is converting its technical capacity into commercial outcomes. These disciplines are not modes the firm sells in separate parcels, and the principal does not begin an engagement with a predetermined view about which of them is relevant. The diagnostic determines that.
The breadth of the firm's view of the people layer, encompassing customers, stakeholders, and the relationships that sit one ring out from the formal organisation, extends in some engagements beyond what the principal alone covers in a typical scope. The associate network exists to bring specialist input on the dimensions that require it: the customer decision-making dimension, the regulatory dimension, the communications dimension, or the governance dimension, depending on where the diagnostic leads and what the situation requires.
The recommendation, when it is made, is shaped by what the diagnostic has surfaced, and it is delivered in the form that the situation will actually absorb: a structured written analysis for leadership teams who need to take a considered position to their board; a programme of work with a defined scope and sequencing for situations that require sustained intervention; a working session with the leadership team for situations where the need is for a structured conversation and a clear framing rather than a written document; or an interim leadership role where the situation requires sustained senior presence over a period of time rather than a written output. The form is contingent on the situation. This contextuality is not a limitation of the method; it is the discipline that follows from taking the first three principles seriously.
Where Esbee sits, and where it does not.
Strategy consulting, in the McKinsey or Bain sense, produces diagnostics and recommendations of substantial quality and operates at the commercial level where the consequential conversations happen. Its depth in the people layer is, in most engagements, insufficient to resolve what its own diagnostic identifies as the cause, because the organisational infrastructure of those firms is not built for the relational, principal-led, extended work that resolving people-layer problems requires. The strategy and the implementation of its people dimension are typically produced by different organisations, which means the diagnostic and the intervention are never held by the same hand.
HR consulting, in the service-provider sense represented by Peninsula or AdviserPlus and their equivalents, operates at a level of commercial seniority that does not reach the decisions where the work has most leverage. Its value is operational and advisory within the HR function, and its relationship to the business problem is typically indirect: it addresses the employment dimension of the situation rather than the business dimension, even where the business dimension is the one that matters.
Interim leadership, as provided by boutique resourcing businesses, places senior individuals into roles. It does not carry the diagnostic and design capability that complex situations require, and the relationship between the individual placed and the structural cause of the situation they are placed into is not typically interrogated before the placement is made.
Management consulting, in the Deloitte or Accenture and equivalents sense, is built for delivery at scale: large teams, large scopes, structured methodologies applied consistently across a large and diversified client base. It is not the instrument best suited to the principal-led diagnostic work that complex people-layer situations demand, and its commercial model requires a volume and scope of work that most organisations with complex people questions do not present.
Esbee is a senior advisory practice, organised around the diagnostic and the intervention rather than around predefined service categories, delivered at the level where the work matters, and engaged by the buyer who needs the problem understood correctly rather than resolved at scale.
Where to read more.
The writing at Insights applies the same approach to specific topics, including employment law, organisational design, and management practice, and is by the principal. The piece on TUPE as a commercial negotiation is the most useful single illustration of what happens when a technical compliance question is treated as the organisational design question it actually is. The essay on what large language models cannot decompress gives the clearest account of the firm's position on AI: sceptical about the easy claims, attentive to the harder ones.
The career background and professional credentials that sit behind the approach on this page are at About.
Last reviewed: May 2026
Talk to us
If the reasoning on this page connects with how you are thinking about a problem in your organisation, or if you are working on a situation that you suspect has its roots in the people layer in ways the current analysis has not yet resolved, we would welcome a conversation. All initial discussions are conducted without obligation and, where the situation requires it, in confidence.
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