Where the best light hits

Why Winnocks

Thirty years managing change across energy, technology and consulting — as a consultant, then as a founding executive inside an innovation centre — kept bringing me back to the same problem: teams that believe they're aligned, and find out far later that they weren't.

It's an easy trap to fall into. A leadership team agrees a broad direction, then each function goes away and builds its own plan on the assumption that everyone else is doing the same, in step. The gaps surface months or years later — in confused execution, in opportunities missed because nobody was looking in that direction, in risks nobody had agreed to watch for. It rarely looks like a failure of communication. Everyone was in the room. Everyone nodded. The alignment was never actually there to begin with.

Governance and advisory board work showed me the same pattern from outside — different organisations, the same gap between what a leadership team believed it had agreed and what it actually had. It wasn't one organisation's problem. It was structural.

The usual fix is a strategy document, often built by an outside consultancy, at real cost, every few years. I've commissioned those and I've delivered them, from both sides of that relationship. What I noticed each time is that a document like that gets read, sometimes debated, then filed — and a plan nobody can describe in their own words was never really shared. It was announced.

The alternative I kept coming back to is simpler: a plan the leadership team builds together, in a facilitated process, so alignment is built into how it's made rather than chased afterwards. The nine-area structure I use today originates in the Technology Leadership Framework, which I devised at the Net Zero Technology Centre to link technology foresight to strategy, delivery and capability. What's grown from it since — combining that experience with formal study in strategic foresight, change management and systemic coaching — is The Winnock Framework, now the heart of what Winnocks does. It also draws on my work with leadership teams and executives — in clarifying the future they're preparing for, and in being effective, efficient, and value-creating today.

I started Winnocks because I'd rather build the alternative than keep pointing at the problem. If a leadership team you're part of has ever discovered, later than it should have, that everyone was reading from a different version of the plan, I'd like to hear about it.

— Luca Corradi, Founder and Managing Director

Working with clients across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East.