Four things we found out, one client problem at a time.
Each came from a real client problem the standard playbook didn't cover — recognized because of 25+ years spent inside professional service firms, moving through uncertainty deliberately instead of waiting for a proven answer. What we found held up, and became a method.
Here's what we found, what we built because of it, and where each one stands today.
The Steering Wheel
Your best innovation ideas are stuck in the heads of the people too busy billing to act on them.
The discovery: the innovation capacity was already there. What was missing wasn't ideas or people — it was a way to engage busy professionals in the innovation process and get results.
A separate R&D unit doesn't solve this — it sits too far from the work to judge ideas that only make sense to the specialist who had them. So we built training, project management, and innovation management into one lightweight structure instead.
for half of teams to know if they had something worth pursuing
of teams that continued delivered a result within 6 months, against a 10–20% norm
See cases →
GenAI made the original platform obsolete. The method wasn't. Open to rebuilding it as an agent with the right partner.
An Opportunistic Approach to Innovation
With Jan van den EndeThe discovery: professional service firms will never have the central budget or team a real investment portfolio needs — so the traditional portfolio model was never going to fit them, no matter how well it's run elsewhere.
We built the alternative: a method for managing a portfolio one bet at a time, without the machinery a portfolio usually requires.
Published as a chapter in the PDMA Handbook →
EDGE
People finish GenAI training knowing what the tool can do — and still never open it.
The discovery: knowledge doesn't produce habit. Only daily use does — and daily use only happens once someone's had a handful of small, real wins.
So EDGE doesn't teach the technology. It hands out one work hack a week, tied to a real task, and lets competence build itself through use.
online completion rate, against a ~3% norm for professional online courses
of finishers become daily GenAI users
Available now as an evergreen online course →
RISE
Boards approve the AI investment. Someone else is expected to deliver the return.
The discovery: nobody is actually accountable for the results. The board decides, the implementer delivers, and everything that goes wrong happens in the gap between them — because a return can't be owed to a budget line, only to the people doing the work.
RISE moves ownership to whoever benefits from the investment, structured around four things: the Returns being pursued, the Investment required, the Support that makes the commitment fair, and the Expectations that make it clear — so project teams can commit to the return at the point of investment, not after.
Set out in Rise Above AI Chaos →
ΔX®
Moving through uncertainty deliberately, one client problem at a time — that's why these four things exist. It's how every O4I engagement is designed.
See how we work →What we're working on now
AI is demanding serious investment from every firm, and the question of where that money comes from keeps surfacing. Some firms are building investment vehicles. We're more interested in making sure the return is there in the first place — that's what makes a fund fundable, and what lets it grow. The pieces already exist: the portfolio method, RISE, and what the Steering Wheel taught us about getting professionals to carry work forward themselves.
We've done something close to this before — not for AI, but for blockchain, a decade ago.
We're looking for one firm to prove it out with.
Let's talk →