The work, in five stories
Five sectors. Five functions. Five different presenting problems.
The pattern underneath is the same: a leadership team that was capable, well-resourced, and aligned on paper, but where something unspoken was producing measurably slower delivery than the situation deserved.
Stories below are anonymised where required by client confidentiality. The patterns and outcomes are real.
FTSE 100 ENTERTAINMENT GROUP
#1
Product roadmap that kept getting redone
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A senior product team in a fast-growing division of a global entertainment business. Six leaders across product, engineering, design, commercial, and operations. Performing well, but the same roadmap kept being redone every quarter. A major platform decision had been on the agenda for nine months without resolution
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Not prioritisation, despite that being the leadership team's working hypothesis. Underneath, two senior leaders were optimising for different definitions of success — one for engineering quality, one for commercial velocity. The trade-off had never been surfaced cleanly enough to commit to.
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Two-day diagnostic with the leadership team, three working sessions over six weeks, 30-day embed. The intervention surfaced the underlying tension explicitly and helped the team make and hold a decision about which direction to optimise for.
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The platform decision was made and stuck. The roadmap held through the next two quarterly reviews without restart. Decision-making at the leadership team level moved from days to hours on similar trade-offs.
We went into the diagnostic with a roadmap nobody was committing to. We came out with a roadmap nobody was relitigating. The shift wasn't in the roadmap. It was in us.
Chief Product Officer, FTSE 100 entertainment group
GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICALS
#2
A transformation workstream that wasn't moving
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A multi-year transformation programme in a global pharma business included a workstream on commercial operations, owned by a leadership team of eight reporting into the COO. Eighteen months in, milestones were slipping, the steering committee was relitigating decisions, and the workstream was at risk of being publicly flagged as red.
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Three of the senior leaders had different mental models of what "done" looked like for the workstream's main objective. The differences had never been surfaced cleanly. Each thought the others were aligned. The drag was invisible in any individual meeting and obvious across quarters.
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A diagnostic at the leadership team level rather than the workstream level. Two days of structured conversation surfaced the divergent definitions; four working sessions over the following weeks resolved them. KIVA was on site twice in the embed period to support the first major decision the realigned team made together. -
The workstream came back to green within one quarter. The programme-level dashboard moved more in 60 days than in the preceding nine months. The intervention itself cost less than the programme was burning per week.
We'd been treating it as a workstream problem and trying to fix it with workstream tools. KIVA told us, gently, that we were diagnosing it wrong. They were right.
Chief Transformation Officer, global pharmaceuticals
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FTSE 100 CONSUMER BRAND
#3
The marketing team that couldn't agree on its own strategy
I'd hired good people who weren't yet a team. KIVA didn't tell me anything I didn't already half-know. It made the team able to say it to each other, which I couldn't have made happen myself.
Chief Marketing Officer, FTSE 100 consumer brand
PE-BACKED FINANCIAL SERVICES
#3
The executive team after a leadership change
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A mid-cap financial services business, recently acquired by a private equity firm, with a new CEO appointed nine months earlier. The executive team of eight, mix of legacy and new appointments, was performing adequately but the CEO sensed the team wasn't operating at the level the next stage of the value-creation plan required.
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Trust between legacy and new members of the executive, never explicitly addressed, was producing a slower and more cautious team than the situation called for. Decisions were being made formally but not committed to informally. Information flow was correct but slow.
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A diagnostic that surfaced the trust gap explicitly and named what each side of the team needed from the other. Four working sessions over six weeks. KIVA returned for one further session three months later at the team's request.
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Time-from-decision-to-action across the executive team measurably shortened. The CEO reported being able to spend less time managing internal alignment. The PE sponsor's six-month review noted a step-change in operating tempo.
The team needed to have a conversation that none of us could have started on our own. KIVA started it, then got out of the way.
Chief Executive Officer, PE-backed financial services
FTSE 250 INDUSTRIAL
#5
A stalled operations leadership team
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The operations leadership team of a UK industrial business — nine people across manufacturing, supply chain, customer operations, quality, and continuous improvement. Cycle times were creeping, margin was under pressure, and the COO had already commissioned an external operational review that hadn't shifted the underlying drag.
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The operational metrics were misleading the leadership team about where the actual constraint sat. Two of the most senior reports were avoiding a conversation about the boundary between their functions, and the team had collectively organised around the avoidance. -
A diagnostic that explicitly worked at the leadership team rather than the process level. Three working sessions where the avoided conversation was had, with KIVA holding the structure. The embed phase focused on translating the new clarity into specific operating-rhythm changes.
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Cycle time stabilised within one quarter and improved within two. The COO reported that the operational issue she'd been trying to fix for six months turned out to take six weeks once the leadership team conversation had happened.