One room. One marker. One decision.
For leadership teams stuck on a decision that already has a date on it.
AI can produce more options, more summaries, more slides and more certainty-shaped language. It cannot take responsibility for the choice. Your leadership team still has to do that.
When the room keeps circling, I use questions, a marker and a whiteboard to make the real decision visible.
Tell me the decision. I’ll tell you whether a Sharpie Room can move it.
No deck.
Helped Deloitte win $2 billion in client work.
Probably more than once.
Everyone has done the work. There is a deck. Behind that deck is another deck. Somewhere there is a model with three scenarios and a fourth tab nobody has opened.
The room still cannot land.
And producing more material has never been easier. AI can generate options, analysis, summaries and recommendations in minutes.
The hour you have to decide did not get any longer.
The diagnosis
Everyone in the room is intelligent. Everyone has a reasonable point of view.
But they are not answering the same question.
The offer
One focused executive session built around one consequential decision.
You bring the people who own it. I bring a marker.
I listen for the language hiding the issue. I ask the questions the room has stepped around. I draw the assumptions, constraints and competing versions of the problem where everyone can see them.
Strip away the broad language and name the call the room has to make.
Expose the different assumptions, interests, risks and time horizons underneath the discussion.
Make it clear what each path requires, what it rules out and who owns what happens next.
Not six issues.
Not a broad strategy day.
One decision.
We have one sponsor conversation.
You send what already exists: numbers, operating plans, research, proposals, emails or the documents that started the disagreement.
No survey. No team homework. No new deck.
Together, we reduce the brief to the decision the room must make.
I begin without a presentation.
We put the current question on the wall. Then I test it.
You receive a one-page decision record within 48 hours.
Someone wants a platform. Someone wants agents. Someone read a deck on the plane. Nobody in the room has said what job the thing is meant to do.
The failure is rarely the model. It is that the thing was bought as a noun. An AI copilot. An agentic platform. A noun with no verb attached to it, so the licences get signed and the pilots quietly stall.
Enterprises do not buy identities. They buy outcomes.
So I start with the work rather than the tool. What your people actually do all day. Which parts need judgment, and which parts are moving something from one place to another.
Five questions before anything gets built
Named as a verb somebody performs, not a capability the system has.
How the work gets done today, measured before anything changes.
A number against that baseline. Not a projection from a vendor.
If only the project team can see the gain, it did not happen.
A date. Anything that cannot carry one is research, and that is a different budget.
Cannot answer all five? Then it is not ready to build.
At Deloitte I worked on the internal enablement platform used by roughly 16,000 people, on the strategy and the experience side. The problem there was never a shortage of information. It was surfacing the right thing at the moment somebody needed it, instead of burying it in a system they had to go and search. I have spent the last two years applying that same thinking to AI, in my own products and with clients.
A slide is a finished argument.
Its edges have been cleaned up. The language has been approved. The uncertainty has been removed before the room sees it.
That makes slides useful for presenting a decision. It makes them poor tools for making one.
A whiteboard is unfinished. People interrupt it, correct it, challenge it, stand up and redraw it.
The thinking stays visible while it changes.
My role
Your people are.
I do not enter the room to replace their judgment with mine.
I enter without the history, departmental loyalty or need to defend the last recommendation. That distance lets me hear what the room cannot hear from inside itself.
The answer is often already there. It is buried under expertise, language, politics, old decisions and too much material.
My job is to help the room retrieve it.
Questions. A marker. A shared picture.What people bring Paul in for
Not a prewritten answer. Not a performance of expertise. A way to help smart people see what they already know from a different angle.
Internal email, November 2021
“Yes he can design, but isn’t what you call a typical designer. Yes he can write, but isn’t a typical writer. And yes he helps develop strategies but isn’t a typical strategist. He is a swiss army knife of many skills but doesn’t easily fit into our typical tool box.”
“Let’s start to think of Paul as an option to help become a bridge between departments. The bridge between the complex and the creatives, or between account and strategy.”
“He doesn’t apply his own personal vision. He seeks to clarify the client’s vision, listening and looking at challenges from different angles.”
“Paul can sit in a room with experts from all manner of professions across a multitude of industries and facilitate creative problem solving.”
“Do yourself a favour and just let Paul ask you the questions you didn’t even know you had to consider.”
“His integrated thinking kneads out the knots in your complex ideas.”
You have enough finished arguments. The room needs somewhere to think in public.
Send me the material that already exists. I will not add another preparation project to the decision.
A room without the people who can decide produces another recommendation. You already have several of those.
I will not run a session designed to create cover for a decision that has already been made.
The narrowness is the value. One consequential decision per room.
People can disagree with a decision and still understand it well enough to act.
Most workshops are built to gather input. This one is built to make a decision.
There are no breakout exercises designed to create participation. No post-it wall that becomes a synthesis deck. No report arriving after the energy has left the room.
The work happens with the decision-makers present. So does the call.
Correct. I do not try to replace the expertise in the room.
Your people understand the business. What they cannot do is see their shared problem from outside the history that produced it. That distance is what I bring.
Because AI can help the team produce more material. It cannot make the team share one picture of the decision.
The whiteboard slows the thinking down enough to expose the assumptions. It keeps the reasoning public. And it makes it difficult to hide behind polished language.
A strategy engagement may be right when you need research, modelling, recommendations or a large body of work.
The Sharpie Room is for a narrower moment. The expertise is already present. The decision is not.
The next move
You do not need a polished brief. You need a live issue, the people responsible for it and a willingness to make a choice.
Book 15 minutesNo presentation required.