About Halcyon

Halcyon spent twenty years operating — building teams, running a function, and eventually running a company through a period that looked much better from the outside than it did from a desk. The advisory work started by accident, as favours to founders who wanted to know what a particular decision actually felt like from inside. It turned into a practice because the questions kept being the same ones, and because most of the advice available to people in that position is written by people who have never had to make the decision with their own name on it. The argument that runs through the writing, the advisory work and the talks is that most problems presented as strategy are not: they are a clarity problem, an incentive problem or a staffing problem wearing a strategy costume. That is not a comfortable thing to be told and it is the reason engagements here are short.