Free. No deck. Five minutes.

THE SKUNKWORKS PROTOCOL

How to build the thing your organisation keeps talking about but never ships.

Give any organisation eighteen months and a wall of Post-its and it will produce a very tidy deck about the thing it was going to build. Not the thing itself. Ask why, and you get a different answer depending on the size of the company, but rarely the true one. This is the true one, sorted by size, because a fifteen-person startup and a global enterprise don’t fail at building for remotely the same reason.

Find your size

Startup Edition

The speed won’t last by accident

Whatever’s making you fast right now won’t survive the next ten hires on its own. It has to be kept on purpose.

10–50 people. You’ve found what works. Now you’re hiring your way out of it.

Read the protocol

SME Edition

The speed you started with hasn’t gone anywhere

Somewhere along the way, the thing that made you good at the old stuff started working against the new stuff.

50–500 people. The core business is fine. Anything new dies in committee.

Read the protocol

Enterprise Edition

The people were fine. The system ate them.

Most innovation programmes don’t fail because the people are wrong. They fail because the company was built, on purpose, to stop new things happening.

500-plus people. No shortage of budget. Shortage of anything moving.

Read the protocol

75%

fewer passes needed to get from requirements to a signed-off architecture, on one enterprise programme

By the client’s own count

years, four rungs the hard way round: engineer, architect, product lead, exec

David Ashenden

juniors on the account. Named specialists, brought in by name, when a job needs one.

No padding

Start with the diagnosis

Each edition is a straight set of questions. Answer them honestly and in five minutes you’ll know whether your organisation is set up to build things, or set up to talk about building things. Most are the second, and most don’t know it yet.

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