Welcome to June’s Strategy Pulse.

May was about execution: whether companies can actually deliver on their strategies. June is a harder question. Before you can execute, your structure has to allow it. And right now, a lot of organisations are discovering that it doesn’t.

The decisions landing this month, from Meta’s wholesale reorganisation to the Big Four cutting in some places and hiring in others, all point at the same underlying problem. The shape of the organisation itself has become the obstacle. That’s a different kind of challenge from capability or planning. You can upskill people. You can hire better. But if the structure is wrong, none of it moves fast enough.

Big Shift: The Org Chart Is the Strategy

For years, restructuring was shorthand for cost-cutting. Leadership would announce a “strategic realignment,” a few hundred roles would disappear, and the business would carry on in roughly the same shape. The language was strategic. The intent was financial.

What’s happening now is different, and Meta is the clearest current example of why.

Meta announced it was reassigning 7,000 employees into four new AI-focused organisations, structured around what its chief people officer described as “AI-native design principles.” This ran alongside plans to cut roughly 8,000 jobs and freeze 6,000 open positions, with the moves affecting close to 20% of the company’s total workforce.

The restructuring involves flattening management layers and creating smaller, faster-moving teams organised around autonomous AI tools and agents, with staff internally referring to the reassignment process as being “drafted.” It’s not subtle, and it’s not primarily a cost story. It’s a structural bet: that the organisation built for social media at scale is the wrong shape for what Meta needs to become.

The strategic logic is real even if the execution is uncomfortable. Meta’s moves signal how aggressively large technology companies are reallocating resources toward AI product development, concentrating specialist talent and trimming functions seen as less central to future growth. For everyone watching from the outside, the relevant question isn’t whether Zuckerberg has called it right. It’s whether their own structure could support a move like this if they needed to make one.

Most organisations couldn’t. And that’s the problem.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey (Deloitte Insights), drawing on more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries, found that 7 in 10 business leaders now say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Only 28% believe scale will be their main differentiator. Scale built the last generation of market leaders. Speed is what the next one is being organised around. But wanting speed and being structured for it are two very different things.

📌 Takeaway: The org chart is no longer just an operational document. How you’re structured is a signal of whether you can compete. Companies still running on 2019 hierarchies are making a strategic bet they may not realise they’ve made.

Brand in Focus: KPMG and the Consulting Identity Problem

The Big Four are not having an easy 2026. But KPMG‘s recent moves are worth examining more carefully than the headline numbers suggest, because they reveal something broader about what professional services brands are now selling, and whether that matches what clients are actually buying.

KPMG laid off around 400 consultants in its US advisory division in late April, with cuts concentrated in regulatory risk, customer operations, and financial services consulting. Two converging pressures drove it. Regulatory demand dropped sharply after the US government’s rollback of financial oversight, reducing client spend on compliance-related advisory work. At the same time, post-pandemic over hiring caught up with the firm as attrition slowed and teams remained larger than the available work required.

But the cuts are only half the story. KPMG was explicit that parts of its advisory business are still growing, specifically in transactions, strategy, and AI services. Same firm, same quarter, shrinking in one direction and investing in another.

That’s a brand and positioning challenge as much as a workforce one. KPMG, like all the Big Four, built its market position on breadth: the idea that one firm could handle everything from tax compliance to transformation strategy. The firm now expects employees to demonstrate how they’re integrating AI into their client work, with the emphasis shifting from generalist consulting to specialised, technology-driven expertise. The pitch to clients is quietly changing. So is the pitch to candidates.

The firms that navigate this well won’t just be the ones that cut in the right places. They’ll be the ones that tell a coherent story about what they’re for now, in a market where “full service” is no longer sufficient as a positioning.

📌 Takeaway: The Big Four’s restructuring is a brand story. When you cut compliance and grow AI strategy in the same quarter, you’re making a public statement about what consulting is worth paying for in 2026. The question is whether the brand is keeping up with the strategy.

Consulting Corner: The Fragmentation Problem

The consulting market isn’t necessarily shrinking. It’s sorting.

Compliance and regulatory advisory, which drove enormous volumes of work through the 2010s, is contracting as a demand category. Strategy, AI integration, and transactions are growing. The firms built wide, across every service line, are now having to make choices about where they actually want to compete. And the firms that haven’t made those choices yet are carrying the cost of both.

For clients, this is more consequential than it might appear. The consulting market of 2026 looks less like a set of full-service generalist firms and more like a landscape of specialists with generalist branding. Knowing which firm has genuinely built capability in the area you need, rather than staffing it from a stretched bench, has become a more important procurement question than it used to be.

Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital research identifies organisational agility as the defining competitive differentiator, with organisations leading on it around twice as likely to report better financial results. But only 8% of business leaders say their change management and learning initiatives are highly effective. That gap between ambition and infrastructure is exactly where the most valuable consulting mandates sit right now. Not AI implementation. Not change management in the traditional sense. Operating model redesign: who decides what, how work flows, and whether the structure can actually support the strategy on paper.

That’s harder to sell than a technology project. It’s harder to deliver. And it requires a different kind of consultant than the ones being cut, not a generalist who can cover a service line, but someone who can read an organisation’s design and diagnose where it’s blocking itself.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting market is fragmenting around specialisation. Generalist capacity is being cut; specialist capability is being competed for. For anyone hiring or being hired in this space, the question has shifted from “which firm?” to “which practice?”

🔔 Final Thought

The consistent thread across everything this month is the gap between knowing and doing. Most leaders agree the structure needs to change. Most organisations are still built in ways that make change slow, expensive, and politically complicated.

AI isn’t closing that gap. If anything, it’s widening the visibility of it. The companies moving fast look further ahead than they actually are, because the baseline has dropped. The ones that haven’t moved yet aren’t just behind on technology. They’re behind on the organisational conditions that would let them catch up.

The question worth sitting with going into the second half of the year: if you had to redesign your team from scratch next month, would it look anything like what you have now? And if the answer is no, what’s actually stopping you?

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own execution gap.

By Francis Nicholson – Expert in hiring Data, Insight and Strategy talent for the Age of AI

Editor’s Note

Over the past eight editions, we have covered a lot of ground. Retrainability. AI literacy. The power shift. Integration. Non-linear careers. Each one has been about adapting — becoming more visible, more connected, more legible to a market in motion.

This month, a different question. Not what you need to become. But what it takes to last.

Because the strategists who fade are rarely the ones who stopped trying. They are the ones who kept trying — furiously, visibly, permanently — in the wrong direction.

Market Signal

The data on this is striking and a little uncomfortable.

DHR Global’s 2025 Workforce Trends Report surveyed 1,500 knowledge workers and found that 88% reported feeling highly engaged — while 82% were simultaneously experiencing burnout. Not disengaged people burning out. Engaged ones.

Deloitte’s research sharpens the point further. A third of workers say they prioritise work that is most visible, regardless of whether it actually creates value. Forty-one percent of daily working time is spent on activity that doesn’t contribute to meaningful organisational outcomes.

And Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends report identifies AI as quietly making this worse — accelerating the pressure to stay current, adding to workloads, and creating burnout as a silent byproduct of what looks, from the outside, like engagement.

The pattern that emerges: people are busy, active, visibly on — and hollowing out. High signal. Declining substance. This is what performed relevance looks like at scale.

Frontline

A senior insight professional, reflecting on a period she now describes as her least productive despite looking like her most active:

“I was posting, attending, upskilling, presenting. I had opinions on everything. I could talk fluently about AI, about brand, about commercial strategy. But when I’m honest, I couldn’t do any of it deeply. I was performing currency I hadn’t actually earned yet. It caught up with me.”

Relevance performed is relevance borrowed. It has to be repaid.

The repayment usually arrives when something real is asked of you — a project that requires genuine depth, a room that requires actual authority, a moment where fluency in the vocabulary is no longer enough.

Sharp Skill: Building from a Stable Centre

The alternative to performing relevance is not stepping back. It is building from a stable centre — a clear point of view, a defined type of problem you solve well, a reputation that doesn’t require constant maintenance to survive a quiet month.

McKinsey’s research on expertise development draws on psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work across multiple fields — medicine, music, athletics — and finds that it is deliberate practice, not repetition, that compounds real capability. Doing more of the same thing more visibly does not build expertise. Intentional, effortful engagement with the right problems does.

For strategists and researchers, a stable centre usually has three components:

1. A type of problem you are known for solving. Not a job title. Not a methodology. A specific kind of challenge that recurs across industries, sectors, and contexts — and that you have genuinely developed judgment about over time. This is the thing that makes you the first call, not one of several options.

2. A point of view that is genuinely yours. Not an aggregation of other people’s frameworks. A perspective — on how insight creates value, on what strategy actually requires, on where organisations consistently get things wrong — that you have earned through repeated exposure and honest reflection. This is what makes a conversation with you worth having.

3. An energy model that compounds rather than depletes. Research on career longevity is clear: burnout-based productivity cycles cannot sustain a long career. The capabilities most relevant to complex strategic work — judgment, pattern recognition, influence — continue to improve well into midlife, but only if the energy model is sustainable. The strategists who last are not those with the highest output. They are the ones who have learned which work builds them and which merely maintains the appearance of motion.

Case in Point

Stanford’s Centre on Longevity published research in early 2026 noting something counterintuitive about knowledge-work careers: while processing speed does decline after early adulthood, the capabilities most central to complex strategic work improve with age. Judgment. Pattern recognition across contexts. The ability to read a room, hold ambiguity, and move toward a decision without full information.

These are not skills that trend-chasing builds. They are skills that accumulate through depth — through repeated, deliberate engagement with hard problems over time.

The strategists who remain genuinely valuable at 45, 50, 55 are not the ones who successfully performed relevance across every passing cycle. They are the ones who built something real underneath it.

Closing Thought

There is a version of staying relevant that is exhausting and ultimately unsustainable. It requires constant attention, constant output, constant signal. It performs currency that has to be repaid when real demand arrives.

There is another version that is quieter and harder. It requires knowing what you actually stand for, which problems you are genuinely equipped to solve, and which trends you can afford to watch without chasing.

The second version does not look as busy. But it compounds in ways the first one never can.

Stay sharp. Not just current.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone navigating exactly this moment — or forward it to a colleague who might be performing more than they’re building.

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Nicholson Glover is a London-based specialist recruitment consultancy, founded in 2002. We place mid-to-senior professionals across four disciplines: Customer Research & Insight, Strategy & Innovation, Data, Analytics & AI, and Product & Technology. We recruit qualitative and quantitative researchers, behavioural scientists, data strategists, econometricians, foresight specialists, product managers, and senior strategy leads — with agencies, consultancies, corporate insight teams, and venture-backed businesses across the UK and globally. To speak to us about a role or a hire, contact Francis at francis@nicholsonglover.co.uk or visit nicholsonglover.co.uk.

June 1st – hayfever and BBQ season is in full swing, and agency and client relationships are shifting. Here’s what’s happening in the insights and strategy space right now, and what it means if you’re in it.

🔁 Quick Pulse: What We’re Hearing

💬 “I want a role where I actually see the impact of my work – not just send a report off into the void.”

💬 “The agency/client relationship is becoming more transactional.”

💬 “We’re hiring, but we’re so busy we don’t have time to actually hire anyone.”

🧠 One Big Trend: The agency–client relationship is losing its depth

Across the board, insight relationships are becoming more transactional. Briefs arrive fully formed, timelines are compressed, and the expectation is delivery, not dialogue. And while efficiency has its place, something is being lost in the process – the consultative back-and-forth that tends to produce the most genuinely useful work.

For candidates, this shift is shaping what they want from their next role. People at the sharp end are increasingly wanting to see where their work lands and see its strategic implications. That’s harder to offer when the relationship with the client is transactional by design.

What’s driving it: Procurement involvement has increased and budgets are tighter. In a market where insight is still proving its commercial value, speed has become the visible metric. The race to the lowest price point is quietly eroding the space for the kind of thinking clients actually need.

🔍 Method Spotlight: Collaborative Discovery

As a counter to the transactional brief model, some agencies are reintroducing structured co-creation at the start of a project, bringing clients into the research design process rather than receiving a brief and disappearing until debrief.

Why it works: When clients co-own the research question, they’re more invested in the answer. Engagement at debrief is stronger, implementation moves faster, and the agency relationship shifts from vendor to partner. It costs more at the front, and saves considerably more at the back.

👀 Brand to Watch: Ipsos Iris

Ipsos’ behavioural science unit has been quietly repositioning itself as a strategic growth partner rather than a research supplier, embedding consultants into client teams over longer engagements rather than delivering standalone projects. It’s a deliberate move against the transactional grain, and one that’s attracting attention from clients who’ve grown frustrated with report-and-retreat agency models.

📊 Smart Stat

42% of insight professionals say they rarely or never receive feedback on how their research was used after delivery. (Source: GreenBook Industry Trends Report (GRIT), 2025)