Welcome to August’s Strategy Pulse. Most of the country’s on the back-to-school run and retailers are gearing up for one of the busiest spending windows of the year. But the interesting story this month isn’t about total spend. It’s about who’s spending it.

PwC‘s latest Retail Outlook describes it as a K-shaped recovery: one group of shoppers has headroom and is starting to loosen up, another is still watching every pound. Same shop, same shelf, two completely different customers. That’s not a demographic footnote. It’s a strategy problem, because most retail operating models are still built for one customer, not two.

Big Shift: One Shop, Two Customers

The K in K-shaped recovery isn’t new language, but the shape of it has changed. PwC’s 2026 outlook found consumers are firmly in control of their spending, shaped heavily by the cost of living, with a clear split between those who have financial headroom and those who don’t. Retailers who move quickly on that reality, using value, experience and technology to reach each group differently, are the ones PwC expects to gain ground this year. (Retail Bulletin)

Here’s the bit that makes it a genuine strategy problem rather than a segmentation exercise. National Retail Federation‘s research with Bain & Company‘s Pyxis unit found the 2026 K-shape looks different to 2025’s. Where the 2025 data showed falling spend across most lower-income segments, the first half of 2026 shows none of the cohorts actually cutting back. The bottom of the K is holding up. The top is still pulling ahead. Which means retailers can’t treat this as a temporary squeeze to ride out. Both ends of the market are staying, and they want different things at the same time.

This is where it stops being a marketing question and becomes an org design one. Serving a value shopper and a premium shopper well requires different supply chains, different store formats, different pricing logic, and increasingly, different people running each of them. A buying team built to negotiate the sharpest possible unit cost isn’t the same team you want curating a premium range. Retailers now need both, inside the same P&L, reporting to the same board.

📌 Takeaway: The K-shaped consumer isn’t a forecasting quirk. It’s forcing retailers to run two different businesses under one roof, and most org charts haven’t caught up.

Brand in Focus: Tesco

Tesco is a decent illustration of a retailer trying to play both ends at once. On the value side, it’s launching on quick commerce platforms Uber Eats and Deliveroo, with shoppers able to access Clubcard prices and earn points through either app. That’s a bet on convenience and immediacy, not just price.

At the same time, its main rival’s moves show how tight the margin for error is here. Asda‘s shift from its Rollback pricing campaign toward what it’s calling the Asda Price strategy is entering its final stages, with heavier use of multibuy promotions, a sign that headline low prices alone aren’t pulling in the sales growth needed, and that basket size now matters as much as unit price. (Retail Sector)

Tesco’s Clubcard and quick commerce push is really an attempt to hold the value shopper close while giving the retailer new terrain (speed, delivery, app-based loyalty) to compete on with everyone else. The interesting tension is whether one loyalty scheme and one brand can credibly serve both the shopper counting every pound and the one adding a Deliveroo order on top of their weekly shop, without either one feeling like an afterthought.

📌 Takeaway: Loyalty schemes built for one type of shopper are being asked to stretch across two. That’s a harder job than it looks from the outside.

Consulting Corner: Advising the Bifurcated Business

Retail strategy consultancies are increasingly being asked to build two playbooks per client instead of one. PwC UK’s retail lead, Jacqueline Windsor, put it plainly: retailers are navigating competing investment demands, reinforcing value credentials in the short term while transforming their business models in the medium term, and those who adapt quickly to a K-shaped reality will be best placed to gain ground.

That’s consultant language for: don’t pick a lane, build two lanes and staff them properly. The firms doing well here (Bain, McKinsey & Company, and specialists like OC&C Strategy Consultants and Simon-Kucher on pricing) are the ones treating this as a workforce and capability question, not just a pricing model. If a retailer needs a genuinely different operating rhythm for its value tier and its premium tier, that shows up in headcount, in hiring briefs, and in who reports to whom. Recruitment for retail strategy roles is starting to reflect that split too, with briefs asking for either sharp commercial efficiency thinking or premium brand and experience thinking, rarely both from the same hire.

📌 Takeaway: Advising a K-shaped retailer means building two operating models, not tweaking one. The firms winning this work understand it’s a people problem as much as a pricing one.

🔔 Final Thought

Retailers have spent years being told to know their customer. August’s question is sharper: which customer, on which day, buying which basket. Two shoppers, two sets of expectations, one org chart trying to hold it all together. The businesses that work this out first won’t just price better. They’ll hire better, because they’ll actually know which team they’re building and why.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly. In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone trying to build one team for two very different customers.

Market Signal

85% of researchers say automated tools have already improved their workflow — primarily by saving time and enabling faster delivery. Automation now supports every stage of the research process, from brief sharpening to survey design, fieldwork, and synthesis. The execution layer is largely solved.

What remains unsolved — and increasingly urgent — is interpretation.

McKinsey’s 2026 Skill Change Index makes the argument directly: AI will not render human judgment obsolete. It will reshape how it is applied. The highest-value work in 2026 is no longer generating data. It is framing the right questions, interpreting ambiguous findings, communicating insight to stakeholders, and validating AI outputs against organisational reality.

Meanwhile, the industry is naming the shift itself. Brands are now expecting research partners who can operate in the blended space of strategy and insight — comfortable with data, fluent in commercial context, able to translate findings into decisions. Insight teams are building capabilities in narrative framing, behavioural interpretation, and strategic translation. The research project manager and the strategic consultant are no longer interchangeable roles. The premium is moving decisively toward the second.

Frontline

A head of insight at a consumer brand, reflecting on how her team’s remit has changed in the past eighteen months:

“We used to spend most of our time on the mechanics — designing studies, managing suppliers, quality-checking outputs. Now the platforms do most of that. What I need from my team is something harder. I need them to sit in a room with the commercial director and tell him what the data actually means for his decision. Not present it. Interpret it. That’s a completely different skill — and not everyone has made the transition.”

This is the gap the edition is about. Not between those who use AI and those who don’t. Between those who can tell you what the data shows and those who can tell you what to do about it.

Sharp Skill: Interpretive Courage

Interpretation is not just an analytical capability. It is a professional posture — and it requires something that no tool can supply: the willingness to take a position.

The research and strategy profession has long rewarded neutrality. Present the findings. Let the data speak. Offer options rather than recommendations. This posture made sense when the risk of being wrong was career-limiting and the value of the researcher lay in their methodological rigour. It makes less sense when AI can produce methodologically rigorous outputs at scale and what organisations actually need is someone willing to say what those outputs mean.

There is a documented pressure working against this. When AI produces a confident, well-structured output, the professional who disagrees with it faces a specific career risk: being seen to override the algorithm is uncomfortable, and deferring to it feels safer. The result is that interpretation — genuine, situated, commercially-aware interpretation — gets quietly replaced by AI-endorsed summary. The findings look sharp. The thinking behind them has been outsourced.

Three moves that build interpretive capability:

1. Separate what the data shows from what it means. Make it a discipline, not an assumption. “The data shows X” and “this means Y for your situation” are two distinct statements. Train yourself to make them explicitly, in that order, every time. The second statement is yours. Own it.

2. Know the commercial context before you know the findings. Interpretation that lands is always situated. What pressure is the commercial director under? What decision is actually on the table? What would change the outcome? The strategist who walks into the debrief knowing the answers to those questions interprets differently — and more usefully — than one who arrives with only the data.

3. Make a recommendation, not a menu. “Here are three possible interpretations” is a research deliverable. “Here is what I think this means, and here is what I would do” is a consulting one. The second is harder, more exposed, and significantly more valuable. If you are consistently offering options rather than recommendations, ask yourself honestly whether that is intellectual rigour or professional self-protection.

Case in Point

The split your audience is living through is not theoretical. It is showing up in how roles are being structured and what is commanding a premium in the market right now.

The research project management layer — scoping, commissioning, supplier management, delivery — is being absorbed into platforms and automated workflows. The organisations investing in headcount are doing so for a different capability: the ability to sit with a client before the brief is written, understand the commercial context, interpret findings in light of organisational reality, and take a clear position on what should happen next.

This is not a new distinction. The difference between a research project manager and a strategic consultant has always existed. What is new is the speed at which the first role is being automated and the premium being placed on the second. The strategists and researchers who thrive in this environment will not be those who executed the most studies. They will be those who learned to interpret — and had the courage to say so out loud.

Closing Thought

AI tells you what happened. Interpretation tells you what to do about it.

For most of the profession’s history, the first part was the hard part — gathering the data, running the study, producing the output. The second part was assumed to follow naturally from sufficient rigour and experience.

That assumption no longer holds. Execution is fast, cheap, and increasingly automated. Interpretation is scarce, situated, and irreducibly human. The gap between those two things is where the next generation of strategic value will be built.

The question is not whether you can produce the findings. It is whether you are willing to stand behind what they mean.

That is the sharper edge.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone who is ready to move from presenting findings to owning what they mean.

Not yet subscribed?

Market Signal

85% of researchers say automated tools have already improved their workflow — primarily by saving time and enabling faster delivery. Automation now supports every stage of the research process, from brief sharpening to survey design, fieldwork, and synthesis. The execution layer is largely solved.

What remains unsolved — and increasingly urgent — is interpretation.

McKinsey’s 2026 Skill Change Index makes the argument directly: AI will not render human judgment obsolete. It will reshape how it is applied. The highest-value work in 2026 is no longer generating data. It is framing the right questions, interpreting ambiguous findings, communicating insight to stakeholders, and validating AI outputs against organisational reality.

Meanwhile, the industry is naming the shift itself. Brands are now expecting research partners who can operate in the blended space of strategy and insight — comfortable with data, fluent in commercial context, able to translate findings into decisions. Insight teams are building capabilities in narrative framing, behavioural interpretation, and strategic translation. The research project manager and the strategic consultant are no longer interchangeable roles. The premium is moving decisively toward the second.

Frontline

A head of insight at a consumer brand, reflecting on how her team’s remit has changed in the past eighteen months:

“We used to spend most of our time on the mechanics — designing studies, managing suppliers, quality-checking outputs. Now the platforms do most of that. What I need from my team is something harder. I need them to sit in a room with the commercial director and tell him what the data actually means for his decision. Not present it. Interpret it. That’s a completely different skill — and not everyone has made the transition.”

This is the gap the edition is about. Not between those who use AI and those who don’t. Between those who can tell you what the data shows and those who can tell you what to do about it.

Sharp Skill: Interpretive Courage

Interpretation is not just an analytical capability. It is a professional posture — and it requires something that no tool can supply: the willingness to take a position.

The research and strategy profession has long rewarded neutrality. Present the findings. Let the data speak. Offer options rather than recommendations. This posture made sense when the risk of being wrong was career-limiting and the value of the researcher lay in their methodological rigour. It makes less sense when AI can produce methodologically rigorous outputs at scale and what organisations actually need is someone willing to say what those outputs mean.

There is a documented pressure working against this. When AI produces a confident, well-structured output, the professional who disagrees with it faces a specific career risk: being seen to override the algorithm is uncomfortable, and deferring to it feels safer. The result is that interpretation — genuine, situated, commercially-aware interpretation — gets quietly replaced by AI-endorsed summary. The findings look sharp. The thinking behind them has been outsourced.

Three moves that build interpretive capability:

1. Separate what the data shows from what it means. Make it a discipline, not an assumption. “The data shows X” and “this means Y for your situation” are two distinct statements. Train yourself to make them explicitly, in that order, every time. The second statement is yours. Own it.

2. Know the commercial context before you know the findings. Interpretation that lands is always situated. What pressure is the commercial director under? What decision is actually on the table? What would change the outcome? The strategist who walks into the debrief knowing the answers to those questions interprets differently — and more usefully — than one who arrives with only the data.

3. Make a recommendation, not a menu. “Here are three possible interpretations” is a research deliverable. “Here is what I think this means, and here is what I would do” is a consulting one. The second is harder, more exposed, and significantly more valuable. If you are consistently offering options rather than recommendations, ask yourself honestly whether that is intellectual rigour or professional self-protection.

Case in Point

The split your audience is living through is not theoretical. It is showing up in how roles are being structured and what is commanding a premium in the market right now.

The research project management layer — scoping, commissioning, supplier management, delivery — is being absorbed into platforms and automated workflows. The organisations investing in headcount are doing so for a different capability: the ability to sit with a client before the brief is written, understand the commercial context, interpret findings in light of organisational reality, and take a clear position on what should happen next.

This is not a new distinction. The difference between a research project manager and a strategic consultant has always existed. What is new is the speed at which the first role is being automated and the premium being placed on the second. The strategists and researchers who thrive in this environment will not be those who executed the most studies. They will be those who learned to interpret — and had the courage to say so out loud.

Closing Thought

AI tells you what happened. Interpretation tells you what to do about it.

For most of the profession’s history, the first part was the hard part — gathering the data, running the study, producing the output. The second part was assumed to follow naturally from sufficient rigour and experience.

That assumption no longer holds. Execution is fast, cheap, and increasingly automated. Interpretation is scarce, situated, and irreducibly human. The gap between those two things is where the next generation of strategic value will be built.

The question is not whether you can produce the findings. It is whether you are willing to stand behind what they mean.

That is the sharper edge.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone who is ready to move from presenting findings to owning what they mean.

Not yet subscribed?

Six months ago, most leaders were still calling hybrid work the settled question. It isn’t.

WPP now expects four office days a week including two Fridays a month. Barclays has moved 85,000 staff from two office days to three. John Lewis & Partners has mandated three days for buying and merchandising teams. JD Sports Fashion UK head office staff have been back four days since last year.

None of this is being sold as a productivity fix. It’s being sold as culture, coaching, and collaboration. Worth asking why the sudden urgency, several years after the pandemic supposedly settled this.

Big Shift: The office is back as a control mechanism

For a while, remote and hybrid work were treated as a talent retention tool. Now they’re being treated as a risk to manage. The shift in language is the tell. Barclays talks about “balancing flexibility… with the importance of working together.” WPP‘s memo leaned on collaboration and creative culture.

What’s actually changed is confidence. When hiring was tight and attrition was expensive, flexibility was a lever companies pulled to keep people. Now, with several sectors seeing looser labour markets, that lever matters less. The return to work (RTO) wave isn’t a discovery that offices work better. It’s a signal that the balance of power has shifted back toward the employer, and offices are the most visible way to demonstrate that.

For hiring and org design, this matters more than the policy itself. A company’s stance on where work happens is now a genuine differentiator in the market for talent, not a footnote in the offer letter. Candidates are reading these announcements as signals about trust, not just logistics.

📌 Takeaway: Watch what a return-to-office mandate says about confidence in the labour market, not just about where people sit.

Brand in Focus: WPP

WPP announced its four-day office policy back in January, effective from April. Staff pushed back hard: a petition calling for the CEO to reverse the mandate picked up more than 18,000 signatures. Employees in London reported the offices simply weren’t built for the volume. Not enough screens to connect laptops. Missing cables. No spare desks. Patchy wifi. Morale, by most accounts, dropped rather than lifted.

The irony is hard to miss for a company that sells culture and creative collaboration as its product. WPP is one of the world’s largest marketing services groups, built on the pitch that bringing people together produces better creative work. When the internal reality of “coming together” turns out to be a scramble for a free desk, the policy undercuts the exact brand story it’s meant to reinforce.

📌 Takeaway: If your product is culture and collaboration, your own office experience becomes part of the pitch, whether you plan for that or not.

Consulting Corner: The mid-market squeeze

Away from the office wars, consulting itself is being reshaped by the same underlying force: AI capability changing who needs how many people. AI-native boutiques can now run research, modelling, and analysis that used to require a bench of junior analysts, letting small teams take on scopes that once needed a much bigger team. At the other end, the largest firms are scaling through acquisition and platform investment to keep pace.

Caught in the middle are mid-sized firms with neither the balance sheet to compete for enterprise transformation work nor the lean cost base to match boutique pricing. Several analysts now expect that segment to shrink meaningfully over the next few years, leaving an industry split between global scale players and specialist boutiques.

The talent consequence is worth noting. If junior analyst work is increasingly automated and mid-market firms (traditionally a training ground for that talent) are shrinking, the traditional consulting career ladder starts to look shorter and steeper at the bottom. Firms that figure out a new apprenticeship model, rather than just cutting junior headcount, will have a real hiring advantage in a few years.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting talent pipeline is being squeezed from both ends. Firms that solve for junior development now will be the ones with a bench later.

🔔 Final Thought

Two structural stories running in parallel this year: where work happens, and who gets to do the work at all as it gets automated. Both come back to the same question for leaders. Mandates are free. Career development isn’t. Most companies picked the free option this year.

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 proximity play.

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.

Subscribe on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7377303978340143104

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)

Welcome to May’s Strategy Pulse.

For the past two years, strategy has been dominated by one question: are you using AI? Boards asked it. Investors asked it. Consultants made good money helping people answer it. But a different question is starting to matter more: can you actually deliver on what you’ve planned?

The gap between strategic ambition and operational reality is widening. Organisations are sitting on well-formed strategies, refreshed roadmaps, and freshly approved budgets. But are still struggling to execute. Not because their thinking is wrong. Because the infrastructure, the people, and the organisational muscle to deliver aren’t there.

This month, we look at what’s driving that gap, what it exposed at one of the UK’s most recognisable retailers, and how the consulting industry is quietly rebuilding its entire model around the same problem.

Big Shift: The Bottleneck Has Moved

Ask most senior leaders where strategy breaks down, and they’ll point to the usual suspects: unclear priorities, misaligned stakeholders, budget constraints. Rarely do they say “we had a good plan and simply couldn’t build the thing.”

But that’s increasingly what’s happening. The strategy bottleneck has shifted. It’s no longer about the quality of the thinking. It’s about the capacity and capability to execute at pace.

A few forces have converged to create this. Leaner teams mean fewer people to absorb the operational load of transformation. AI has raised expectations dramatically: boards want faster cycles and higher output, often without proportionate investment in the people or structures needed to deliver them. And years of planning heavy, delivery light consulting has left many organisations with sophisticated roadmaps and limited institutional muscle to act on them.

The capability gap showing up most acutely is the one between people who can design strategy and people who can operationalise it. Translators, essentially. Professionals who can move fluently between a boardroom ambition and a working system, who understand AI-augmented workflows not in theory but in practice, and who can manage the messy, unglamorous work of actually shipping things.

That profile is in short supply. And organisations that haven’t started building for it are already behind.

📌 Takeaway: The strategy problem most organisations have right now is delivery. The question to ask isn’t “do we have a plan?” It’s “do we have the people and structure to execute it?”

Brand in Focus: M&S and the Cost of Execution Debt

In April 2025, Marks and Spencer was hit by a ransomware attack that became one of the most disruptive cyber incidents in UK retail history. Online orders were suspended for weeks. In-store payment systems partially reverted to manual processes. Fresh food supply chains were thrown into chaos. Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimated around £30 million in immediate profit losses, rising by roughly £15 million weekly until systems were restored, with the total hit eventually landing at around £300 million in lost operating profit. (BlackFog)

The headlines focused on the hackers. The more instructive story is what the attack revealed about M&S’s infrastructure beneath the surface.

The same hacking group hit Co-op just days later using near-identical tactics. Co-op detected the breach within minutes and suffered minimal disruption to customer-facing services. M&S endured weeks of operational shutdown. Same threat. Completely different outcome. The difference wasn’t the sophistication of the attack. It was execution readiness.

At M&S, legacy systems and tightly coupled infrastructure meant that containing the threat required bringing down broad swathes of the environment. Even though the company claimed over half of its systems were unaffected, the interdependencies made targeted containment extremely difficult. Pre-existing execution debt, accumulated over years of under-investment in infrastructure modernisation, made visible by a crisis. (MTI Technology)

What happened next is worth noting. Rather than treating recovery as a return to normal, M&S condensed a planned two-year digital overhaul into six months, rephasing investment and prioritising the infrastructure simplification it had been deferring. By 2026, M&S had partnered with Microsoft to build what it describes as an “Agentic Retail” ecosystem, deploying 11,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences across its workforce and targeting £100 million in cost savings through AI-driven efficiency. (InfotechLead)

The M&S story is a useful frame for the execution gap more broadly. Most organisations carry some version of execution debt: deferred infrastructure decisions, legacy dependencies, organisational structures that haven’t kept pace with strategic ambition. It rarely becomes visible until something breaks. So, the question isn’t whether your organisation has execution debt. It’s whether you’re choosing to address it, or waiting for a crisis to force the issue.

📌 Takeaway: M&S’s cyber crisis was the trigger, not the cause. The execution infrastructure wasn’t built to absorb disruption. Building it after the fact is possible, but far more expensive than building it in advance.

Consulting Corner: McKinsey and the End of the Advice Model

For decades, consulting’s value proposition was relatively simple: hire smart people, get smart answers. The work was structured around expertise, delivered through slide decks and workshops, and billed by the hour or the project. Clients paid for thinking.

That model is under serious pressure. And nowhere is the shift more visible than at McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey now has around 20,000 AI agents supporting its internal work, up from 3,000 just 18 months ago. CEO Bob Sternfels has been explicit about what this means for the firm’s model: McKinsey is moving away from pure advisory work toward an outcomes-based approach, tying fees to the impact delivered rather than the time spent delivering it. (Fortune)

Around a quarter of McKinsey’s global fees now come from outcomes-based pricing. Clients are increasingly coming to the firm not with a scope, but with an outcome, and asking McKinsey to underwrite the delivery of it. Pure strategy advice, the thing people traditionally associated with McKinsey, now accounts for less than 20% of the firm’s work. The majority is implementation: multi-year transformation programmes, AI integration, operational redesign. (Yahoo Finance)

The firm has also started testing candidates on its internal AI tool Lilli during the hiring process: a signal that what McKinsey values in a consultant is changing. It’s not enough to be analytically sharp. You need to be able to work effectively within AI-augmented workflows, manage outputs that AI generates, and focus your own energy on the judgment and client management that agents can’t replicate. (Fortune)

The talent implication is significant. If consulting firms are shifting from advice to implementation, from billable hours to outcomes, from analyst pyramids to AI-augmented delivery, the people they need look different. Less about raw analytical horsepower, more about the ability to translate strategy into working systems, manage human-agent teams, and hold clients accountable to the results they commissioned.

That’s a different hire. And it’s one a lot of firms, consulting and corporate alike, haven’t fully worked out how to make yet.

📌 Takeaway: Consulting is rebuilding itself around execution. The firms winning the next decade will be the ones who can actually deliver the transformation they sell.

🔔 Final Thought

There’s a version of the execution gap that’s always existed. Strategy has always been easier to produce than to deliver. But something has shifted. The gap is wider, the stakes are higher, and the organisations that haven’t built genuine delivery capability are starting to feel it in ways that are hard to hide.

The M&S story, the McKinsey pivot, the growing premium on people who can bridge thinking and doing… they’re all pointing at the same thing. The next competitive advantage isn’t a better strategy. It’s the operational infrastructure and the people to execute one.

The organisations closing the gap fastest aren’t necessarily the most innovative. They’re the most honest about where their execution debt actually sits, and disciplined enough to do something about it before a crisis does it for them.

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.

The market isn’t broken, but it is changing shape. Here’s what’s actually happening in the insights and strategy hiring space right now, and what it means if you’re in it.

🔁 Quick Pulse: What We’re Hearing

💬 “We’re not adding headcount, we’re protecting it.”

💬 “I’d move for the right role, but I’m not taking a risk right now.”

💬 “The briefs are still coming in, it’s the sign-offs that are slow.”

🧠 One Big Trend: The rise of the “earn the move” mindset

When uncertainty rises, so does the bar for changing jobs. Candidates aren’t disengaged, but they’re discerning. The roles that are cutting through right now share a few things: clear progression, meaningful briefs, and organisations that can articulate why the work matters beyond a job description.

What this means for hiring teams: Vague EVPs and templated JDs aren’t cutting it. The best candidates have options, even in a quieter market, and they’re choosing employers who can sell the substance of the role, not just the title and salary band. The conversation has to earn their attention.

In a stability-first market, you attract the best by making change feel safe.

🔍 Method Spotlight: Skills-based hiring

With junior pipelines thinning and CVs getting harder to benchmark, more insight teams are experimenting with skills-based hiring, assessing candidates on demonstrated capabilities rather than years of service or agency pedigree.

Several consultancies are quietly dropping degree requirements for insight roles, focusing instead on portfolio evidence and scenario-based interviews. Early signals suggest it’s improving both diversity of hire and retention at the junior level.

👀 Brand to Watch: Korn Ferry

The global talent advisory firm has been quietly expanding its research and insight practice, embedding market intelligence more deeply into its talent strategy work. It’s a sign of where the industry is heading: insight capability as a core component of organisational design, not a downstream research function.

📊 Smart Stat

📉 61% of knowledge workers say job security now outranks salary as their primary reason for staying in a role. (Source: Mercer Global Talent Trends)

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

Editor’s Note

Last month we looked at the integrator: the strategist who creates value by connecting functions that weren’t designed to speak to each other. This month, a harder question. If that kind of work is increasingly where the value sits — lateral, relational, cross-functional — why does it so rarely appear on a job title, a pay band, or a performance review?

Because most organisations still reward the ladder. And most strategy careers are no longer shaped like one.

Market Signal

The data is starting to catch up with what many of us already sense.

Among professionals who have been in their roles for five or more years, 38% are no longer considering management positions as their next move. Even among current managers, 19% are actively seeking non-supervisory roles next. Progression without a title upgrade is becoming a deliberate choice, not a fallback.

McKinsey’s research on career mobility tells a sharper story still. The professionals with the most upwardly mobile trajectories — moving one, two, or three income brackets higher — were not the ones who stayed longest in a lane. They were the ones who made what McKinsey calls “bold moves”: roles that were adjacent but contained up to 40% genuinely new skills. Lateral stretch, not linear tenure, drove the biggest career gains.

Meanwhile, Deloitte finds that organisations adopting skills-based talent models — where range and adaptability are assessed alongside depth — are 63% more likely to achieve their desired business outcomes than those using traditional role-based frameworks. The logic is shifting. Most organisations just haven’t updated their reward systems to match.

Frontline

A strategy director at a professional services firm, reflecting on her last two career moves:

“Both times, I took what looked like a sideways step. Different sector, slightly smaller team. Both times, people asked me if I was sure. Both times, I came out the other side with a sharper point of view, a broader network, and frankly more interesting work. The ladder would have had me managing more people and attending more governance meetings.”

The pattern is consistent. The moves that look lateral from the outside often compound fastest on the inside.

Sharp Skill: Narrating the Non-Linear

The risk of a non-linear career is not that it limits your options. It is that others can’t read it.

Hiring managers, sponsors, and senior stakeholders are still pattern-matching against a ladder. A varied career looks like indecision to someone who has only ever seen one kind of progression. The strategist’s task is to make the arc legible — to give the range a narrative.

Three practical moves:

1. Name the thread, not the titles. The through-line of a non-linear career is rarely a job function. It is a kind of problem you solve, a lens you bring, a type of situation you thrive in. “I work at the intersection of data and commercial decision-making” is more compelling — and more accurate — than a list of lateral moves that require explanation.

2. Make range look intentional. Every move that felt exploratory at the time can be reframed as deliberate in retrospect. Not dishonestly — but accurately. The skills you built in each role were real. The question is whether you have articulated why they compound.

3. Publish your thinking, not just your work. In a lattice career, reputation travels ahead of you in ways a CV cannot. The strategists building durable visibility — as we covered in Edition 5 — are the ones whose thinking is legible before they enter a room. A newsletter. A point of view. A consistent voice on a specific tension. These are not personal branding exercises. They are how range becomes recognised as expertise.

Case in Point

McKinsey’s internal mobility research found that employees who took on rotational assignments — moving across functions, sectors, or problem types — were 20% more likely to be promoted than those who stayed within a single track. The moves that looked sideways were, in aggregate, the faster route up.

But here’s the friction: the same research shows that over 80% of role movements still involve people changing companies rather than moving internally. Most organisations structurally resist the lateral moves they claim to value. Which means that for many strategists, the non-linear career is largely self-managed — and self-narrated.

That is not a disadvantage. It is leverage, for those who know how to use it.

Closing Thought

The ladder was always a simplification. It assumed a stable hierarchy, a predictable market, and a single definition of seniority. None of those hold in the way they once did.

What’s replacing it isn’t chaos. It’s a lattice — and a lattice rewards different things: range, relationships, the ability to operate in unfamiliar terrain without losing your bearings.

The strategists who thrive in this environment are not the ones with the most impressive vertical climb. They are the ones who can make their journey make sense to someone hearing it for the first time.

Narrative is the new CV.

The Sharp End is a monthly field guide for strategists, researchers, and insight leaders. If this edition resonated, share it with someone who would find it sharp rather than safe — or forward it to a colleague who is navigating exactly this kind of career moment.

Not yet subscribed?