News & Announcements
Why strategy documents sit in a drawer unused
Every year, organisations spend significant time and money producing strategy documents that nobody reads after the away-day. This is not a mystery. It is a predictable outcome of a process that optimises for the document rather than for the decisions the document is supposed to support.
Read more →How to run an organisational diagnostic that finds the real problem
The presenting problem is almost never the real problem. When an organisation brings in an external consultant to run a diagnostic, the brief usually describes a symptom: poor communication between teams, slow decision-making, high turnover. The diagnostic process needs to be designed to get below the symptom to the structural cause.
Read more →Three patterns that make leadership teams less effective
When a leadership team is not working well, the effects spread through the whole organisation. Decisions slow down. Conflicting messages reach the teams below. Good people start to disengage. The dysfunction itself is usually not mysterious. It tends to follow one of a small number of recognisable patterns.
Read more →What kind of support does your organisation need?
Answer four questions about your current situation and we will point you toward the type of engagement most likely to be useful. This takes about two minutes.
The hands behind it
Marcus Ellery
Marcus Ellery founded Guild Branch in 2017 after fifteen years working inside organisations rather than advising them from the outside. He trained as a management accountant, spent seven years at a logistics firm in the East Midlands, then moved into operational leadership at a housing association before taking a strategy role at a professional services group in London. He started Guild Branch because he kept watching good organisations fail to act on good advice, and wanted to build a practice that stayed in the room long enough to see the work through. Outside of client work, he runs a small reading group on organisational theory that with monthly in Birmingham, and has a long-standing habit of annotating every book he reads in two colours of pen.