The Two-Week Pilot
A decision, in fourteen days.
From £15,000 · Two weeks
There is a date in the diary and no capacity to reach an answer before it arrives.
Everyone who could think about it properly is committed to something else, so the version that gets presented is the one somebody assembled at the weekend.
EY gave us two weeks to answer what makes a city iconic. We did not research it. We put the people who already knew in a room with the problem and modelled while they argued.
Two weeks is enough. It has to be spent differently.
What happens
Convene, don't research
The fastest route to an answer is rarely a literature review. It is the right five people in a room with a real problem. Finding them, and getting them to think together rather than take turns presenting, is the skill this is built on.
Design it as a live test
Not a workshop where a client watches thinking happen. The answer gets built, argued with and stress-tested in front of the people who have to live with it.
Model in parallel
While the room works, analysts build and optimise against what is being said, so the thinking is tested as it is made rather than after everyone has gone home.
Build it to be shown
The output is designed from day one to go upward, to a board or a client or an investor, without translation.
The proof
EY
EY needed to know what actually makes a city iconic, and whether it could be designed on purpose, for a district being built from an empty site.
From first hearing about the engagement to presenting a concept: two weeks.
We did not write a strategy. We convened world-renowned authorities on cities, design, governance and public space alongside prospective residents, and had them co-create in the room while analysts designed and optimised blueprints in parallel for the experts to react to.
What came out was a transferable model, Systems and Empathy, and design principles a sovereign-scale development could build against. The strategy became a template for city design, applied across three city typologies. Two smart destinations were taken into development.
What you get
- The decision, and the case for it
- Something presentable. Not notes, a thing you can put in front of the people who approve it
- A recommendation on what to pilot next, if anything
What it costs
From £15,000. Two weeks, start to finish. Travel agreed separately at cost.
This is not a sprint
Every agency sells a sprint, and most are a workshop with a countdown clock. The difference is what happens in the room. A sprint runs a process. This runs a test.
- Not a discovery phase
- Not a strategy review
- Not a facilitated offsite whose output is a photograph of a wall covered in notes
If your date is close, say so on the call. Two weeks is the product, not the lead time.