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  <title><![CDATA[Keystone Willow Ford]]></title>
  <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/</link>
  <description><![CDATA[Keystone Willow Ford is an Edinburgh-based management consulting firm helping founders and leadership teams improve operational clarity, strategy, and organisational design.]]></description>
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    <title><![CDATA[What a consulting diagnostic review actually involves]]></title>
    <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/what-is-a-diagnostic-review.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[The word diagnostic gets used a lot in consulting, often to mean different things. Some firms use it to describe a two-hour conversation before they propose a larger engagement. We use it to describe a structured four-week process that produces a written findings report with prioritised recommendations. This article explains what that process looks like in practice.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-05-12</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Why most strategy offsites fail to produce real decisions]]></title>
    <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/why-strategy-offsites-fail.html</link>
    <guid>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/why-strategy-offsites-fail.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[A two-day strategy offsite is a significant investment of leadership time. Done well, it produces a set of clear priorities and a leadership team that is genuinely aligned behind them. Done poorly, it produces a document that sits in a shared drive and is referenced once, at the following year's offsite, as evidence that the previous year's priorities were not achieved. The difference is almost always in the preparation.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-04-08</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Organisational design after a period of rapid growth]]></title>
    <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/organisational-design-after-growth.html</link>
    <guid>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/organisational-design-after-growth.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Most businesses do not design their organisational structure. They accumulate it. A team forms around a person. A reporting line gets added because someone needed a manager. A new function is created because a problem needed an owner. This works well enough at twenty people. By the time you reach sixty or eighty, the accumulated structure is often actively getting in the way.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-03-17</pubDate>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[How leadership teams can make better decisions together]]></title>
    <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/how-leadership-teams-make-better-decisions.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[Most leadership teams are made up of capable individuals who, when they sit in a room together, make worse decisions than any of them would make alone. This is not a talent problem. It is a design problem. The way the team meets, the way it frames decisions, and the way it handles disagreement all shape the quality of what gets decided. These things can be changed.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-02-03</pubDate>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Change management: what the research says versus what actually works]]></title>
    <link>https://keystonewillowford.com/notes/change-management-what-actually-works.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[There is no shortage of change management frameworks. Kotter's eight steps, Prosci's ADKAR model, McKinsey's 7-S framework. They are all useful as maps. The problem is that maps describe the territory but do not tell you what it feels like to walk through it. After twelve years of supporting organisations through significant change, the things that matter most are rarely the things that feature prominently in the frameworks.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-12-09</pubDate>
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