Experience didn’t teach me to think this way

It gave me thirty-five years of material to think with

I didn’t arrive in management consultancy through a conventional path, and I don’t think the route itself fully explains how I work.

Since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to understand how things work, what connects to what, why something is done that way and what happens somewhere else when you change it.

I’ve followed that instinct throughout my career.

I started work in 1990 and spent the years that followed in a fairly eclectic collection of roles: administration and customer service, marketing and communications, contracts, procurement and bids.

I moved into increasingly senior roles, then interim and independent work, and eventually management consultancy.

Every move gave me another view of how organisations work and another set of patterns, exceptions and connections to add to the picture.

Experience changes what you notice

After a while, and with a substantial library of patterns to draw from, some situations become familiar:

• Businesses grow through recognisable stages
• Departments develop their own habits and perspectives, not always in harmony with other departments
• Temporary workarounds acquire surprisingly long lives

But resemblance isn’t proof

One of the dangers of experience is assuming that, because you’ve seen something similar before, you already know what you’re looking at. I don’t make that assumption.

I want to know why that workaround exists. Why two people can describe the same process completely differently. What that apparently outdated system is still doing that nobody has quite accounted for.

Every situation brings its own challenges

Much of my most useful work happens inside organisations at moments they would reasonably prefer not to turn into public case studies, and I respect that. These anonymised examples of real assignments show a little of how I work.

Right issue, wrong brief

A multi-branch regional charity brought me in for an organisational project that included a significant technology requirement.

They were right that the technology needed to change. But once I’d spoken to people across the organisation and looked properly at what they needed, it became clear that the anticipated solution wasn’t viable.

Instead of trying to force the original brief to work, I researched alternatives, considering hardware, software, implementation, training, costs and practical constraints against the organisation’s wider plans.

That gave us a workable route forward: what to buy, what needed to happen first, how it could be introduced and how people would be supported through the change.

At that point the project was clear enough for somebody else to have taken over implementation. I chose to stay and see it through because it was a great project.

An attractive opportunity. Ready, or not?

A specialist manufacturer, already successful in private and residential markets, wanted to build a meaningful presence in the UK public sector.

But winning the work was only part of the question.

I looked at what public sector buyers would expect behind the bid: certifications, policies, evidence, internal ownership, operational capacity, reporting, training and the resources needed to deliver what would eventually be promised on paper.

That turned a vague ambition to ‘win more public sector work’ into a much more useful question: what would this organisation need to become genuinely ready to compete and deliver?

From there, the route to market became much easier to sequence.

Expanding the view

During the acquisition of a long-established UK business by a much larger group, I was asked to take on a senior interim role overseeing marketing, communications and sales.

Looking at the work itself, I felt they were trying to roll two fundamentally incompatible jobs into one. One needed somebody predominantly inside the organisation, managing information and relationships through a major transition. The other needed somebody outside it, developing commercial opportunities.

I separated the responsibilities, defined two roles and helped recruit the second person. We then worked alongside our counterparts in the acquiring organisation throughout the transition.

Established doesn’t mean stuck

Established businesses have history behind them. They’ve already survived years, sometimes generations, of changing markets, new technologies and ways of working.

Their people, systems, processes and cultures have developed over time. Some of these still serve them brilliantly, while others have been stretched far beyond the job they were originally brought in to do.

Meanwhile, technology, AI and changing expectations around work are creating opportunities to make organisations both more effective and more workable for the humans inside them.

Adapting doesn’t mean throwing away everything that came before. Redesigning well is knowing what to keep, what to change and how to get from here to there without losing the organisation’s heart and soul.

In many ways, it’s what I’ve done with my own work

I began working independently in 2006 and, from 2010, increasingly specialised in commercial tendering, eventually creating the standalone bid consultancy UK Bid Writer in 2018.

That specialism gave me unusually close access to established SMEs considering growth opportunities, new markets and commercial readiness.

In late 2024, after a refreshing two-year sabbatical, I returned to consultancy with a deliberate decision to broaden the lens once more.

In 2025, I completed London Business School’s The Business of AI: Strategies for Leaders and became a Chartered Management Consultant.

Over thirty-five years I’ve accumulated a lot of experience.

Redesigning Business brings the whole picture back together with my natural instinct to find connections, understand cause and effect, and make things work better.

Lyndsey Wray MCMI ChMC
Independent Chartered Management Consultant
Redesigning Business