Helping founders build cultures that live their values

Snapshot

Young Global Leader (YGL) start-ups wanted to turn big values like sustainability, responsibility, and empathy into daily company habits.

Challenge

Behavioural Strategy Advisor & Leadership Coach: Built the experiment framework, coached founders, and ran low-risk pilots to prove what works.

My role

10 start-ups ran behaviour experiments

Impact

The problem

Bold goals are easy to announce. Living them, every day, is hard. We found three blockers:

1. Inconsistent behaviours - daily actions didn’t reflect stated values.

2. Overload - change felt heavy; teams froze instead of acting.

3. No clear path - without measurable steps, progress stalled.

Approach

Decode → Ideate → Test

1. Decode current reality

   Used Accenture’s Sustainable Organisation Diagnostic to map behaviours versus aspirations.

2. Ideate micro-experiments

   Co-designed small, testable actions with founders, e.g. meeting rituals, hiring tweaks, feedback loops.

3. Test and learn fast

   Supported 4-week pilots, gathered data, and refined or scaled the winners.
   

Outcome: change became easy, measurable, and owned by each team.

Spotlight
Pano AI’s “Leadership Reset”

As a fast-scaling start-up tackling wildfire prevention, Pano AI was growing rapidly, but culturally, they hit a wall.
High pressure and high stakes were creating silence: team members didn’t feel safe to raise challenges or ask for help. That lack of openness was stalling creativity and blocking collaboration. The two things their mission depended on.

Pain point

Through coaching sessions we outline a behaviour-led reset, focused on everyday signals and rituals:

• Leaders modelled vulnerability by sharing challenges in meetings

• Introduced a 20-min “Support Slot” in all-team calls for open asks

• Trained teams in listen-to-understand to deepen trust and reduce conflict

• Reweighed hiring criteria to prioritise empathy, not just expertise

What we did

• +42% participation in team meetings

• Faster decisions, better collaboration

The shift

“It cut through the noise and gave us actions we could use straight away.”

– Arvind Satyam, Chief Commercial Officer, Pano AI

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