Writing is research.

What makes written content come alive is not fancy phrasing or elaborate construction — that’s just eyeball glitter. When you experience great writing, what you’re feeling are the hours of deep background that went into it: the desk research; the carefully chosen inputs; the briefings, data, sources or interviews. The art of great writing lies in pulling that material together, like a drawstring, into one seamless story.

We know because it’s in our bones: Quant./qual. research is where we all started out decades ago: studying global businesses models through interviews and case studies; learning how to ask the right questions and turn disparate responses into coherence. It’s why all of our writing today is proudly research-based.

And the formal research work continues too: We conduct private polls and surveys for clients, and continue to publish regular external studies on leadership, reputation, corporate affairs and public policy.

Since 2020, awards submissions have become a rapidly growing business for us, with remarkable results: 83% of our written entries for clients have seen their work shortlisted in major comms/PR programmes such as the EMEA SABREs, PRWeek Globals and Cannes Lions — and 71% have won outright. Often up against hundreds of rival entries, that’s unprecedented success.

We think it’s how we approach the challenge. Because the question is not why your story is great. It’s why it’s better than all the other great stories on the juror’s pile.

Your story has to be a sweeping novel, a structured case study and a detail-rich briefing paper, all in one. That tight 800 words needs a narrative arc that catches attention on a skim read and puts it into the consideration pile, tiny subtleties that reward deeper scrutiny at shortlist stage, then carefully sown seeds of evidence — decisions, obstacles, ingenuity, strategy, sprinkled at just the right moments — to enable someone to argue for you in the final jury discussion. It’s a delicate tapestry; a subtle weave of hard facts and inspirational storytelling. It’s some of the most difficult writing we do.

But we believe — and our clients would agree — that we’ve got quite good at it.

Going through a rebrand? Strategic overhaul? New vision? Transformation? It usually all means the same thing: a new CEO with a new direction to explain.

We help organisations change the narrative by writing one: the story of who you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and why. Written as a story, it becomes something you can give to agencies pitching for the rebrand, executives developing their own strategies or clients looking to understand your ambitions.

Why do it this way? Because a strategy’s meaning often lives between the bullet points. There are facts and targets, but also motives, convictions, difficult choices and past experiences that explain the direction you’ve chosen. Narrative brings them together, giving readers a richer understanding of the vision and the reasoning behind it.

Our clients tell us this can shortcut months of partial understanding: the agency pitch that misses a crucial nuance, the departmental strategy that follows the letter but loses the spirit. A shared story gives everyone something to work from, with enough depth to understand how their part fits into the whole.

It might read like a short Harvard Business Review analysis, take the form of a strategy proposal or unfold as a story with moments of peril, obstacles overcome and a future still to be decided. One page or 20, its job is to make your direction clear—and make clear why it matters.

An op-ed asks a busy reader to spend a few minutes inside someone else’s argument. There has to be something worth finding there: a perspective they haven’t considered, an assumption challenged, an experience that casts familiar events in a different light. We work with you to find that contribution and give it a clear line of argument, with an opening that earns attention and evidence that earns belief.

Ghostwriting makes this a particularly close collaboration. The piece carries your name, so its judgements and voice must feel like yours. We ask questions, test the reasoning and anticipate the objections, helping you say precisely what you mean with enough conviction to persuade someone who doesn’t already agree. Our work has included pieces in international newspapers for Ukrainian civil society leaders ahead of key UN votes — arguments written for a specific audience, at a moment when reaching it mattered — as well as for corporate leaders in national media and trade magazines.

[content missing]

A speech has to work at the speed of listening. The audience can’t reread a complicated sentence or turn back a page to recover the thread. Every idea has to arrive clearly, in an order that makes sense, with enough rhythm and variety to keep people listening. And it has to sound natural in the mouth of the person delivering it.

That starts with conversation. We work with you to find the argument, the experiences that give it substance and the turns of phrase that make it yours. A candid admission, an unexpected detail or a well-timed pause can do more than a paragraph of polished corporate language. The craft is knowing where each belongs—and giving you words you can stand behind as well as stand up and say.

Our experience includes helping senior leaders explain reorganisations, set out new strategies and speak to people facing considerable uncertainty. We bring the same care to a keynote or a leadership address: understanding what the audience needs to hear, where they may be sceptical and what you want them to carry away when you leave the stage.

This is not your standard writing training – all that well-worn “write in the active voice,” “how to create a killer headline” stuff. Designed specifically for busy communications teams, this short, interactive seminar has a specific purpose: Get your team to away from their keyboards for an hour to re-engage with the craft of writing. Our goal: Get them to thinkbefore they next begin typing, whether they’re working on an annual report or an email.

Writing is full of decisions we rarely stop to examine. Why begin with that fact? Why use that word? Why does one sentence carry you effortlessly into the next, while another brings you to a halt? We open up that machinery, drawing on journalism, literature, neurology, pattern-recognition studies and the psychology of reading, exploring how words hold attention and how stories take shape for readers — and how we create writing that moves, persuades or informs.

Then we put those ideas to work: finding the argument in an unwieldy executive interview, giving an abstract statistic a scale the reader can picture, reading a passage aloud and hearing where it falters.

We think of it as “a yoga retreat for the writing mind” — a chance to step away from the busy day for one hour and re-engage with the craft – and how to pay closer attention to your own decisions the next time your hands are hovering over your keyboard.

A strategy can make perfect sense in the boardroom and become steadily less clear as it travels through an organisation. People encounter it through a manager’s briefing, a change to their role, a decision that seems to contradict the announcement. Our consultancy starts with that gap: between what leaders intend and what people understand, believe and do.

We bring experience on both sides of it. We’ve spent a quarter of a century researching how organisations communicate, alongside working inside multinationals to help deliver reorganisations, digital transformation and changes in culture. We’ve advised senior leaders, developed global communications strategies and taken on interim responsibility for putting them into practice.

That means we can help shape the strategy, question its assumptions and find the storyline that makes it intelligible. Then work through what it requires of leaders, managers and the communications team. Our role can range from a sounding board for a difficult decision to hands-on support through a sustained programme of change.

Away from work, we’re creative writers too.

• Josie produces a blog and writes poetry – check out her page.

• Kieron’s writes psychological thrillers under the pen name J.J. Castro. ‘Before You Wake Up’ will be available in online stores from December 2026

At heart, we’re word nerds. So in our spare time, we also construct crosswords and other word puzzles for national publications, including The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Drop us an email and we’ll happily send you one for free — or if you want one for your publication, let us know!