Strategic Advisory
Services Portfolio 2026
Strategic Planning & Design
CEO Strategic Advisory & Team Performance
New Science. Ancient Wisdom.
Better Business.
WHO I WORK WITH CEOs & Executive Directors
If you're a CEO or Executive Director navigating real organizational complexity — the kind that
doesn't respond to traditional playbooks — here's why my approach works when others haven't.
A Quantum Intelligent Philosophy
I work with CEOs, Executive Directors, and their senior teams to design strategy and build teams capable of delivering on it—without burning everyone out in the process. My expertise isn’t bound by industry. It lies in analyzing and designing systems that support the organization holistically, regardless of size, sector, or complexity. My clients are the industry experts.
What I bring is 30+ years of deep experience in strategy, risk, and resilience—a combination that means the frameworks I use don’t just look good on paper; they hold up under pressure because they were built in the field, where the risks are real. Tools and frameworks aren’t enough. The formula I use combines Performance Intelligence, Strategy Design, and Executive Coaching because it takes all three disciplines to solve strategy.
My approach and methods are shaped by what I call quantum intelligence—an awareness of the quantum reality we live in, where everything is energy, everything is connected, and everything moves in response to everything else—together with the capacity to apply that understanding within the realm of business. My goal is to help conscious leaders build equally conscious strategy.
The CEO’s Guide to Quantum Intelligence explores the thinking behind this approach—the science, the philosophy, and why it works.
It’s yours as a complimentary resource.
Sana Effird, State of Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education
Erin’s approach is not the usual formula-driven process. I would recommend her to any organization that wants to embrace a new direction that goes beyond the bottom line and also includes engaging all the human aspects needed to successfully implement.
THE FORMULA Intelligence + Design + Performance
My roots run deep in both strategy design and enterprise risk. I have learned that even the most elegant plan will fall short if we don’t address the inherent nature of humans and the inevitable complexity brought on by growth. My Intelligence + Design + Performance formula addresses these intricacies.
Intelligence
What does your market demand? What can your organization deliver? What do your people need to thrive? Performance Intelligence is the foundation for strategy design. Diving deep to answer these questions provides the organizational awareness necessary to solve evolution challenges so you can successfully make your next move. You and your team are the experts—my job is to help you challenge assumptions, reveal capability gaps, and break status quo mindset. Depending on scope, this work ranges from self-assessments and workshops to an all-in deep dive with the ESQI 360 diagnostic.
Strategy Design
How do Vision & Values manifest? Is the work connected to the strategy? Are you managing Purpose, Growth & Evolution imperatives in Equilibrium?
The plan is not the most important outcome of strategic planning. The most important outcome is building the kind of strategic thinking discipline that drives agility. That requires the articulation of a compelling vision together with clear strategic imperatives that support the purpose, growth, and evolution of the organization. Design work produces visioning, PGE Imperatives, strategic goals, risk appetite alignment, and a Performance Blueprint with KPIs and targets.
Performance Coaching
Understand the team you have. Build the team you need. Empower trust and authenticity at every level.
At the core of performance are relationships, and it starts with leadership. Creating clarity and balance at both individual and team levels builds the authentic rapport and trust that high-performing teams are known for. The key: your team needs to evolve as the organization grows. Every change in leadership changes the dynamics of the entire team. Coaching flows through every stage of the project—individually and as a team—to support strategy alignment and execution.
The Strategy Design Diagnostic lets you assess where your organization stands right now.
The Strategic Performance Team Diagnostic surfaces the five patterns most likely to undermine your team’s capacity to execute.
Both are yours as complimentary resources.
THE FOUNDATION Quantum Intelligent Strategy
The Essential Strategy Formula
The fundamental flaw in traditional strategic planning is the lack of context that connects strategy to the most critical elements of organizational success—those things fundamental to its purpose, growth, and evolution. The Essential Strategy Formula addresses this directly, using a Purpose, Growth, Evolution, and Equilibrium lens that brings clarity and focus by revealing hidden opportunities and weaknesses in strategy. This quantum intelligent approach expands perspective and challenges outdated assumptions about how organizations thrive.
Four Rules of Quantum Intelligent Strategy
- Purpose is internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution.
- Growth is intentional, matched by adaptive learning and expansion of capabilities to sustain both speed and scale.
- Evolution actively anticipates the changing needs and wants of all those who serve and who are served by the organization.
- Purpose, Growth, and Evolution are interconnected and exist in a state of dynamic Equilibrium.
Risk appetite is embedded in the strategy design through four questions tied directly to your PGE imperatives—each one meaningful and measurable.
- How much do we invest before the cost is too great? (Purpose)
- How fast can we get there without sacrificing existing value? (Growth)
- To what extent are we willing to change? (Evolution)
- What threats have the potential to disrupt the critical path? (Equilibrium)
Essential Strategy is exactly what the name describes—a thoughtful approach to building strategy from its most fundamental elements, its essential elements—nothing more and nothing less. This simplified methodology lays out a framework that creates clarity, focus, and intentionality around the things that matter most for the health of the organization and, by extension, its ability to implement strategy and sustain agile performance.
Nearly 15 years in the making, Essential Strategy and its complementary frameworks were designed and tested in real organizations just like yours. It simply works—and it works regardless of the organization’s type, size, complexity, or industry.
The Essential Strategy Quick Reference Guide provides an outline of the full framework.
Available to you as a complimentary resource.
STRATEGIC PLANNING & DESIGN The Initial Engagement
That's the framework. Here's how it comes to life. Strategic planning typically falls short in pre-planning
analysis and post-design implementation. For this reason, I use a Discovery • Alignment • Pathfinding •
Performance process to ensure that both your strategy and your plan to execute it are solid.
Organizational Intelligence: the First Lift of Strategic Planning
My Discovery process involves intelligence gathering for every aspect of an operation, building on what you already have and augmenting it to provide a holistic view of true performance drivers.
Operational Performance Intelligence
OPI involves gathering and reviewing information on what has worked and what has not worked. This includes 1:1 interviews as well as deep dive work with your senior team, key SMEs and/or stakeholders to identify subtle misalignments that may raise no flags on their own, but when taken together, explain drivers of performance that you didn't even know were there.
People & Systems Intelligence
P&SI involves understanding the dynamics of your leadership team and your culture as a whole. Subtle shifts caused by the movement of people in and out of leadership significantly impact your ability to execute strategy. The culture you hope exists also affects performance. You need this visibility, so for this work, I use the PrinciplesUs suite of tools for individuals and organizations.
When a comprehensive top-to-bottom diagnostic is called for, the ESQI 360 Performance Assessment can be added to a strategy project, extending the depth and breadth of the Discovery phase.
Strategy Design: The Main Event
With Discovery completed, we move into Alignment and Pathfinding. This main planning event is all about problem-solving and strategy-building. We don’t jump right into goals—we take time to understand what success means and what’s getting in the way of achieving it. Then, and only then, do we build strategy to bridge the gaps. Clarity and definition of Risk Appetite is also embedded in the strategy design process through four questions that are tied directly to your PGE imperatives.
The main planning workshop is often a single 1.5 to 3-day event, or a series of events, where we create space to make it easy for a group of people to come together and find real solutions to critical problems. I don’t do off-the-shelf anything. Your workshops will include a combination of thought-provoking, perception-expanding, and engaging experiences designed to fit the people you have and the solutions you need. The design is based on what we find during the Discovery process.
STRATEGIC PLANNING & DESIGN
Strategic plans are at their strongest the day the workshop ends. This is where most consultants disappear. It's where my work deepens.
Post Workshop Performance Blueprint Work Session
The Performance phase continues after the main planning event. We identify key goals, measures of success, and initiative champions during the workshop, but the high energy surrounding a plan build can dissipate quickly when operational realities come back into the mix. Targets that felt right in the room need stress-testing. Initiative teams need to be brought in. And the cadence for reviewing progress, surfacing challenges, and adapting the plan doesn’t establish itself—it has to be built.
This follow-up work session with the core leadership team happens within two weeks of the workshop, solidifying the tactical plan and the processes that make implementation real.
The 90-Day Strategic Debrief
Ninety days is when the truth shows up. It’s enough time for the strategy to have met real friction—for assumptions to be tested, for team dynamics to shift under the weight of execution, and for the gap between what was planned and what’s actually happening to become visible. Most organizations never pause long enough to read those signals. They either push harder on a plan that’s already drifting, or they quietly abandon pieces of it without ever understanding why.
The 90-Day Strategic Debrief is built into every engagement—a structured session with the CEO and senior team designed to do what most planning processes skip entirely: assess how the strategy is actually performing against the organization’s Purpose, Growth, and Evolution imperatives, not just whether tasks are getting checked off.
We look at what’s gaining traction, where resistance is showing up, what the organization has learned about itself in the process, and whether Equilibrium is holding. The output is a clear-eyed recalibration—adjustments to targets, priorities, and team alignment based on what ninety days of reality has revealed.
This is also the decision point. For some organizations, the strategic foundation is solid and the team has the muscle to carry it forward. For others, this is the moment it becomes clear that strategy needs to stay in motion—and that keeping it there requires a sustained partnership.
For CEOs who are ready to move from a plan to a living strategic discipline, QI Performance Navigation picks up exactly where this engagement ends.
CEO STRATEGIC ADVISORY & TEAM PERFORMANCE A Commitment to Excellence
More than 60% of executives report they were unprepared for the strategic challenges they faced in senior leadership. Not because they lacked talent, but because no one built the bridge between what they'd been taught and what the role actually demanded.
QI Performance Navigation
Thirty years of experience has shown me that the leading cause of plan failure is bad design, a flaw in the process that ignores the most critical elements of organizational success: purpose, growth, and evolution. But that gets fixed in the initial Strategic Planning & Design engagement. The secondary cause is an assumption that a static plan will serve you. It will not. It's a multifaceted effort. QI Performance Navigation works on two fronts:
- Strategic advisory for you, and
- Performance coaching for your team.
Sound Familiar?
- Your strategy looks right on paper but isn't gaining traction, and no one on your team can tell you why.
- You inherited leaders with talent but no alignment.
- You're spending more energy managing internal dynamics than moving the organization forward.
- Your board wants results in 18 months, but the problems you're solving took years to build.
- You've invested in executive coaching before and it helped you personally, but nothing changed organizationally, because no one was coaching the system.
What CEO Strategy Coaching Looks Like
Most CEOs don't have a performance problem. They have a support problem. You're running a complex organization with a team you may or may not have chosen, a strategy you may or may not have designed, and a board that's watching the clock. CEO strategy coaching works on the thing that will actually determine your success: how well your strategy, your team, and your organizational reality are aligned. That's a fundamentally different problem, and it requires a fundamentally different kind of partner.
The Work I Do
The work I do sits at the intersection of strategic design, team performance, and leadership development — because you can't solve any one of those in isolation. I will help you see the patterns your team can't see, challenge the assumptions your strategy was built on, and build the kind of cohesion that turns a group of smart individuals into a team that executes with precision.
CEO STRATEGIC ADVISORY & TEAM PERFORMANCE
82% of executives believe their leadership team is aligned on strategy. The actual number is 23%.
That gap is where strategy dies - not in the boardroom, but in the space between your senior leaders where assumptions go unchallenged and misalignment hides behind polite agreement.
What Team Performance Coaching Looks Like
Strategic agility is tied, in no small part, to team cohesion. High-functioning cohesive teams have a greater awareness of each other’s cognitive, engagement, and motivation styles. They work better together and make decisions faster because they know how to harness the unique dynamics of their team. And here’s what most leaders underestimate: every change in leadership changes the dynamics of the entire team.
This is Strategy Performance Coaching for your team. Real tools. Real insights. Conversations that actually move strategy forward.
- 1:1 monthly sessions with each of your direct reports
- Quarterly team deep dives to assess strategic performance, agility, and adaptation
- Ongoing support through the PrinciplesUs dashboard to build deep peer and leadership relationships
- Bi-annual 5Cs Culture assessment refresh
This means better performance. Longer tenure. Lower burnout.
Every engagement is grounded in PrinciplesUs personality science and the 5Cs Culture Assessment — tools introduced during the initial strategic planning project and deepened through ongoing coaching.
What the Outcomes Look Like
What changes over time is how your team operates when the pressure is on. Leaders who used to defer to you start making aligned decisions on their own—not because they're guessing, but because they understand the strategy well enough to act on it.
Conversations that used to circle for weeks get resolved in a single meeting because the team has built the trust and shorthand to challenge each other without it becoming personal. New leaders integrate faster because there's an actual framework for how the team works together, not just institutional folklore.
And when the strategy needs to adapt, because it will, your team doesn't freeze or fragment. They recalibrate, together.
This is what strategic cohesion looks like in practice. Not a team that agrees on everything, but a team that knows how to disagree well and still move forward as a unit. That's the muscle most organizations never build, and it's the difference between a strategy that lives on paper and one that lives in the way your people show up every day.
I am a Strategy Coach — my focus is to improve strategic performance by giving you deep visibility into your team, so together you can deliver on the future you envision.
Essential Strategy Quantum Intelligence 360 a Deep-Dive Assessment
Information is Power. The QI 360 Model, anchored by the PGEE foundation of Essential Strategy, was designed to identify what is — and what is not — driving strategic performance from the inside out. It leverages deep expertise in enterprise risk, resilience planning, and strategy design to give you a holistic view for the stage of growth you're in right now.
The Comprehensive ESQI 360 Assessment Add-On
For new CEOs who want an unbiased top-to-bottom assessment of their organization, or existing CEOs who feel the edges fraying around their operation and just can't pin it down, I offer the ESQI Performance 360 as Discovery add-on to a core strategic planning project.
The analysis unlocks a holistic understanding of how the organization itself operates, learns, adapts, and navigates both internal and external influences at three levels: the Operational Core, Business Discipline agility, and Quantum Intelligence operational flow. The outcome reveals gaps between formalized expectation and operational reality.
Operational Core
Analysis starts with the Business Core, working to reveal the inner functioning of the organization itself, including how well the organization understands its market, industry, and socio-political environment.
- Business Model & Systems
- Culture & Learning
- Information Flow & Interlocks
Business Discipline
Assessing Business Discipline works to identify the level of agility or rigidity.
- QI Strategy
- Performance
- Leadership
Quantum Intelligence
Measures cohesion of purpose across the organization, focused on key elements necessary for sustainability.
- Aspiration & Alignment (Purpose)
- Intelligence & Decisiveness (Growth)
- Navigation & Adaptation (Evolution)
Attributes of a QI Organization
Six key attributes support the PGE foundation, exemplifying the organization's ability to maintain equilibrium and agility in the face of continual evolution.
- Aspiration – Vision sentiment in and outside the organization
- Alignment – Deployment of resources in support of strategy
- Intelligence – Depth and breadth of learning praxis
- Decisiveness – Are they effective & timely
- Navigation – Attentiveness to change and its impact on strategy
- Adaptation – Ability to move through change
Engagement Investment Projects Built for Service & Value
Every engagement begins with Strategic Planning & Design — the foundational work that builds organizational intelligence, strategic architecture, and performance discipline.
For CEOs who recognize that strategy isn't a one-time event, QI Performance Navigation continues the partnership annually, keeping your strategy alive through ongoing advisory, team performance coaching, and structured reviews that evolve as your organization does.
The ESQI 360 is available as a Discovery add-on for organizations that need a comprehensive, inside-out diagnostic before planning begins.
Every Project Is Different. That's the Point.
The services in this portfolio are structured around three decades of experience and the patterns that consistently produce the strongest outcomes. But structure is not formula. Every organization arrives with its own history, leadership dynamics, and version of what's working and what isn't. Discovery surfaces intelligence unique to your operation — your people, your systems, your culture. The work done in Alignment and Pathfinding depends entirely on what Discovery reveals. That's what separates this approach from canned planning and one-size-fits-all consulting. Every solution is customized to what your organization needs for its purpose, growth, and evolution.
Key Deliverables
- Discovery Summary Report — intelligence gathered across interviews, assessments, and organizational review
- Pathfinding Summary Report — strategic design work and decisions from the planning sessions
- Core Strategic Plan Document — vision, PGE imperatives, strategic goals, and risk appetite
- Performance Blueprint (Smartsheet/Excel) — KPIs, targets, initiative owners, and progress cadence
- PrinciplesUs Team Dynamics & Culture Reports — leadership team composition and organizational culture visibility
The ESQI 360 produces its own comprehensive Discovery Report covering business model and systems, culture and engagement, information flow and interlocks, and operational discipline across all levels of the organization.
The Arc of the Work
Building a cohesive senior team with the strategic thinking discipline to sustain quantum intelligent performance is not a twelve-month project. It takes two to three years of consistent, intentional work to reach the point where that discipline is genuinely embedded in how your team operates, decides, and adapts. Year one builds the foundation and begins shifting the patterns. Year two deepens the muscle and tests it under real conditions. By year three, your team owns the discipline. It’s theirs, not mine. That’s also the point where fresh perspective serves you better than continuity. I’d rather tell you that now than let an engagement run past its usefulness. The goal was never dependence on an outside advisor; the goal was always to build a team that doesn’t need one.
Engagement Investment Options
| Services Included by Engagement | Strategic Planning & Design | SP&D + QI Performance Navigation | Add On ESQI 360 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DISCOVERY | Senior Team 1:1 Interviews | 30-60 Minutes | ||||
| Months 1-2 |
• CEO & Senior Team Individual 1:1s • Current Plan & Performance Metrics Review • Intelligence Assessments (SWOT, reviews, surveys, etc.) • PrinciplesUs Team Personality Assessments • PrinciplesUs 5Cs Culture Assessment |
X | X | |
| Add 4-6 Wks |
• Comprehensive Review: Business Model, Culture, Info Flow, & Ops • Direct Report to Senior Team 1:1s (30-60 min) • Customer/Client Outreach (survey or interview) • Key Stakeholder/Board 1:1s (30 min) |
X | ||
| ALIGNMENT | Senior Team Work Sessions | 1-2 Days | ||||
| Month 2/3 |
• PrinciplesUs Team Dynamics & Culture Analysis Work Session • Senior Team Vision Alignment & Intelligence Analysis Update |
X | X | |
| PATHFINDING | Senior Team Work Sessions | 1-3 Days | ||||
| Month 2/3 |
• Strategic Imperatives & Risk Appetite Design • Key Goals, Initiatives, & Success Measures Defined |
X | X | |
| PERFORMANCE | Team Work Session | .5 - 1 Day | ||||
| Mo 3/4 |
• Strategic Performance Blueprint Work Session • Final Blueprint Delivery + Maintenance Process |
X | X | |
| Months 4-12 |
• Monthly CEO & Senior Team 1:1s (2x per quarter) • New Team Member Strategy & Onboarding Orientation • Quarterly Performance Reviews & Bi-Annual Culture Updates • Annual PrinciplesUs Team & Culture Dashboard |
X | ||
| Investment Year 1 | $45k* | $60k* | $12k+ | |
| Investment Years 2 & 3 | ||||
