What kind of problems do you work on?

Moments when a leader's authority is in play. Taking a mandate you didn't build. Holding it while it erodes. Passing it on so that what you built outlasts you.

In practice: post-merger integration, taking up a new post, succession and handover, strategic assessments, community development programmes, change programmes that have stalled or started to lose their people. Crises, where the sequence of decisions matters more than any single one of them. Special initiatives that need a third party who can move quickly and stay out of sight. And situations where trust between two parts of an organisation, or between an organisation and the people it depends on, has broken and neither side can repair it alone.

Working across government and business is what makes this possible. Public sector work forces you to reckon with the political consequences of decisions, which private organisations tend to treat as noise until they aren't. Private sector work imposes a discipline on delivery that public programmes sometimes trade away. Each corrects for what the other takes for granted.

Who actually does the work?

I do. Tembo is a practice, not an agency, so the person you meet is the person on the engagement. Where a project needs more hands or a specific expertise, I bring in people I have worked with before and I tell you who they are. The research runs with a wider circle of contributors from government, defence, diplomacy, mediation, business, medicine, the academy and the arts. They speak at our conferences, join the dialogues and test the tools. None of them work for me, and none of them are on your engagement unless we agree they should be.

Why do both advisory and research?

Because each keeps the other honest. Advisory work tests whether a framework survives contact with a real organisation. Research keeps the advice from hardening into a formula.

Are you for-profit or not-for-profit?

Both. The advisory work is for-profit, under Tembo Circle SAS. The research runs through the Hic et Nunc Lab, operated by Tembo Citizen, a French association. The split isn't just administrative. Research that answers to a client isn't research, and the non-profit structure is what makes partnerships with universities and leadership networks safe for all parties.

What is the 4Cs framework?

Four bases on which authority gets recognised: Clarity, Consistency, Convergence, Consciousness. They came out of fifteen years of conflict management, management consulting and leadership work, and each project tests them again. They are the current answer, not the final one.

How do you charge?

On deliverables, not on time. Fees are agreed up front against what you get, which means the hours are my problem rather than yours. If something needs another two days of thinking, it gets them. It also removes an incentive that time-based billing creates on both sides: mine to stretch, yours to ration access at the moment you most need it. What I ask in return is that we define the deliverable precisely enough that we both know when it has been met.

Do you work with clients whose positions you disagree with?

Yes, within limits. Mediation between parties who see things differently is most of what this work is, and it doesn't function from a position of moral arbitration. Disagreeing with a client is often the reason to be in the room.

The limits are real, though. I won't produce a description of an organisation that its own people couldn't recognise. I won't take work whose purpose is to give a decision the appearance of a process it didn't go through. And I hold what is shared with me in confidence, permanently, including after the engagement and including from your competitors, whom I may also be advising. If a conflict of interest exists, you'll hear it from me before we start rather than after.

Are you still relevant in the age of AI?

Possibly more than before. AI removes the technical excuse. When execution gets cheap and fast, what's left is deciding what an organisation is for, who it answers to, and what it will not do. None of that is a technical question, and all of it determines whether people follow the decision.

Why the name?

Tembo is Swahili for elephant, animals with no predators and predators to none. Citizen points to the social contract underlying how organisations work and how collective problems get addressed. Legitimacy is granted by others, and the name says who does the granting.