Most firms promise a perfect roadmap. We help you navigate reality—messy, fast-moving, and full of variables you can't control.
Why traditional consulting fails
Most consulting firms sell certainty. A perfect roadmap. A best-practice playbook. Eighteen months of carefully orchestrated steps.
Here's the problem: your world doesn't cooperate.
Markets shift. Competitors move. Technology disrupts. Customer expectations evolve. And that beautifully crafted plan from Q1? It's already outdated by Q3.
Worse, traditional consulting creates dependency. You pay for advice, not capability. You get a deck, not a system. And when the consultants leave, you're back where you started—just with a bigger invoice.
We stopped believing this works. So we do something different.
The uncomfortable truth about change
Traditional consulting promises you can plan your way through complexity: rigid roadmaps, cookie-cutter playbooks, and a fantasy that the future will wait for your steering committee.
We don't believe that anymore
Your world changes faster than any plan can accommodate. So instead of selling you the illusion of control, we help you build the capability to navigate constant change—to sense what's shifting, adapt without falling apart, and keep moving forward.
That's a fundamentally different product
We work across four areas where organizations struggle most: strategy execution, transformation, operating models, and customer / employee experience.
We look at how work, decisions, and influence actually flow—not how the org chart says they should—before recommending anything.
We co-create, not prescribe
Solutions are built with the people doing the work, not dropped on them from a conference room.
We build capability, not dependency
When we leave, your team should be stronger and more self-sufficient—not waiting for the next consultant.
We design for humans, not org charts
We treat change as a design challenge in a living system, not a project plan to be managed.
We tell you what you need to hear
That includes naming the dysfunction everyone's dancing around and being honest about what's actually possible.
We actually implement
Strategy without execution is expensive theater. We stay through the messy middle where plans meet reality.
Our approach to complex change
Four principles that guide everything we do:
1
Expect to learn, not just execute
Design thinking over rigid playbooks. We assume we'll learn things that change the plan—and we build that into the work.
2
Map the invisible, not just the obvious
Work with the system, not against it. We map networks, informal influence, and hidden dynamics—not just hierarchies.
3
Enable, don't govern
Minimal rules, maximum enablement. We focus on a few enabling constraints and feedback loops instead of over-governing.
4
Distribute decisions, not just information
Distributed intelligence, not command-and-control. We help leaders shift from having all the answers to creating the conditions where great answers emerge.
The people behind Navigate
We're strategists, operators, and facilitators who've led transformations from the inside—not just advised them from the outside. We've been in your shoes. We know what it's like when theory meets reality.
Robert Kathol
Founder & CEO
A seasoned strategist and transformation leader who helps executives unlock clarity, align teams, and accelerate meaningful change.
Whether you're rewriting strategy, rescuing a stalled transformation, or trying to fix a broken experience, we're happy to pressure-test your thinking and see if we can help.
