Consulting that turns complexity into clear decisions.
Electric Summit Lab works with leadership teams navigating operational change, technology adoption, and organisational design. We help you see the problem clearly before we talk about solutions.
Operational Diagnostic
A four-week structured review of how work moves through your organisation. We map decision flows, interview key people, and identify...
- Every engagement is led personally by Thomas Hutton, not delegated after scoping
- Deliverables are written documents, not presentation decks that need narration to make sense
- We reframe the brief when the evidence points to a different root problem
Strategy Clarification Sprint
Six weeks of structured working sessions for leadership teams that have a direction but cannot agree on priorities. Produces a one-page...
- We reframe the brief when the evidence points to a different root problem
- We cap active engagements at four at any one time to protect quality
- We do not pitch for work we cannot start within a reasonable timeframe
Technology Adoption Advisory
An eight-week engagement focused on the people and process changes that determine whether a new system actually gets used. We cover...
- We do not pitch for work we cannot start within a reasonable timeframe
- Pricing is fixed-fee per engagement, not hourly, so scope creep is our problem to manage
Organisational Design Review
A six-week assessment of reporting lines, team mandates, and communication patterns for organisations that have grown faster than their...
About Electric Summit Lab
Electric Summit Lab was set up in early 2017 after Thomas Hutton spent eight years inside organisations that kept hiring consultants and getting the same slide decks back. He had been a senior operations manager at a mid-sized logistics firm, then a strategy lead at a professional services group, and in both roles he watched expensive engagements produce reports that sat in shared drives and changed nothing. The problem was rarely the analysis. It was that the consultants left before anyone had to act on it.
The name came from a conversation about what good consulting should feel like: a moment of clarity at altitude, where you can see the whole terrain. The lab part is deliberate. Every engagement is treated as a working hypothesis. We test assumptions, revise the framing when the evidence points somewhere unexpected, and we do not protect our initial diagnosis just because we wrote it down. That willingness to be wrong early has saved clients from expensive wrong turns more than once.
— Rachel Okonkwo
Ready to get a clearer picture?
Strategy and systems for organisations that want to move with clarity.
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Why operational diagnostics fail before they start
An operational diagnostic is supposed to tell you where your organisation is losing time and money. Most of them do exactly that. The analysis is sound, the recommendations are reasonable, and the report sits in a shared drive for six months before anyone looks at it again. The diagnostic did not fail because the analysis was wrong. It failed before the first interview was conducted.
Read more →Decision rights: the quiet source of most team friction
Most team friction does not come from personality clashes or poor communication. It comes from a structural ambiguity that nobody has named: two or more people believe they have the right to make the same decision. Until that ambiguity is resolved, no amount of team-building or communication training will fix the underlying problem.
Read more →Why new software fails and what to do about it
Organisations spend considerable time and money selecting the right software. They run procurement processes, evaluate vendors, negotiate contracts. Then they roll the system out and find that six months later, half the team is still using the old spreadsheet. The software was not the problem. The adoption process was.
Read more →“Thomas spent three weeks with us before he wrote a single recommendation. By the time the report landed, we had already started to see the problem differently. The document just confirmed what we had begun to suspect.”
— Rachel Okonkwo, COO, professional services firm
James Ferreira
Selected client feedback. Individual experiences vary and may not be representative.
Common questions
How long does a typical engagement take from first call to final deliverable?
It depends on the service. An Operational Diagnostic runs four weeks from kick-off. A Strategy Clarification Sprint is six weeks. We build in a two-week buffer for scheduling interviews and gathering documents before the clock formally starts, so plan for six to eight weeks total from first conversation to final report.
Do you work with organisations outside the UK?
Yes, though most of the work is currently UK-based. Remote engagements work well for the strategy and advisory services. For diagnostics that involve interviewing multiple people across a team, we prefer at least one in-person visit, which we can arrange for European locations at cost.