Strategic advisory · Mathieu Darmedru
The decision you believe is still open has already been made.
In M&A it shows up most clearly. A letter of intent, a synergy timeline announced internally, a governance charter published too early: the integration is locked in before the deal is even signed. M&A simply makes it more visible. An AI pivot, a capital allocation, a reorganization create the same points of no return. They are built through acts of good faith, before anyone has named them.
What your organization hides from itself, no audit will reveal. It has to be triggered.
I put your teams into a real decision. An actual call to make, under constraint, against the clock. Under pressure, the organization loses its ability to lie to itself: directives degrade as they cascade down, functions align on the surface and diverge in their actions, and decisions thought to be open turn out to be already settled.
I read what surfaces. That reading is the deliverable. The method is only its form.
Two wargames, deployable alone or together, anchored in real-world cases.
I've built a modular system of two wargames, one strategic, one organizational, deployed according to the decision at hand. When the two run together, it's the gap between them that reveals the most: what your leaders fear is almost never what actually breaks.
Lays bare what your leaders believe will kill them: the incompatible futures, the bets that rule each other out.
Reveals what actually happens when the decision meets your organization, where directives degrade and functions diverge.
Anchors the whole in comparable real-world cases: what held, what gave way, and why.
Consulting usually ends with a recommendation. Here, you leave first with a reading: what will break in your organization, and why. The recommendations follow from it.
Others have faced the same decision before you, and it's documented. On those real cases I reconstruct what a system like mine would have made visible, and you recognize your own trajectory in it. I go back to the moment, upstream, where everything locked in, long before the outcome was visible.
I see the structures others miss, and I keep digging until the logic holds.
12 years in medical-device R&D, making decisions under FDA and CE regulatory constraints.
Executive MBA, HEC Paris. Board governance specialization co-delivered with NYU Stern.