What oomph. actually does.
In practice.
Every oomph. engagement begins with a diagnosis. Not a discovery call — a genuine examination of where the narrative breaks down, what it's costing, and what the right level of intervention actually is. These two case studies show what that looks like in practice: one at the individual level, one at the organisational level. Different clients, different products, same underlying problem.
Narrative debt. Left unaddressed, it compounds.
SPRINT — TWO WEEKS
A founder who knew exactly what they thought. Just not how to say it.
Individual narrative engagement
A specialist media consultancy founder
Strong track record. Respected voice. Serious thinking about where the sector was heading. But every time they needed to articulate what made their firm distinctive — in a pitch, a press briefing, a new business conversation — they were improvising. Different angles for different audiences. No single version that felt true, transferable, and sharp enough to use.
The Sprint excavated the point of view that already existed and gave it structure, language, and a document they could actually hand to someone else. The output: a Narrative Foundation document covering their claim to credit, their core argument, and the language that travels from LinkedIn to a live panel to a pitch deck.
ENGINE — EIGHT WEEKS
Eight weeks to find the thing a major media group had been circling for years.
Organisational narrative engagement
A well-established UK media business
The pitch deck, the website, the CEO's public appearances, and the sales team's positioning were all telling subtly different stories. Not contradictory. Just incoherent — in the way that happens when a business grows quickly and never stops to ask whether the narrative architecture underneath is still holding.
The diagnosis revealed a narrative problem that had been compounding for years. Eight weeks: materials audit, competitive landscape analysis, four stakeholder interviews, a strategy workshop, Socratic stress-testing. The output was a full Narrative Architecture Document — a single organising idea, the language system that travels from it, and the logic of why this business can credibly claim what it claims.
Every engagement starts in the same place
The two cases above are different in scale, duration, and scope. What they have in common is the diagnostic starting point: a genuine examination of the narrative problem before any solution is proposed. If something in these case studies sounds familiar, that's probably worth paying attention to.