I help leadership teams decide where to play next, and leave with a plan they can act on.
I work with teams, their stakeholders and their clients when the world is changing around them. I help to define new propositions, new operating models, transformation programmes that have to commit before they're fully knowable. The work is part research, part synthesis, part facilitation, and a lot of exploring potential propositions and portfolios so that leadership teams can make a decision they can stand behind six months later.
Consultancies
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I lead strategy work for your clients, under your brand, alongside your people.
Businesses
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Research and strategy for your proposition, on a fractional or project basis.
A six-month research-based pilot for UHNW wealth aggregation. Four behavioural archetypes — not the four the kick-off hypothesised — and a multi-year portfolio strategy now in delivery across Coutts and the wider NatWest Group.
A three-day strategic summit and 11 follow-on workshops, routing 500 people across the business. Nine transformational initiatives are still ribboning through four years on.
A six-week reframing of BI strategy. The data-marketplace direction the leadership team chose has aged well — the demand for clean structured data to feed ML systems is now arriving as predicted.
The full colleague experience mapped in seven weeks — three cultures, four mindsets, fourteen chapters. The frameworks are still in use; the lead stakeholder, now Head of HR at the parent company, has asked about rerunning the work at parent-company scale.
The short version.
Trained at the Glasgow School of Art and the Institute of Design Innovation, with a spell at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Fourteen years in practice across agencies and in-house — including Principal Service Designer at Foolproof, Lead Service Designer at rehab, and Design Director at MOHARA. Independent as Sunart Works since 2022, working as an Associate with agencies like Nile and CreateFuture, and directly with clients like NatWest Group and Pulsant.
This work resulted in the transformation of the way we deliver monetisation strategy for the largest gaming console community in the world.VP, Digital Commerce, PlayStation
An adjacent practice — and a working artefact of the AI-in-the-loop position.
In parallel I run Facilitation Studio — a publishing and coaching practice on facilitation craft. Its operating model is itself a piece of AI-augmented design work: a chain of skills I've built to make a fortnightly cadence sustainable while running full client engagements. It's a working artefact of the broader thesis, not a content-marketing project. The voice and the judgment are mine; the AI is in the loop where it adds leverage.
facilitationstudio.com →
Let's talk.
Or email john@sunart.works
For case-study access, mention what you'd like to see and I'll send the password back.
Based in Scotland. Working globally.