STRATEGIC FRICTION
THE DIAGNOSTIC
A focused, one-to-one session designed to surface the structural conflict between the strategy you're running and how you actually operate.
This is not exploratory. It's not a preview or a sample.
It's a complete diagnostic intervention.
For some, it resolves the core constraint in a single engagement.
For others, it becomes the foundation for deeper work.
Either way, the session stands on its own.
The Three Forms Of Strategic Friction
Across hundreds of diagnostics, three recurring forms of Strategic Friction appear.
Most people experience one as the primary constraint, often with elements of the others.
Each creates predictable business consequences.
Identity Friction
The strategy requires a version of you that isn’t sustainable.
Positioning looks right on paper but breaks down in execution. Marketing feels forced or avoided. Business models generate revenue but drain energy. Momentum is possible short-term, but never compounds.
Result: inconsistent execution and growth that resets instead of building. Momentum and motivation fade.
Reality Friction
The strategy is built on assumptions the business can’t support.
Plans rely on optimistic capacity, time, or resources. They are aimed at the business you think you should have, not the one you actually run. Known constraints are worked around rather than addressed.
Result: stalled execution, repeated bottlenecks, and frustration that no amount of effort resolves.
Permission Friction
The correct moves are visible but never taken.
Pricing, positioning, or structural changes are clear, yet delayed. Decisions are revisited instead of executed. Fear of judgement overrides logic. You know that you need to make a change, but don't feel you can.
Result: artificial ceilings, prolonged plateaus, and growth constrained by hesitation rather than aligned effort.
These frictions are not personal failures.
They are structural mismatches between the strategy, the business reality, and the human required to execute it.
Until that mismatch is diagnosed, execution will continue to leak, regardless of intelligence or effort.
(These frictions stem from patterns like those outlined on the home page)
The Conflicts Strategic Friction Creates
Strategic Friction doesn’t just slow execution.
It creates persistent business conflicts that quietly tax revenue, decision quality, and momentum.
Running a strategy that fights you, the operator, consumes attention, confidence, and energy every day.
In practice, this shows up as:
- Decision paralysis at inflection points: Directional changes stall. Strategic moves are delayed or abandoned altogether.
- Avoidance of necessary conversations: Pricing, scope, boundaries, or role clarity remain unresolved, creating downstream friction.
- Chronic underpricing and value leakage: Fees are discounted, offers softened, and margins sacrificed to avoid internal conflict.
- Second-guessing at the highest leverage moments: Decisions that should be straightforward become mentally expensive and slow.
- Inauthentic marketing and selling: Messaging is executed because it “should work,” not because it’s owned, reducing effectiveness.
- Deferred authority: Validation is sought externally, delaying action and reinforcing hesitation.
- Endless optimisation without commitment: The search for the “right way” replaces decisive execution.
These conflicts persist because their source remains unexamined.
No tactic resolves a conflict you can’t see.
Once the underlying friction is made visible, decision-making simplifies, resistance drops, and execution resumes.
Not through force, but alignment.
The Empty Chair
Most advisory work starts with a model.
This work does not. It starts with The Empty Chair.
There is no preset agenda, framework, or methodology you must fit into.
You bring your actual situation to chair: stalled decisions, strategies you understand but can’t execute, or a business that performs externally but feels internally constraining.
We work with your real data - your words, numbers, history, and behavioural patterns, to surface the hidden structure shaping your outcomes.
The objective is clarity, not comfort.
Clarity is what restores decision authority, reduces internal resistance, and allows execution to resume without constant force or burnout.
(Read about the methodology, Aletheia Performance, here)
Overview Of The Diagnostic
The Strategic Friction Diagnostic is built around your situation. Your business, your decisions, and the specific way progress has stalled.
In the session, we focus on three things:
- Identify the core structural conflict: We isolate the exact point of friction that is driving your stuckness and quietly undermining every strategy you’ve attempted.
- Clarify why previous approaches failed: You will understand why tactics that worked for others didn't hold for you, and what that reveals about what will actually work going forward.
- Cut through the noise: Most interventions increase complexity. This one reduces it. Options narrow and the path forward becomes obvious rather than overwhelming.
This is about removing friction, not adding more thinking.
After the Session, You Receive
- Your Strategic Friction Map: A written diagnostic document outlining the specific frictions currently shaping your business and broader life decisions.
- Your Alignment Brief: Three to five concrete decisions, boundaries, or strategic moves for the next 30–90 days that would bring your work back into alignment with how you actually operate.
These are not generic recommendations. They follow directly from the diagnosis.
One week later:
- A Follow-Up Consolidation Call: to clarify what's landed, pressure-test the decisions you’re planning to make, and confirm direction before execution begins.
This step exists to ensure clarity converts into action, not just insight.
Full details of the process, example deliverables, and pricing are outlined in the Diagnostic Brief.
Outcomes - What Happens When The Friction Is Removed
What Shifts:
The specific outcomes vary by person, business and the depth of work.
However, the same shifts show up repeatedly once the underlying friction is identified and removed.
- Decision Paralysis Ends: Decisions that stalled for months become obvious. Action follows naturally.
- The Knowing-Doing Gap Closes: The persistent space between understanding what to do and actually doing it dissolves, often permanently.
- Authentic Business Alignment: You stop building a business shaped by who you think you should be, and start building one that fits who you actually are.
- Secondary Problems Resolve: Issues that were treated as separate problems, in business or life, begin to resolve without direct intervention. This occurs because many of those issues were downstream effects of the same underlying conflict.
- Action Becomes Unblocked: You stop waiting for permission, certainty, or the ideal conditions. Action resumes not because confidence is manufactured, but because resistance has been removed.
"I've gained full clarity when before I was in a haze. This has been one of the best decisions and investments I've ever made. Complete transformation."
— Caroline S. Portugal)
"Mark completely opened my eyes and skilfully pulled out everything I'd been thinking about for years. He's an absolute genius at what he does and it's life changing stuff."
— Lisa C, UK
"You won't come across someone easily who will be straight up with you and call you out on your BS whilst still being compassionate and non-judgemental. This is an investment that will change your life."
— Harriet C, UK
This Is For You If:
This Is NOT For You If:
An Honest Note On The Work
This is strategic diagnostic work, not transformation theatre. I am not a magician.
A single session will not rebuild a business overnight or resolve years of complexity in two hours.
What it does reliably do is:
- Stop motion in the wrong direction: Prevent further investment of time, energy, or capital into misaligned strategies.
- Interrupt recurring execution loops: Break patterns that recycle effort without compounding results.
- Surface the structural constraint: Identify the specific conflicts making progress unreliable or unsustainable.
- Restore decision clarity: Reveal what becomes possible once the real constraint is visible.
Once this clarity is achieved, next steps are no longer a matter of willpower or discipline. They become a matter of judgment.
For some clients, the Diagnostic is sufficient.
The friction is named, the direction is clear, and no further involvement is required.
For others, the Diagnostic reveals that implementation would benefit from additional support, either short-term integration or longer-term advisory.
Both outcomes are valid. There is no embedded upsell.
Only an honest assessment of what will actually improve execution.
By the end of the session, which path makes sense will be self-evident.
Next Step: Access The Diagnostic Brief
The Strategic Friction Diagnostic Brief contains:
- A detailed breakdown of the Diagnostic process: What happens before, during, and after the session, and how the work actually unfolds.
- Pricing and practical details: Clear information on investment and logistics.
- Extended client case studies: Real examples showing what clients came in with, what was revealed, and what changed.
- An example Strategic Friction Map: A full, anonymised diagnostic document so you can see exactly what you’ll receive.
- An example Alignment Brief: A forward-looking document showing how diagnostic clarity translates into concrete decisions and actions.
- Frequently asked questions: Clear answers to common concerns around fit, expectations, and outcomes.
- A direct link to book your Diagnostic: If, after reviewing the material, the Diagnostic makes sense for you.
Access The Diagnostic Brief
Enter your first name and email address below to receive access to the brief.
Currently accepting a limited number of Diagnostic clients each month.
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