Every C-suite knows the feeling: a strategy gets signed off, weeks of executive time go into the plan — and twelve months later, the numbers haven't moved the way the deck promised. The cause is rarely the strategy. It is that the people executing it weren't quite agreed on what mattered. Congruent measures exactly where that disagreement is, quantifies what it costs you in revenue, margin and retention — and gives you the roadmap to close the gap. For a 250-FTE professional-services firm the modelled first-year unlock on a standard Diagnostic runs to £0.3–1.2m against an £18k fee (modelled bottoms-up, sources cited below), and the gap closes wave-on-wave from there.
Published research — across HBR, PMI and LSA Global — points the same way: misalignment quietly costs every mid-market organisation a material share of revenue, growth, and retention every year. Alignment is the single biggest controllable variable.
Three surfaces, one source of truth. Surface 1 — the Diagnostic — tells you where misalignment exists and gives you the baseline to measure any initiative against. Surface 2 — Monitor — is the platform: your KPIs, peer-benchmarked and tracked wave-on-wave. Surface 3 — Bank-in-a-Box — is the accelerant for the parts of the business where the diagnostic surfaced a structural process gap. Click a card to see what each delivers, then click through for the full walkthrough.
A 12-minute pairwise survey plus an executive baseline interview establish where misalignment exists — and set the measured baseline before any planned initiative to improve alignment.
Board-ready Word / PDF — 9 sections including Total Misalignment, Segment Analysis, Value Chain, KPI Summary with named £ benefits, and Peer Benchmarking.
Each priority misalignment mapped to specific KPIs — formulas, owners and aggregation levels — the baseline you measure every initiative against.
90-minute session with leadership, full Q&A, recorded for replay — the close of the six-week engagement.
Platform access. The KPIs you provide land in a peer-benchmarked dashboard — see how you compare, track the trend across time, and watch your change initiatives visibly move both alignment and the KPIs being monitored.
Live HTML — eight tabs covering Overview, Value Chain, Segments, Respondents, KPI Cockpit, Benchmarking, Trend Analysis and Methodology. Refreshes every wave.
Your KPIs as live tiles — current value, 12-month trend, owner, level tag. Calculations run inside your data environment; only pre-calculated values cross the boundary.
CI × EBITDA against an overall cohort and a sector × size peer set, with P25 / P50 / P75 bands on every KPI tile and the trend tracked wave-on-wave.
An inventory of the organisation using systems thinking, targeting the collection of processes where change would have the most impact — with costed options for change provided.
Live HTML — process inventory scored on five dimensions, the redesign portfolio shortlist, KPI cockpit feed, peer-benchmark unlock and the projected CI lift.
Board-ready Word / PDF — audit narrative, the redesigns with owners and target metrics, projected CI movement and the peer-benchmark unlock case.
Most strategy work is sold on the value of the recommendations. Congruent is sold on the gap it identifies between the strategy and the people who execute it — and the £ value of closing that gap. The unlock numbers below are modelled, not promised, and every input traces to a public source — SHRM on replacement cost, McKinsey on pricing, MCA on UK consulting margins, HBR / Bain on strategy execution, LSA Global on alignment outcomes. Sources are cited in the methodology panel.
The standalone reading. One survey wave, the executive baseline interview, the diagnostic report and dashboard, and the five priority KPIs already specified.
The standard mid-market tier. Quarterly survey waves keep the gap measured wave-on-wave. The KPI Cockpit instruments every priority misalignment and tracks the lift toward target.
The accelerant when the diagnostic surfaces a structural process gap. Inventories the BU's processes, scores them, shortlists redesigns, and locks down the change scope. Each redesign tied to a cockpit KPI.
The Y1 unlock numbers are modelled per-engagement from the buyer's own data — the full method, the stepped worked example and every cited source sit one click away.
A 30-minute fit call: we'll walk through the diagnostic, the dashboard, and whether the engagement makes sense for your organisation right now.
A Word + PDF executive diagnostic generated from the engine's output and the sample firm's company profile. Nine numbered sections, two appendices. Every Congruence Index in the document carries its variance band (per the executive baseline methodology). The KPI Summary names organisational and financial benefits per KPI. The Peer Benchmarking section places the firm against both an overall cohort and a sector × size cohort, and converts the cohort gap into £-unlock.
The firm sits at the bottom of the Warn band on Congruent's Congruence Index (71.4 ± 4.0). The strategy is well-articulated at the top, has been absorbed by the long-tenured, but is not landing consistently at the operating edge — Partners score CI 91, Consultant/Analysts CI 60. Tenure is the single strongest predictor of alignment (R² 0.87).
Five priority misalignments split into two patterns: three communication-gap signals (Superior Talent, Brand Recognition) where leadership intent has not landed at IC level, and three lived-experience signals (Pricing Agility, Customer Experience, Operational Excellence) where the segments are telling the executive something the baseline does not see.
Every recommendation arrives with a named owner, a target trajectory, the £ benefit, and a confidence flag — "act now" for high-confidence findings, "firm up via follow-up interview" for criteria where the executive baseline carries more uncertainty. The board reads the report knowing which interventions to fund first and which to investigate before committing.
No scales, no ratings — just structured pairwise choices about relative priority. The format mirrors how humans actually make decisions (linguistically, not numerically). Works on any device, no login required. Pre-issued roster IDs let the business owner track completion in real time.
Select where each comparison sits on the scale. The middle option means equally important.
This is a representative sample of the real instrument. The full survey covers up to 35 criteria in ~12 minutes.
The fast-survey, same-day-report framing describes the respondent burden — not the engagement. What you are actually paying for is a structured, independent conversation about your strategic priorities that the leadership team genuinely cannot have internally without it becoming political. The measurement spine is the artefact that makes that conversation possible — and repeatable.
50–1,000 FTE. Sweet spot 150–500. Multi-office or decentralised organisations, post-Series B or 5+ years of organic growth. Sector-agnostic, with sector-tuned KPI overlays for professional services, financial services, technology, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and the public sector.
→ New CEO arriving in the first 100 days
→ Post-merger integration
→ Annual or 3-year strategy refresh
→ Persistent inter-departmental friction
Active executive time is concentrated in weeks 1 and 6. Most of the lift happens in the survey, engine, and reporting phases between — which is where Congruent does the work.
Total active executive time: ~3 hours (weeks 1, 4 and 6 combined). Total respondent time: 12 min per person. Total elapsed: 6 weeks. The first quarterly subscription wave runs the same cadence starting at Week 13.
Yes, you can produce a survey and a spreadsheet of weights in an afternoon. What you can't produce is a defensible, comparable, board-credible diagnostic. Here's the difference, plainly.
The Congruent method has 40+ years of peer-reviewed academic foundation — fuzzy logic + the Analytic Hierarchy Process — applied across aerospace, automotive, industrial control, AI and ML. Our engine matches the original worked examples to the second decimal. An LLM-designed scoring scale doesn't survive a board challenge from a CFO who's done their own reading; this does.
Methodology cite: Buckley 1985 (see Methodology drawer)A one-off AI questionnaire produces a one-off number. Congruent's instrument, scale, mathematics, and consistency thresholds are sealed — re-running the survey next quarter produces a directly comparable Congruence Index. Alignment becomes a managed metric, not a re-asked vibe.
Same instrument · same maths · same scaleRespondents whose pairwise responses breach transitivity (if A>B and B>C then A>C must hold) are automatically flagged via the Central Consistency Index. A small fraction of responses gets excluded this way. Skip this step and your aggregate weights are statistical noise dressed up as strategy.
CCI threshold · CR < 0.10The biggest single reason this can't be DIY: respondents tell us things they would never put into an internal survey, an HR-run engagement check, or an exec-sponsored "alignment exercise." The data leaves the building, comes back aggregated, and the executive team can hear it without owning it politically.
Outside the politics · inside the dataMapping each strategic criterion to a specific KPI — with a formula, a level (OP / BU / CORP), and an owner — is expert work built from years of consulting practice. An LLM can suggest plausible-sounding metrics; it can't tell you which six to instrument first and which to leave alone.
Curated · sector-tuned · formula-backedThe Benchmarking tab in the Diagnostic Dashboard anonymously compares your Congruence Index against peer organisations in your sector and FTE band, plus an overall services cohort. That benchmark is impossible to construct from a single organisation's data — and is the answer to the inevitable "is 71.4 good?" board question. (For the sample firm: P31 — bottom third — on both cohorts.)
Enterprise tier · peer-anonymisedPut plainly: the survey is the cheap part. What you can't replicate without us is the validated maths, the comparability over time, the independence that gets honest answers, and the consulting layer that turns weights into a 90-day plan the board will actually fund.
Illustrative sample data from a mid-market consultancy diagnostic (Wave 1, May 2026 · 142 respondents · CI 71.4 ± 4.0). The live dashboard has eight tabs; the previews below show the four most-used. The KPI Cockpit tab tracks the five priority KPIs the diagnostic surfaces. The Benchmarking tab places the firm against an overall cohort and a sector × size cohort. The Trend Analysis tab tracks the gap closing wave-on-wave.
Additional tabs in the live dashboard: Respondents (Central Consistency Index flags), Benchmarking (peer cohort CI × EBITDA), Trend Analysis (CI trajectory wave-on-wave), Methodology (the Congruent method + triangulated baseline note).
The seven stages are a sector-agnostic adaptation of Porter's Value Chain (1985). Every taxonomy criterion in the survey is mapped to exactly one stage. The stage-level Congruence Index is the strategic-weight-weighted average of the alignment of the criteria living in that stage — so a small misalignment on a highly-weighted criterion penalises the stage more than a large gap on something the executive deprioritises. The same Porter spine drives the Bank-in-a-Box process view below, so the two surfaces are directly comparable.
Porter, M.E. (1985), Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. Free Press.
The KPI Cockpit and Trend Analysis tabs live inside the Dashboard — Surface 2, the Monitor platform. They share the same data layer as the Overview / Value Chain / Segments tabs — switching between them is switching the lens, not switching the underlying numbers.
The KPIs that close each priority misalignment surface here as live tiles — current value, 12-month trend, owner, level tag. Calculation templates run inside the client's data environment (Power BI / Fabric, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, dbt); a thin push connector sends pre-calculated KPI values to Congruent on each refresh — no raw client data leaves the boundary.
Dashed grey lines on each tile: peer cohort P25 · P50 · P75 (sector × size cohort, UK consulting 150–499 FTE, n=24).
Overall services cohort plus a sector × size peer set. The cohort gap is converted into a £ unlock so the board can size the prize — "is 71 good?" answered. Cohort percentile on CI, EBITDA and each priority KPI. Dashed cohort bands (P25 / P50 / P75) run on every KPI tile in the Cockpit, and the Trend Analysis tab tracks the gap closing wave-on-wave against the same bands.
Places the firm against an overall cohort (UK professional services, n=64) and a sector × size cohort (UK consulting 150–499 FTE, n=24). Peers in the top-right quadrant are the firms whose alignment has compounded into a measurable P&L outcome — the sample firm sits at P28 / P31 (bottom third) on both cohorts.
The cohort sits in the top-right quadrant — high alignment compounds into high EBITDA. The sample firm's CI 71.4 / EBITDA 14.2% places it in the bottom-left, P31 on both axes. Closing to cohort median on CI alone is worth ~£0.96m of annual gross margin contribution; closing to upper quartile, ~£2.62m.
The Bank-in-a-Box engagement represents your organisation as interlinked processes and sub-processes, scores them across five dimensions (risk, customer impact, complexity, strategic value, automation potential), and locks down which are in scope for change. The platform shows the process inventory live, the redesign portfolio shortlist, and the projected CI lift the redesign programme will deliver — verified at each subsequent survey wave. BIAB Essentials (automated audit) is included from the Scale tier; the full consultant-led engagement is a standalone from £120k.
The seven stages below are the same Porter Value Chain adaptation used in the Dashboard's value-chain view. The Dashboard tells you where the thinking is misaligned (criterion weights vs executive baseline); Bank-in-a-Box tells you where the doing needs to change (process inventory and redesign scope). Both views surface red against the same Porter stage when a strategic priority isn't being delivered by its underlying processes.
Porter, M.E. (1985), Competitive Advantage. Adapted: primary activities + support activities collapsed into 7 sector-agnostic stages.
Every named process and sub-process documented, owner-mapped, scored on agreed dimensions.
For each process: what data signal would tell us it's working — and is that signal currently captured?
Redesign the high-priority processes — change management, KPI re-baselining, and quarterly Congruence reviews.
A Word + PDF audit report produced at the end of the BIAB engagement. Names the priority redesigns (with owners, dependencies, target metrics), shows the projected CI movement that the next survey wave will either confirm or refute, and places the firm's position before and after on the peer benchmark. The same numbers as the BIAB Platform — written for the board.
Building from the Wave 1 Diagnostic's CI 71.4 firm-wide and the Operations & Performance BU's CI 67.3 (lowest of the four BUs), the BIAB audit inventoried 70 processes, scored each on the five BIAB dimensions, identified 14 priority candidates, and shortlisted 6 redesigns targeting the two largest in-BU criteria gaps: Operational Excellence (Δ +4.9pp) and Agility in Pricing Strategy (Δ +4.2pp).
Direct-effect modelling against five reference peers projects a +5.1 point firm-wide CI lift and a +12.2 point BU CI lift within two quarters of go-live, with the next survey wave the verification mechanism. Cohort-relative: the firm moves from P31 to P55 on CI and P31 to P50 on EBITDA margin.
The audit report's numbers tie line-for-line to the BIAB Platform above. The Diagnostic (Surface 1) identifies the gap; the Bank-in-a-Box platform (Surface 3) inventories the processes and its audit report names the redesigns and the projected unlock. Same dataset, three lenses.
This is one of six redesigns in the audit. Each gets a current-state flow, a target-state flow, named process owners and dependencies, the cockpit KPI it moves, and a projected criterion-level lift. The Wave 2 survey verifies the projection within two quarters of go-live.
The Y1 unlock numbers above are not historical averages from past Congruent customers — they are modelled per-engagement from the buyer's own data, on day one of the Diagnostic. Two independent methods produce an estimate; they're shown together in §9 of the Diagnostic Report so the sponsor can see the maths and the assumptions.
For each priority KPI, multiply the gap (current vs target) by an externally-cited driver value. We use the lower end of the published range, not the average. Sums to a 24-month range, not a point estimate.
Place the buyer firm's CI against published industry alignment benchmarks. Project EBITDA uplift from closing the gap, using sector EBITDA distribution data. Independent of Method 1 — the two should converge within ±20%, which is the validation test we run.
Five steps. Two buyer inputs, two cited external benchmarks, one conservative assumption. The modelled unlock for this one KPI alone substantiates a meaningful multiple of the Diagnostic fee.
Why this is defensible. The buyer can challenge any line of the model. Every input is either from the buyer's own data (FTE, revenue, current KPI baseline) or from a publicly cited source above. We don't carry a "typical client" anchor — the model recomputes from scratch every time. At pitch, we run Method 1 first against your top-of-house numbers before the £18k is even spent; if we can't see the fee paid back inside the first year, we tell you not to proceed.
The model above captures direct P&L impact only. LSA Global's proprietary research on 410 companies across 8 industries reports highly-aligned firms grow revenue 58% faster, run 72% more profitable, satisfy customers 3.2:1 and engage employees 16.8:1 versus the unaligned peer (LSA Global 3× Model ↗). Apple's product coherence and EasyJet's operational precision are the exemplars of what this compounding looks like over a decade. Our model quantifies the directly-attributable share only; the rest is upside.
The unlock model in the methodology panel runs against your top-of-house numbers (FTE, revenue, attrition rate, EBITDA margin) before you commit the Diagnostic fee. If we can't see the fee paid back inside the first year, we tell you the engagement isn't worth running — and we won't raise an invoice for the modelling work. That's the deal. Three things make this commercially safe for both sides:
We run the bottoms-up KPI math against your top-of-house numbers — four inputs, computed in minutes on the fit call. You leave with the modelled Y1 unlock range whether you proceed or not — no contract attached.
If the model doesn't pay the fee back inside the first year, we say so — usually because the buyer firm is already well-aligned, or the priority KPIs aren't moveable. Better to lose a low-value engagement than book one that doesn't pay back.
The Wave 2 re-survey verifies the projected CI lift against measured movement — the verification mechanism is built into the product, not asserted. If the lift hasn't landed, the readout says so plainly and the intervention set is re-aimed for the next wave.
Prefer to run your own numbers first? The same model is available self-serve in the ROI calculator →
The point of the deal is to make the financial conversation symmetric. Strategy work usually transfers all the execution risk to the buyer. Congruent doesn't — because the only way the modelled unlock doesn't land is if either the math was wrong (our problem) or the recommendations weren't implemented (yours), and both should be testable at the next wave.
Everything from the product set in one table — what each FTE band includes and what is an add-on. Larger groups and bespoke scopes are priced on request. Tick what you're interested in and send it over in one click — it gives the first call a running start.
| Offering | Price | What's included | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surface 1 · Diagnostic | |||
| Diagnostic Fixed price · any FTE · 6 weeks |
£18,000 one-off | Single wave + board report · Congruent-method analysis with consistency check · value-chain heat map · recommended KPIs per priority · 50% credit toward year-one subscription. | |
| Surface 2 · Monitor — annual subscription, by FTE band | |||
| Starter 50–149 FTE |
£15,000 / yr | Annual wave on the comprehensive 35-criterion taxonomy · live dashboard + cohort benchmarking · initiative tagging · KPI cockpit — 3 KPIs included. | |
| Growth 150–349 FTE |
£36,000 / yr | Everything in Starter, plus quarterly waves · segment filtering · KPI cockpit — 5 KPIs included. | |
| Scale 350–699 FTE |
£90,000 / yr | Everything in Growth, plus custom taxonomy + custom segmentation · HRIS integration · Slack / Teams nudges · KPI cockpit — 10 KPIs · BIAB Essentials included (1 division · 15 processes / 4 redesigns per year). | |
| Enterprise 700+ FTE |
£150,000+ / yr | Everything in Scale, plus multi-entity · SSO (on request) + API · KPI cockpit — 15 KPIs · BIAB Essentials included (division + cross-cutting function · 25 processes / 6 redesigns per year). | |
| Surface 3 · Bank-in-a-Box | |||
| BIAB Essentials — automated audit Add-on at Starter (whole organisation · 5 processes / 1 redesign) and Growth (one functional area · 8 processes / 2 redesigns) |
£7,500 Starter · £12,000 Growth | Platform-generated process inventory, five-dimension scoring and redesign options with a costed ROI estimate, delivered in the portal with one founder-led readout. Included at Scale and Enterprise. | |
| Bank-in-a-Box — consultant-led One BU · typically 3–6 months |
from £120,000 | Stakeholder interviews, workshops, bespoke swimlanes, change-management support and 12 months of quarterly Congruence reviews. 50% of your annual subscription credits toward a full Bank-in-a-Box booked in the subscription year. | |
| Add-ons (all tiers unless noted) | |||
| Additional cockpit KPIs | £1,500 / KPI / yr | Extends the KPI cockpit beyond the tier allocation. | |
| Additional processes inventoried | £2,500 per 5 | Extends the BIAB process inventory. | |
| Additional redesigns | £2,000 each | Extends the shortlisted redesign portfolio. | |
| Custom segmentation | £2,500 / dimension / yr | Included at Scale & Enterprise. | |
| Custom taxonomy | £5,000 | Included at Scale & Enterprise. Most engagements run best on the comprehensive standard taxonomy — it keeps the full KPI library mapping intact. | |
| Additional survey waves | £3,000 / wave / yr | Up to quarterly · Starter only. | |
BIAB Essentials is the automated process audit — platform-generated process inventory, five-dimension scoring and redesign options with a costed ROI estimate, delivered in the portal with one founder-led readout. Included at Scale and Enterprise; a paid add-on at Starter (£7,500) and Growth (£12,000). The full Bank-in-a-Box (from £120k, typically 3–6 months) adds the consultant-led layer — stakeholder interviews, workshops, bespoke swimlanes, change-management support and 12 months of quarterly Congruence reviews. 50% of your annual subscription credits toward a full Bank-in-a-Box booked in the subscription year.
Add-ons (all tiers unless noted): additional cockpit KPIs £1,500/KPI/yr · additional processes inventoried £2,500 per 5 · additional redesigns £2,000 each · custom segmentation £2,500/dimension/yr (included at Scale & Enterprise) · custom taxonomy £5,000 (included at Scale & Enterprise) · additional survey waves up to quarterly £3,000/wave/yr (Starter only) · BIAB Essentials audit £7,500 Starter / £12,000 Growth (included at Scale & Enterprise).
Strategy gets written, distributed, briefed — and then quietly diverges. Each layer adds its own interpretation, each function optimises for its own priorities, and within a few quarters the organisation is executing six versions of the plan in parallel. Existing tools — engagement surveys, OKRs, balanced scorecards — measure how people feel about work, not whether the organisation agrees on what work matters most.
Plans land in a deck and rarely make it intact past the next layer. Execution drifts because different parts of the business prioritise different things — quietly.
It shows up across the P&L: slower decisions, duplicated effort, higher turnover, and strategy that never fully lands. Misalignment compounds — through execution drag, brand inconsistency, and lost talent — before it ever surfaces as a visible problem.
Existing tools measure how people feel about work. None measure whether the organisation agrees on what work matters most — or quantify the gap.
Reference patterns from consistently high-performing organisations — Apple's product coherence, EasyJet's operational precision. Alignment compounds across the P&L and beyond.
Aligned teams make faster decisions because fewer people are optimising for different things.
Misaligned organisations lose people who can see the gap between stated and lived priorities.
Alignment between strategy and frontline behaviour is what makes brand promises credible.
Misalignment between commercial and operational priorities is felt by customers first.
Congruent typically gets approved by a small committee — a C-Suite sponsor, the finance lead, and a technical / operating lead. Each comes to the conversation with a different question. The Congruent proposition answers all three.
"My plan is good. Why isn't the business delivering it the way I expected?"
A measured reading of where your strategy is not landing — by criterion, segment and value-chain stage. A board-ready report you can put in front of investors. A credible P&L number on what closing the gap is worth. The plan starts landing wave-on-wave, and you can prove it.
"What's the return on this spend, and how do I evidence it to the board?"
Every priority recommendation arrives with a £ benefit, a target trajectory and a payback window. The Diagnostic at £18k models a £0.3–1.2m first-year unlock for a 250-FTE professional-services firm, bottoms-up against named external sources. Peer-benchmarked against a sector × size cohort so you can sense-check the unlock against external evidence.
"Is this defensible methodologically, and is my data safe?"
Methodology is decision-science grade — peer-reviewed for forty years, applied across aerospace, automotive and AI. Architecture is bring-your-own-warehouse: KPI calculations run inside your data tenancy, only pre-calculated values cross the boundary, no raw client data leaves. Compliance is handled through your existing tenancy. No third-party data egress.
Strategy consultancies tell you what your strategy should be. Congruent measures whether the people executing it actually agree — and where, exactly, the divergence is hiding.
An advanced decision-making method that combines the structured approach of the Analytic Hierarchy Process with fuzzy logic to handle the uncertainty and vagueness inherent in human judgements. Developed over the last 40 years and peer-reviewed since 1985. Fuzzy logic is used across aerospace engineering, automotive traffic control, business decision-making, industrial processes, artificial intelligence and machine learning — Congruent is the application of that science to strategic alignment.
Most strategy-alignment work is interview-driven and impressionistic. Congruent produces a number you can track over time. Re-running the diagnostic gives you a directly comparable index — alignment as a managed metric, not a vibe.
Bring-your-own-warehouse architecture. KPI calculations execute inside your data environment using calculation templates we configure during the cockpit build (DAX / SQL / dbt per system family). Only pre-calculated KPI values cross the boundary — one number per KPI per refresh period. Raw records, PII and employee-level data stay client-side. The cockpit dashboards are hosted on the Congruent platform. Congruent is a measurement platform, not a data warehouse — literally true at the data layer. Data security and compliance are handled through your existing tenancy — no third-party data egress.
Each misalignment ties to a curated KPI library so recommendations come with measurement plans, not vague calls to action. The KPI cockpit turns the diagnostic into a live measurement layer in days, not months.
Eight questions that come up in every sign-off conversation, answered in two sentences each. If you've got an objection that isn't here, the fit call is the place to raise it.
"Couldn't I just ask an AI to build a pairwise questionnaire and send it round?"
An LLM-built scale doesn't survive a board challenge from a CFO who's done their own reading. The Congruent method is decision-science with a 40-year peer-reviewed track record across aerospace, automotive, and AI. The engine matches the original academic worked examples to the second decimal — which is what makes the output defensible.
"What if my CEO disagrees with the survey result?"
That's a feature, not a bug. The Diagnostic measures where the executive baseline diverges from the rest of the organisation — disagreement is information. If the CEO's view of priorities sits 10pp away from the FTE-weighted view, that is the misalignment we're surfacing. Wave 2 then measures whether the cascade has closed.
"Is my data actually safe? The CFO won't sign a third-party data export."
Bring-your-own-warehouse architecture. KPI calculations execute inside your data environment (Power BI, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, dbt) using calculation templates we configure during the cockpit build. Only pre-calculated KPI values cross the boundary — one number per KPI per refresh. No raw client data, no PII, no employee-level records.
"What happens at Wave 2 if the numbers haven't moved?"
Two scenarios. (1) If the firm implemented the recommendations in good faith and the CI hasn't moved, the Wave 2 readout treats that as a first-class finding — we re-examine the misalignment hypothesis with you and re-aim the intervention set for the next wave. (2) If the recommendations weren't implemented, Wave 2 surfaces that as a separate finding, which is itself board-grade evidence the sponsor can act on.
"How is this different from an engagement survey or eNPS?"
eNPS measures how people feel. Congruent measures what they prioritise. These are different signals — a team can be highly engaged but completely misaligned with executive priorities (very common in fast-growing scale-ups). The Congruence Index sits alongside eNPS as the strategic-execution counterpart to engagement.
"Why pairwise? Isn't a Likert scale easier?"
Likert scales tell you what people like; pairwise tells you what they would trade off. A respondent saying "we should invest in talent" and "we should invest in pricing" gives you no information. Forcing the trade-off — talent or pricing? — exposes the actual priority ordering. The respondent burden is similar (~12 minutes) but the signal is qualitatively different.
"Can I run this without my HR team finding out?"
Yes, if scoped narrow. The standard pricing tiers assume firm-wide cooperation, but the Diagnostic can run on a single business unit or leadership-team-only scope without HR involvement — a common pattern when a new CEO wants a baseline before declaring intent. Talk to us about the scoping options at the fit call.
"What if my firm is already well-aligned? Will the model still pay back?"
If the model doesn't pay the fee back inside the first year, we tell you not to proceed — most often the firm is founder-led, sub-150-FTE, or just emerging from a recent strategy reset. We say so on the fit call; better to lose a low-value engagement than book one that doesn't return.
Congruent is in pilot phase as of June 2026 — we don't yet publish live customer case studies, but the academic backing of the methodology, the publicly-cited evidence base, and the founder track record are public. Customer references will follow as pilots conclude.
The Congruent method builds on fuzzy logic extensions (Buckley, 1985). Applied in aerospace, automotive, industrial control, and ML for forty years. Engine matches the original academic worked examples to the second decimal.
Every external number on this page names a source we can produce on request — SHRM on replacement cost, McKinsey on pricing, Equiteq on consulting margins, HBR on strategy implementation, LSA Global's proprietary 410-company alignment research. Each is stated as its source states it, including where the source is a consultancy publishing its own methodology, or is relaying a finding rather than producing it. Where a number is our own — the overhead loading, the capture rates, the addressable population — it says so on its face. Figures we could not trace to a primary document have been removed rather than caveated. The buyer can sense-check each input from their own desk.
Three founding-partner engagements are running through Q3 2026; live engagement data is available under NDA on request. Once pilots conclude (target Q4 2026), public case studies will appear here. Request reference access ↗
Congruent runs the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process — a multi-criteria decision technique used in peer-reviewed strategic management research. The pipeline below runs invisibly behind every survey.
Each linguistic response on the 1–9 importance scale is captured as a fuzzy range around the most-likely value, so the natural imprecision of "a bit more important" versus "much more important" is preserved rather than forced to a single hard number.
The engine converts each respondent's pairwise judgements into a normalised set of priority weights across the criteria. The specific weighting calculation is proprietary.
A standard consistency-ratio check flags and excludes respondents whose judgements are internally intransitive — if A > B and B > C, then A > C must hold — above the conventional 0.10 threshold.
Every criterion maps to one of seven Porter-style value-chain stages: Strategy & Governance, Customer & Market, Sales & Commercial, Delivery & Operations, People & Culture, Technology & Data, Risk & Compliance.
Each segment's priorities are compared against the executive baseline to give a 0–100 measure of how closely they track it — the Congruence Index. The exact computation is proprietary. The same measure runs by tenure, business unit, years-in-industry, role level, function and geography.
Buckley (1985); Bulut, Duru, Keçeci & Yoshida (2012); Nilsson & Rapp (2005); Porter (1980, 1985); Miles & Snow (1978); Kaplan & Norton (1996).