An unresolved problem eventually costs more than the decision to fix it.
Important initiatives stall. Programmes underperform. Operating models stop scaling. Technology investments fail to deliver what leadership expected.
When the stakes are significant and the answer isn’t obvious, I investigate what’s actually happening, determine what the evidence supports, and give leadership a clear strategic direction and an implementation roadmap.
Strategic Diagnostic & Roadmap
A focused, founder-led research engagement for consequential business decisions. About six weeks.
Everyone has a theory. But a theory isn't fact.
While opinions matter, when your challenge is costing you more daily, it's usually because nobody has had the time, or the distance, to settle which one the evidence supports.
01
A major initiative isn’t producing the expected return.
Significant resources are already committed, and adoption, revenue, productivity, margin, or customer value isn’t following.
02
Growth has exposed structural weaknesses.
Processes, roles, systems or programmes that worked at a smaller scale now create bottlenecks, duplication, expense, or risk.
03
Leadership is preparing to commit significant capital.
Before more money, headcount or technology spend goes in, you need stronger evidence about what will actually create value.
04
AI is creating pressure to move faster than the organization can responsibly decide.
The question isn’t what can be automated. It’s what should change, what value that change creates, and what operating and governance model it requires.
05
Several executives agree something must change, and disagree about why.
The organization needs an independent evidence base before it commits to a direction.
Economics
Strategy without economics is just preference.
Every recommendation is evaluated against the business value it’s meant to create. I look at the financial and operational consequences sitting around the decision.
The objective isn’t to identify what could change.
It’s to determine what is worth changing.
What I do
When you're ready for the solution, I'm ready to begin.
I investigate it from an expansive perspective, taking the time, establishing the rigor, and leveraging the distance your team can’t delegate while keeping the business running.
01
InvestigateInterviews, internal data, market and competitor research, process and financial analysis. Whatever the question actually needs.
02
DiagnoseSeparate the cause from the symptoms, and test the explanations against the evidence rather than against what would be convenient.
03
EvaluateEvery realistic path forward, with the economics, trade-offs, risks, and dependencies attached to each.
04
RecommendOne direction, with the reasoning laid out so you can check it, and the alternatives I ruled out.
05
RoadmapWhat to do in the first 90 days, at six months, at twelve. Sequenced, with owners.
The five lenses
The biggest challenges rarely stay siloed.
More often, they're a combination of operational, financial, technological, or human. So we analyze all five at once.
01
Evidence
What do we actually know?
Assumption separated from evidence, competing explanations investigated, and a clear account of what the research and your own data support.
02
Economics
Where is value created or lost?
Costs, revenue implications, opportunity costs, resource allocation, and the economics around each possible direction.
03
Systems
How do the pieces affect each other?
Processes, technology, roles, incentives and information flows rarely operate independently. I map the system rather than isolating one symptom.
04
Human behaviour
What must people do differently?
An elegant strategy fails if the customers, employees or partners it depends on cannot or will not use it.
05
Governance
How is it controlled and sustained?
Where AI, automation, sensitive information or distributed decision-making is involved, the operating model matters as much as the technology.
Deliverables
It's more than a strategic plan. It's a solution - elegantly architected and fully defensible.
01Executive Decision Deck
Short enough to hand to a board: the issue, the findings that matter, the recommended direction, the risks, and the decisions now in front of you.
02Strategic Diagnostic
What is actually happening, evidenced. Root causes, constraints, gaps, dependencies, and which assumptions held up.
03Options, Trade-offs, Risks, & Mitigations
Every realistic path forward, with what each one costs, what it risks, and what it depends on.
04Recommendations & Architecture
One direction, the reasoning laid out so you can check it, and the alternatives I considered and ruled out.
05Roadmap & Project Plan
What happens in the first 90 days, at six months, and at twelve. Sequenced, with owners, so nobody has to work out where to start.
06Executive Working Session
A facilitated session to review the evidence, challenge the assumptions, settle the open questions, and turn the findings into decisions.
Your team doesn’t inherit a project. They inherit a plan.
Who this is for
Designed for decisions when the consequences matter.
The Strategic Diagnostic is for established organizations, business units and leadership teams facing decisions or challenges with material implications for growth, profitability, operating capacity, customer value, organizational risk, or strategic investment.
It earns its cost when:
The economic consequence of the issue materially exceeds the cost of investigating it.
The problem crosses functions, stakeholders, or systems.
Leadership is considering a significant investment or change.
Internal teams lack the capacity, or the independence, to investigate it thoroughly.
The organization is prepared to act on what the evidence reveals.
Founder-led
Senior judgment from beginning to end.
Dr. Elisa Janson Jones
Founder, JANSON Research & Strategy
When you hire JANSON Research & Strategy, you work directly with me. I conduct the investigation, the stakeholder interviews, the analysis, the strategic evaluation, and the development of the final recommendation.
Complex business problems lose context when the research, the analysis and the recommendation are divided across layers of consultants.
My work integrates business strategy, research methodology, operations, financial analysis, human systems, technology and AI governance — so the recommendation reflects a comprehensive system rather than one functional view of it.
Research
Doctorate level research, experienced in org and national studies, run from design through publication. Research trustworthiness is at the core of what I do.
Strategy
An MBA in strategy, plus two decades building programs, growing businesses, diagnosing operational challenges, designing solutions, and managing the change through implementation & evaluation.
Practicality
Recommendations built for organizations with real budgets, real people and real deadlines, not for a case study.
Good research tells you what is true. Good strategy tells you what to do about it.
Published research
Investment
Test the waters, or dive right in.
Start here if the problem isn’t defined yet
Executive Clarity Brief
A diagnostic conversation & next steps.
$2,500
Fixed price. Scoped, delivered, and finished.
Already clear on the challenge and ready for the relief of a solution?
Strategic Diagnostic & Roadmap
We fully research & diagnose, gaining clarity on the challenges before architecting the best solution.
Scoped individually
We take the work into account when establishing pricing. Just as each solution is customized to your business, so is each engagement.
If the Executive Clarity Brief leads into a full Diagnostic, the $2,500 is applied to the balance of the full engagement.
No hourly billing. If the problem doesn’t warrant the work, I’ll tell you before you spend anything on it.
Not sure what needs to be investigated yet?
Start with an Executive Clarity Brief.
Sometimes the business consequence is clear and the strategic question isn’t. Leadership sees declining performance, escalating costs, implementation friction, stalled growth, or competing explanations — without enough clarity to know what to investigate first. The Brief frames the decision before significant resources get committed to answering the wrong question.
Background review
I read the relevant materials before we meet, so the session starts somewhere useful.
Executive working session
We interrogate the issue together, with whichever leaders actually hold the pieces.
Independent analysis
I work out what the strategic question underneath the presenting problem appears to be.
Written Problem Brief
Three to five pages you can circulate, not notes from a call.
Recommendation session
I walk you through what I think should happen next, and why.
What you leave with
A clearly framed strategic problem or decision
The critical questions that need answering
The assumptions that should be tested
The evidence, stakeholders and information it would take
My recommendation for what should happen next
Questions
What exactly is a Strategic Diagnostic?
A Strategic Diagnostic is a focused research engagement that investigates one consequential business problem and determines what is actually causing it.
Over about six weeks I gather the evidence the question requires — stakeholder interviews, internal data, market and competitor research, financial and process analysis — then test the competing explanations against it, evaluate the realistic paths forward, and deliver a recommendation with an implementation roadmap. It is research aimed at a decision, rather than research delivered as a report.
Who actually does the work?
I do. Janson is deliberately founder-led.
I conduct the research, the stakeholder interviews, the analysis, the strategic evaluation, and the development of the final recommendation. I may use specialist tools or outside data sources where they help, but your engagement isn’t handed to a junior team.
What if we don’t know exactly what the problem is yet?
That’s often part of the engagement. Come with what leadership is seeing, and the first week works out what question the research actually has to answer.
How long does it take?
About six weeks, depending on the research scope and how quickly the right people are available to talk.
How much of our team’s time does it take?
Far less than trying to resolve it internally.
I need access to the right people and the relevant information — usually an hour or two each, plus a working session at the start and another at the end. The research, the analysis, the synthesis and the writing are mine. Nobody on your team has to run a research project on top of their actual job.
Will what our people tell you stay confidential?
Yes. Interview findings are reported in aggregate and nothing is attributed to an individual without their explicit agreement.
That isn’t only a courtesy, it’s what makes the evidence good. People tell an outsider things they will not put in an internal survey or say in a room with their director in it. I sign your NDA, or provide mine, before any material changes hands.
What does it cost?
The Executive Problem Brief is $2,500, fixed.
A Strategic Diagnostic is scoped against the problem itself, so the price depends on the research required, the number of stakeholders, and the depth of analysis the answer needs. You get a fixed price for a defined question before any work starts, and if a Brief led into the Diagnostic, the $2,500 comes off it.
What if the evidence says our idea won’t work?
Then you found out before committing the money, the people, and the year.
My job isn’t to validate the direction you came in wanting. It’s to determine what the evidence actually supports, and to tell you plainly when those two things differ. That is most of what you’re paying for.
Which one do we need?
The Brief is for ’we know something is wrong, or a decision is coming, but we need help defining what actually has to be investigated.’
The Diagnostic is for ’we have a consequential question and need someone to investigate it thoroughly enough to tell us what to do.’
If you’re not sure which side of that line you’re on, start with the Brief. Working it out is what the Brief is for.
Do you implement the recommendation?
The Diagnostic is deliberately finite. You’ll know what implementation takes and who’s suited to it, and implementation advisory can be scoped separately when it’s useful. The recommendation is written and delivered before that conversation happens.
How is this different from hiring a consulting firm?
You’re buying concentrated senior research and judgment aimed at one consequential question. Not a consulting team, not an open-ended retainer, and not a methodology that existed before your problem did.
Do you know our industry?
Sometimes. Often not, and that is less of a disadvantage than it sounds.
The method travels: how you frame a question, test an explanation against evidence, and weigh the economics of an option is the same work in any sector. What changes is the context, and the first week of the engagement is spent acquiring it. Someone without your industry’s assumptions also asks the questions insiders stopped asking years ago — which is frequently where the answer turns out to be.
Is this extra hands for an overloaded department?
No. If what you need is project management, execution capacity, routine market research, a facilitator for a planning retreat, or someone to validate a decision you’ve already made, this is the wrong engagement and I’ll tell you so.
When can you start?
Because every engagement is delivered personally, I run a small number at a time.
Tell me what you’re dealing with and I’ll tell you honestly what the next available window looks like. If the problem is urgent and I can’t get to it soon enough to be useful, I’ll say that rather than hold the slot.
Bring me the problem that’s costing too much to leave unresolved.
If the issue affects growth, profitability, capacity, customer value, strategic investment or organizational risk — and the answer isn’t obvious — we’ll determine what the evidence actually supports.
Have a defined strategic problem?
Still determining what the real question is?
I read every enquiry myself. The first conversation decides whether the issue is right for a Diagnostic. No obligation, no pitch.