The Approach Matrix
Every leadership team has the same three arguments about a new piece of technology. Do we bring in a firm or use our own people? Do we buy it or build it? Do we start small or do it properly? Those arguments run for months because they are all downstream of two questions the room never actually asked.
Guess first — commit before you look
Think of one thing your organisation is about to take on. Who did you assume would build it?
Answer on instinct, before any of the questions. Most people already have a view before they have a reason — that's the useful part.
Question one of two
Edge — does doing this our own way win us anything?
Some work is genuinely yours: it carries judgment you accumulated, and customers can feel the difference. Most work isn't. Both answers are respectable; only one of them justifies the cost of doing it yourself.
Question two of two
Certainty — do we know what good looks like, and how to get there?
This is about whether the path is known, not whether you personally know it. Before you answer high, send someone to find out whether three organisations like yours have already done this. Confusion in the room is not the same thing as novelty in the world.
The reality check
Three things that override the answer
The matrix assumes you have people, time, and room to be wrong. Usually one of those is missing, and it matters more than the quadrant does.
Your posture
Where this lands
The point moves as you answer. The three dials underneath are the arguments you were going to have anyway — with the price of each position named.
Nothing leaves this browser. Your answers are stored locally on this device only, and a code is just your result written down — it carries no name unless you type one above.
Where this bites
The same two questions, four very different answers
Four real decisions an organisation might face in the same year. Notice that the budget, the vendor and the timeline arguments are all settled the moment you place the initiative — and not before.
Replacing the payroll system
Nobody has ever chosen a supplier because of your payroll run, and thousands of organisations have done this exact migration. Doing it your own way buys you nothing and costs you a year.
AI note-taking across the company
Commodity — but the market reshuffles every quarter and the tool you standardise on today may be a free feature of software you already own by renewal. Buy short and keep the transcripts yours.
An insurer's pricing model
This is the business, and actuarial pricing is a well-trodden discipline with an established path. Hand it to a consultancy and you have rented your own competitive advantage back from someone who now understands it better than you do.
An AI agent that drafts underwriting decisions
Potentially a real edge, and genuinely nobody knows what good looks like yet. Any eighteen-month plan written today is fiction. Six weeks, one real queue, an agreed way to tell whether it worked.
Two of these four are about AI, and AI bends this matrix in ways worth naming separately — the Edge axis moves under you, and the usual case for hiring professionals partly inverts. We wrote that up in Who Builds It Is the Last Question. If you want the readiness picture underneath it, start with Where Does Your Pyramid Stand?
The argument was never about budget.
It was about whether this is your edge — and that question is answerable in an afternoon, with the right people in the room. We run this as a working session with leadership teams, on the decisions actually in front of them.
Talk to us about running this session