Structural Diagnosis
Different people in the same structure produce the same outcomes. I diagnose the mechanisms generating the underperformance in climate tech organizations, then redesign the system so the people you already have start producing different results.
What I do
Strategy without fixing the system is expensive wallpaper. Coaching without fixing the system is therapy that doesn't stick. I start with the structure.
The instincts that scaled you to ten people are the same ones producing the dysfunction at fifty. The system changes. Then you do.
Read →Your DD reads the deck, the cap table, and the CTO's LinkedIn. It doesn't read the decision graph — the layer that determines whether the thesis delivers.
Read →Hardware, software, government, commercial. Four operating models, four cadences, one founder sitting on top of the collision. SaaS DD frameworks can't see it.
Atmospheric modeling taught me one thing: most failures come from unexamined assumptions, not bad data. I apply the same diagnostic process to organizations — not because it's a clever metaphor, but because it's structurally the same problem.
Most advisors skip this. They arrive with the answer. I don't form a hypothesis until I've seen what's actually happening — not what you believe is happening. These are rarely the same thing.
I build a structural hypothesis about the root cause — the mechanism generating all the other problems. Not the symptoms you've been treating. The thing underneath them that makes failure structurally inevitable.
We design interventions that produce data. We find out if the hypothesis holds. This is not gut feel, not best practice, not what worked at your last company. It's a structured experiment with a real feedback loop.
If the hypothesis was wrong, we update it. This is where most advisory engagements end — the moment the clean answer gets complicated. It's where mine starts getting accurate.
For investor engagements, the same method operates on a compressed timeline. A pre-investment organizational assessment takes days, not months. The rigor is the same. The clock is different.
Patterns
These are the patterns I see repeatedly in climate tech organizations. Each one is a mechanical problem, not a motivational one. If you recognize your situation in any of them, the diagnosis is already underway.
Your strategy exists in a deck. Your team is executing something else entirely. Every advisor has told you it's a communication problem. It isn't — the decision infrastructure that translates strategic intent into daily choices doesn't exist.
Read →At ten people, the founder IS the operating system. At fifty, the founder's bandwidth is the binding constraint. The organisation scaled the headcount without scaling the operating model.
Read →Your organisation is more complex than it needs to be, and the person who made it that way is you. Technical founders model complex systems for a living.
Read →Your process map is a geological record of every failure the organisation has survived. The layers compound, nobody removes the old ones, and the people who navigate the workarounds are the ones who defend them.
Read →You're treating a structural problem as a people problem, and it's costing you talent, time, and money. The underperformer you're about to fire.
Read →Organisations hit predictable structural walls at 15, 30, 50, and 100 people. Each breakpoint invalidates the operating model that got you there. The symptoms look like people problems. They're physics.
Read →Nobody stands up and says 'we're pivoting to defense.' It's the quarterly revenue review where the defense contract is the only deal that closed, so engineering resources shift. Then the next quarter. Then the mission is narrative, not operational.
Read →You're optimizing a model whose assumptions no longer hold, and every improvement is making you more efficiently wrong.
Read →Nobody in your organisation knows who can say yes. The org chart says one thing. The actual decision flow says another. The result is high latency, low quality, and zero accountability — and the fix isn't 'empower people.'
Read →The board sees one company. The team is running another. The gap isn't deception — it's structural. Quarterly reporting compresses operating reality into a format that filters out the information investors need most.
Read →Your climate tech company has completed fourteen pilots and closed zero commercial contracts. The technology works in every pilot. The organisation was never built to convert pilots into revenue.
Read →Sectors
The collisions are different in each subsector. Hardware versus software in earth observation. Science versus project development in carbon removal. Actuarial versus climate model in insurance. The structural failure modes are sector-specific — generic advice misses the mechanics.
Climate adaptation is a sector where the technology works and the market doesn't. The science is solid. The products are real. The commercial infrastructure doesn't exist yet.
Read →Energy markets are being structurally transformed, and the companies building for this transformation are being whipsawed by the very forces they're trying to serve.
Read →Carbon removal companies are trying to operate as a research lab, a hardware manufacturer, and a project developer inside one building. Three cadences, three definitions of 'done', one founder sitting on top of the collision.
Read →AgTech's bottleneck isn't technology. It's trust.
Read →Clean energy companies grow project by project, and that growth pattern creates an organizational identity that's very difficult to escape.
Read →Climate data companies sit on an uncomfortable paradox: the data pipeline IS the product, but the organization treats it as an engineering problem rather than a product management problem.
Read →For Investors
Most of what gets attributed to "people issues" in portfolio post-mortems was visible in the decision graph before the check was written. Standard DD reads the deck, the cap table, and the CTO's LinkedIn. It doesn't read the layer that actually produces the outcomes your thesis described.
Your due diligence reads the pitch deck, the cap table, and the CTO's LinkedIn. It doesn't read the decision graph — the layer that actually converts your capital into the outcomes your thesis described.
Read →The board sees 'execution problems.' The structural diagnosis sees a decision architecture that routes every product decision through the CTO, creating a six-to-eight-week delay on every release. One is a description. The other is fixable.
Read →Can this founder scale? The usual assessment is personal — leadership style, coachability, self-awareness. The structural assessment asks whether the organisational design allows the founder to evolve, or traps them in early-stage behaviours regardless of capability.
Read →Climate tech is not SaaS. The operating model assumptions from software investing don't transfer to companies with hardware, regulatory dependencies, and project-based revenue.
Read →A venture fund with thirty portfolio companies absorbs organisational failure as statistics. A family office with five climate tech investments feels each one. The structural assessment gap between financial evaluation and organisational evaluation is where your investment risk concentrates.
Read →The check is written. The company is struggling. Board advice isn't working. You've told the founder to fix the org three times. Nothing sticks. That's where structural diagnosis starts.
Read →About
PhD in atmospheric physics from TU Delft. Built €20M ARR in climate adaptation products at ICEYE. Spent years watching brilliant organizations fail for mechanical reasons that had nothing to do with talent, and most of the post-mortems misdiagnose the cause. Now I run structural diagnosis for the companies and the investors who back them.