Best New Consultancy
Designing organisations that can deliver.
Many organisations reach a point where their strategy is clear, but the way the organisation is structured makes delivery difficult. Responsibilities overlap, decision-making slows and teams struggle to focus on what matters most. These challenges often emerge during periods of transformation, growth or financial pressure, when leadership teams need to rethink how their organisation works.
Kindred was founded in 2020 to help leaders address these moments. The firm specialises in organisation design – working with leadership teams to rethink how roles, teams and decision-making structures operate so organisations can deliver on their ambitions.
A recent project illustrates this approach. A media organisation was moving to a product-led operating model built around empowered, self-sufficient teams. While the strategic direction was clear, the organisation’s delivery function had evolved in a way that no longer supported the new model. Responsibilities had become blurred across delivery, product and engineering roles, creating unnecessary coordination and slowing decision-making.
Working with leaders and teams across the organisation, Kindred helped build a clear picture of how responsibilities were operating in practice and where friction was emerging. This clarity enabled leaders to confront long-standing structural issues and make deliberate decisions about which roles were essential, which activities could stop and how accountability should work going forward. The resulting design replaced embedded coordination roles with a smaller central function responsible for portfolio-level delivery oversight – reinforcing empowered teams while creating clearer accountability and stronger alignment across the organisation.
In another engagement, a major national organisation facing significant financial pressure needed to reduce costs while protecting its ability to deliver on strategic priorities. The leadership team had a clear ambition but needed help translating it into structural choices they could act on. Working with the executive team over several months, Kindred helped redesign the operating model from the ground up – clarifying divisional structures, broadening spans of control and creating a central operations function that improved support while reducing cost. The organisation has since described the work as foundational to its new strategy.
Kindred has supported organisations across sectors including media, telecommunications, sport, higher education and non-profit – and has grown almost entirely through repeat client relationships and referrals. That track record reflects something deliberate about how the firm is built.
The firm has consciously remained small and senior. A partner leads every engagement and works directly alongside the consulting team and client throughout – not just at the start and end, but in the analysis, the difficult conversations and the decisions. Engagements are also designed so that clients own the outcome: Kindred builds understanding within the organisation so that change can continue once its involvement ends.
Kindred was built on a simple belief: a small, senior consultancy can deliver work usually trusted to much larger firms – and do it better.