Continuity from first question to a structure that can scale.
Consilium is the AI-supported workspace that connects discovery, decision, experimentation, and scale. It preserves perspectives and evidence, builds a shared model of the challenge, and carries the reasoning and ownership behind a decision forward into implementation.
During consulting, Consilium gathers perspectives, organizes evidence, maps the system, exposes trade-offs, and gives participants a traceable basis for shared direction.
Three platform phases across the six-step BPG process.
Consilium supports Discover and Map by gathering perspectives; Decide and Design by building shared understanding; and Pilot and Scale by carrying decisions, ownership, and learning into action.
PHASE 1 · DISCOVER & MAPthe ecosystem
Challenge discovery & mapping
"What is actually the problem, and how does it break down?"
Your whole membership — hundreds of people, not the usual twenty — contributes to a living map of nested challenge statements. React, comment, propose a problem nobody named yet, or sit for a short AI conversation. Every statement carries its own synthesis and shows you exactly which sectors haven't spoken.
OUTPUT
A challenge map your whole consortium can see itself in
Hundreds of participants
GATE A — PROMOTIONA statement becomes a challenge only with enough depth, enough sectors at the table, and a sponsor willing to act on the result.
PHASE 2 · DECIDE & DESIGNone challenge
Briefing & synthesis
"What do we jointly understand about this problem?"
A working group forms. Each member sits for a private, dialect-fluent interview, then edits and confirms the briefing it produces. System-dynamics modelling maps the problem state. Everything synthesizes into one master briefing — and each participant confirms, in writing, that they were represented fairly.
OUTPUT
A shared understanding nobody had to concede to reach
8–20 participants
GATE B — SHARED UNDERSTANDINGNobody gets in a room until the master briefing is confirmed. This is enforced, not encouraged.
PHASE 3 · PILOT & SCALEone solution
Collaboration & solutioning
"So what do we do about it? What do we build?"
Now the group meets — in person or virtually, once or several times — with AI transcription, live synthesis, and a private research advisor for every participant. The session ends with artifacts, not minutes. The final event is less a working session than a graduation: the pilot is unveiled to the consortium first and the world second.
OUTPUT
A concrete pilot structure, roadmap, and distributed ownership
8–20 participants
FINAL DELIVERABLE — CONCRETE NEXT STEPSSolutions that can actually be implemented.
THE PLATFORM
Four instruments for understanding a problem.
This is not a meeting tool with AI bolted onto it. Four instruments do the work of turning several hundred conflicting worldviews into a problem statement a room can actually act on — and a fifth discipline, below, turns that statement into something built.
PHASE 1
Challenge mapping
Most consortia decide what the problem is in a room with twelve people, and then spend three years on it. Challenge mapping opens that decision to your entire membership. A living, nested map of problem statements — anyone can react to one, argue with one, or propose the one nobody named. Statements only the steering committee cared about quietly fade. Statements the steering committee never thought of arrive with evidence behind them.
Nothing gets promoted to real work until the map can show that enough sectors have actually weighed in.
CHALLENGE MAP · PHASE 1
PHASE 1PHASE 2
AI elicitation
A private conversation that adapts to whoever is in it. A founder is asked about the wedge, the user, and speed. An academic about novelty, rigor, and prior work. A regulator about mandate, risk, and constituency. Nobody translates, nobody performs, nobody defends their frame to a skeptic — so people say the thing they would otherwise only say in the corridor afterwards.
A human facilitator has a face, and a face has a tribe. This is the one instrument a brilliant facilitator cannot replace.
PRIVATE INTERVIEW · STAGES ZERO–ONE
PHASE 1PHASE 2
AI synthesis
The agreement is usually already there, buried under vocabulary. Synthesis digs it out. Genuine disagreement gets reframed as a structural trade-off — two parties defending different legitimate risks — rather than as one sector being difficult. And it reports its own coverage, so a sector that hasn't spoken appears as a visible hole rather than as silence you'd never notice.
Every participant confirms they were represented fairly before their words are used. Consent isn't a checkbox here; it's the mechanism.
MASTER BRIEFING · STAGES ZERO–ONE
PHASE 2
Blueprinted ecosystem mapping
System-dynamics modelling of the problem itself. Which variables actually drive the outcome. Which stakeholders move which variables. Where coordination creates leverage and where it just creates meetings. What has to happen first, second, third. Blueprint turns a pile of perspectives into a model you can interrogate — and disagree with precisely, which is the only kind of disagreement worth having.
Opinion aggregation tells you what people think. Blueprint tells you what the system does.
BLUEPRINT · PHASE 2
THE PLATFORM · CONTINUED
And one discipline for building the answer.
Consortia are extraordinarily good at deliberating and structurally bad at deciding. That isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when everyone in the room answers to an institution that didn't send them there to concede anything. So the deliberation runs until the calendar runs out, and the output is a record of the deliberation.
The venture world hit a version of this problem twenty years ago under different pressure — a startup that deliberates dies — and built a discipline in response. Pick the wedge. Design from the binding constraint, not the wish list. Commit to the smallest thing that tests the thesis. Put a name next to it. Decide in advance what would make you stop.
Consilium runs your live sessions on that discipline, with the AI holding the structure and every participant's research advisor sitting in their own screen. Not a facilitator asking how everyone feels about the whiteboard — a process that ends the session with a costed first phase and a name against it.
But the naive version of this fails, and it fails insultingly. A consortium is not a startup. It has mandates it cannot pivot out of, constituencies it cannot break things for, and a legitimacy that speed actively destroys. So we import selectively, and we're specific about what stays behind.
IMPORTED FROM VENTURE BUILDING
Wedge selection — the narrow first cut, not the full problem
Constraint-first design — build from what's immovable
Smallest testable first phase
Named ownership, never "the working group"
Kill criteria agreed before anyone is invested
Phase gates with real teeth
DELIBERATELY LEFT BEHIND
Move fast and break things
Founder unilateralism
Pivot at will, mandate be damned
Speed as a substitute for legitimacy
Disruption as a value rather than a side effect
The assumption that incumbents are the problem
The result is the same forcing function, without the founder's licence to ignore the room. Y Combinator meets the United Nations — and the point is that both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.
WHAT COMES OUT
The output fits the work. It always names a next move.
01 · DECISION
A strategic direction
A decision grounded in evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a shared understanding of what happens next.
02 · ROADMAP
An owned plan
A sequenced path with named owners, dependencies, and the coordination needed to put it into practice.
03 · PILOT
A practical experiment
A bounded first phase designed to test the opportunity, generate evidence, and deepen shared ownership.
04 · INITIATIVE
A structure that can grow
A coalition, program, platform, or venture with a clear value proposition, governance, and support pathway.
Not every engagement needs every instrument, and not every opportunity should become an initiative. Consilium makes that visible early, preserving trust and directing effort toward the next move the evidence can support.
WHO IT'S FOR
Built for complex work that no single perspective can solve.
Consilium can be used with a leadership team, a focused working group, or an international consortium. The common need is a transparent path from fragmented perspectives to coordinated action.
Mature consortia
You convene well and your IP framework is settled. The gap is between the convening and anything that scales.
Corporate innovation arms
De-risked innovation and strategic options, sourced through a process your competitors can't replicate.
Government & economic development
Policy that arrives as a real company or a running program, not a white paper with a launch event.
Foundations
Mission-aligned pilots that your grantees, regulators, and beneficiaries designed together.
Investors & funds
Proprietary, pre-vetted deal flow — plus months of evidence on how the founding team actually thinks.
Founders
A route into fundamental research and public institutions that doesn't require learning four dialects first.
WHY US
Neither half of this works alone.
VENTURE & AI PRODUCT
Michael Sattler
Multiple-time founder and AI product and venture operator. Owns the venture-creation machinery — the part that turns a validated idea into something investable rather than something interesting.
CONSORTIA & SYSTEMS MODELLING
Brian Goodman
Consultant with deep government and industry relationships across the European marketplace. Owns the consortium relationships, the convening trust, and the system-dynamics modelling underneath the synthesis.
The Boston-to-Brussels corridor is a real and underserved seam: US technology needs to understand the European landscape, and European institutions want credible access to frontier innovation. What's hard to copy here is precisely what was hard to build.
GET STARTED
Bring us a challenge that needs shared direction.
The first conversation is about the decision, opportunity, or system you need to move—and whether Consilium should support it through consulting, the Lab, or a combination of both.
