Where the credibility was earned
Seventeen years inside the system.
I started as a software developer and Oracle DBA at a healthcare SaaS company - eight years building products for 1.4 million users in a safety-critical regulated environment. That is where I first encountered what I now call the human operating system: the gap between what the org chart said and what actually happened when decisions needed to be made under pressure.
From there: co-founding two ventures, leading business development across Singapore, London and Barcelona, building a strategic development framework for a digital cluster of 100+ Italian SMEs, heading partnerships for a venture studio. Each of those roles put me at the interface between strategy and the people who were supposed to execute it - and gave me a granular understanding of what makes that interface work and what makes it break.
The anchor role was two years at British American Tobacco - Global N-4 leading a £3M innovation portfolio and facilitating the agile transformation of a 2,000-person business unit. I orchestrated 60 proof of concepts generated from 1,000 ideas, ran PI Planning for 300 leaders, and contributed to £80M in annual cost savings. I also, in that role, experienced what happens when a high-performing system runs its operator into the ground.
The personal layer
I have used these tools on myself.
I have broken under high-performance load three times in my career. At university, when the system didn't fit and I pivoted. After eight years at Insiel Mercato, when the accumulation became too much. And at BAT, after my team was closed - one month later, I had a serious health crisis.
Each time, what rebuilt me was a combination of specific things: a change of context, finding one senior person willing to vouch for me into a new room, building one small proof point, and compounding from there. Not resilience in the general sense. A method, applied repeatedly, with measurable outcomes.
What I never had - during any of those moments - was what I now build with other people: a structured peer group who understood the situation, hosted by someone who had actually been through it, in a framework that was neither therapy nor a strategy offsite. I build what I needed and didn't have.
The connection
That history is not background. It is the diagnostic instrument.
When I sit with a founder who is the ceiling of their own company, I am not reading a case study. I recognise the dynamic from the inside. When a senior leader describes the experience of agreeing in meetings and diverging in execution, I know what that costs - not from research, but from having been on both sides of it.
That recognition is not a therapeutic offering. It is a practical one. It changes the quality of the diagnosis. And it is the reason - the only reason - I do this work rather than returning to a management job.
From a real session
This is what the raw material looks like.
Not a framework on a slide - a wall of what the people in the room actually named: what anchors them, what strains them, what the company is really for. The group work is built directly on this, in their own handwriting.
The Intellectual Foundation
Built on tested ground.
The LeadCulture Index™ is a 12-dimension diagnostic of leadership team health, built by Carlo Fontana Giusti - former McKinsey & Company partner, INSEAD MBA, faculty at ESCP Europe and Mobius Executive Leadership - across more than twenty years of applied work with 110+ companies in Europe. I am a licensed practitioner: I use it as the opening and closing measurement in every engagement, the baseline that makes the 180-day delta provable.
The Reboot Map draws on three converging sources. First, the British Design Council's double-diamond framework - structured divergence and convergence applied to human systems rather than product design. Second, the working-alone-together principle from AJ&Smart's Design Sprint methodology, which creates individual clarity before group synthesis. Third, a peer-reviewed study in the European Management Journal (Bortoluzzi, 2024) on how applying divergence-convergence principles to strategic storytelling improves decision-making quality and speed in leadership teams.
Eight years of workshop facilitation - 300+ workshops, 100+ leaders, contexts ranging from FTSE 100 transformation programmes to founder-led growth design. AJ&Smart Design Sprint certified. TAG Innovation School Digital Transformation programme. The tools in this method have been tested under conditions more demanding than the ones I now deploy them in.
Currently
What I am building right now.
If you Google me, you'll find these. Better to surface them clearly than let them create confusion.
Building the commercial engine for a Fortune-500-grade facilitation and leadership practice: catalogue design, go-to-market motion, sales cadence.
Turning bespoke L&D into repeatable asynchronous products for senior leaders.
Problem-solution fit and B2B validation for a neighbourhood-merchant cashback fintech.
A structured peer-group retreat for high-performing professionals in transition - the same framework principles as the organisational work, applied to individuals at a crossroads. Before rebooting, you save what matters, close what's finished, delete what's broken, and restart from fundamentals.
What People Say
"I had the chance to work with Riccardo in his framework. I personally facilitated workshops using the methodology he created - and I appreciated it. I also used his framework for a scientific study on the quality and speed of decision-making in teams, accepted for publication in the European Management Journal."
"Riccardo's outstanding skills in workshop facilitation and design thinking consistently made a significant impact. His ability to create engaging, collaborative and focused environments ensured that teams could navigate complex challenges with confidence and clarity."
"Riccardo helped us assess Talentware's cultural growth needs and then tailored a strategic workshop for us. Our team appreciated how quickly we were able to diverge and converge on complex topics, leveraging our collective wisdom in an energetic and engaging way."
Some of the organisations I've worked inside or alongside.