Engagements are scoped individually. The first conversation is always free and without obligation.
Start a conversationMiriam Voss spent eleven years inside large organisations before starting Tessera Quanta in 2017. The last of those roles was as head of strategic planning at a mid-sized infrastructure group in Frankfurt, where she watched a well-resourced team produce a three-year strategy that was quietly shelved eight months after it was approved. The problem wasn't the analysis. The problem was that the process had been designed to produce a document, not to change how anyone thought. That observation is the reason this firm exists.
Tessera Quanta was built around a specific conviction: that the most valuable thing a consultant can do is help a leadership team think more clearly about a hard problem, not hand them a pre-packaged answer. The name comes from the idea of small, precise pieces (tessera) that, when placed correctly, reveal a larger pattern (quanta of meaning). It's a bit abstract, but it describes the work accurately. Most of the problems we're brought in to solve look intractable at first. They usually aren't. They're just poorly framed.
Six to ten weeks of structured work on a single high-stakes decision. We start by mapping what is actually being decided, which is often different from how it's been framed internally. The process includes stakeholder interviews, assumption mapping, and a structured decision session with the leadership team. Delivered as a working document and a facilitated session, not a slide deck.
Typically eight to twelve weeks. We diagnose the structural causes of the symptoms you're seeing (slow decisions, unclear ownership, duplicated effort) and design a new operating model. The design phase is followed by a sequenced transition plan that accounts for the people and politics involved, not just the org chart.
Quarterly sessions with written briefing notes prepared in advance of each meeting. Miriam reviews management proposals, strategic plans, or specific risk questions and provides an independent written assessment before the session. Available to a small number of boards per year. Renewed annually by mutual agreement.
For founders approaching a liquidity event, a succession, or a significant role change. The work covers both the organisational dimension (what needs to be in place for the business to function without you) and the personal dimension (what you actually want from the next chapter). Typically ten to fourteen weeks.
Quantitative scenario work built in Excel, Python, or R, depending on what your team already uses. We document every assumption explicitly, build in sensitivity analysis, and run a working session with the people who will use the model. The output is a model you own and can update, not a black box.
The word 'problem' covers a lot of ground. A bridge engineering challenge and a market entry decision are both problems, but they require fundamentally different approaches. Conflating them is one of the most common reasons strategy work produces impressive documents and modest results.
Read more →Most strategy engagements that go wrong do so in the first two weeks, not because the consultant was incompetent or the client was difficult, but because the scope was agreed before either party had asked the right questions. A good scoping conversation is harder than it looks.
Read more →Organisations rarely break all at once. The structure that worked well at 40 people starts to creak at 120. The operating model that made sense when the founders ran everything directly becomes a bottleneck when there are four layers of management. The symptoms appear gradually, and they're often misread.
Read more →Answer four questions about your situation. The result will point you toward the type of work that tends to be most useful for problems like yours.
Miriam Voss founded Tessera Quanta in Edinburgh in 2017 after eleven years in corporate strategy roles, most recently as head of strategic planning at Brandt Infrastruktur GmbH in Frankfurt. Before that she spent four years as a senior analyst at a London-based management consultancy, working primarily on post-merger integration for mid-market industrial companies. She holds a first-class degree in mathematics from the University of St Andrews and a postgraduate qualification in organisational behaviour from Birkbeck. Outside of client work, she reads widely in decision theory and keeps a small vegetable garden that she describes as a reliable source of humility. She runs one engagement at a time when possible, and takes August off entirely.