Sparring partner to executives & leadership teams
You don’t have to decide alone
A confidential space to test the decisions you cannot discuss with your team, your board, or the people close to you. You stay in charge. Our role is to make sure you decide clearly.
Nearly 30 years in the field · Executives & complex transformations · France & international
When people call us
There is no typical engagement. There are moments when the decision matters more than the method.
01
A decision you keep putting off
A strategic trade-off, a reorganisation, a separation, a pivot. You have been circling it for weeks and there is no one you can discuss it with without political consequence. We put the decision on the table, explore the scenarios you have not considered, and you leave with a decision - or with the real reason you were stuck.
02
A leadership team that does not say everything
Meetings are polite, decisions commit no one, and the real disagreements get settled in the corridor. We work with the leadership team to put the confrontation back where it belongs: in the room.
03
A transformation that has stalled
The plan was clear, the execution is not following. The blockage owes less to method than to alignment, blurred roles, or decisions that were never made. We identify what is actually blocking, then we deal with it.
Three ways of working together
Three situations, three formats. One person has to decide. A group has to decide together. Or decisions are getting stuck inside the organisation.
Executive Sparring Partner
One-to-one sessions to test your decisions as they arise. Most common format: ninety minutes every two to three weeks, over a six-month cycle. Nothing said in a session is written up or passed on to anyone.
Leadership team
Work with the leadership team: clarifying who decides what, putting disagreements back on the table, turning reporting meetings into places where decisions are actually made. Workshops, board-level sessions, support over time.
Organisational transformation
A transformation rarely stalls for lack of method alone. It stalls when responsibilities blur, when trade-offs travel up to the wrong level, and when certain difficult conversations are avoided again and again. On a transformation involving 450 people, eighteen internal ambassadors carried the work on feedback, strategic framing, collaboration and new ways of working together. Our work begins where a transformation stops being a question of method and becomes a question of decision and responsibility.
One decision, ninety minutes
The Decision Stress Test puts a single decision under pressure, in one ninety-minute session. You bring a real decision and leave with what did not hold and what you do about it. No commitment to continue.
Three engagements, as they happened
Different contexts. The same tipping point: putting decisions, responsibilities and conversations back where they belong.
Mentoring executives - information systems division
2 members of the executive committee · middle management · talent pipeline
An information systems division undertakes a deep transformation of its organisation and its management. Two members of the executive committee carry it: the head of human resources and the chief technology officer. I mentored both individually, alongside the work carried out with middle management and the talent pipeline.
KAIRNEXA reading - When a transformation rests on two people, the question is not the method. It is their ability to hold at the top what they require at the bottom.
Luxury - eighteen leaders carrying a transformation
18 managers · 18 brands · members of executive committees
The luxury division of a group launches a transformation built on feedback, a strategic frame, real conditions for cooperation and new formats for meetings. It is carried by eighteen “activators”, each a member of the executive committee of one of the brands, tasked with spreading these practices in their own house. I worked with those eighteen leaders.
KAIRNEXA reading - A frame agreed together is replayed alone, in every committee, at every costly trade-off. That is where it holds or gives way.
Automotive - transforming through management
450 people · 18 internal ambassadors · 9 months
The procurement division of a car manufacturer launches, with its network, a transformation covering feedback, strategic framing, the conditions for collaboration and new formats for meetings. Eighteen internal ambassadors become its relays. I led the engagement and worked with those ambassadors.
KAIRNEXA reading - Method is not enough. A transformation holds when management is able to carry new decisions, new conversations and new responsibilities.
These three engagements were carried by the founder of the practice. They are real and anonymised: I describe what was at stake and what I did - not results I cannot prove to you.
Esteban Martinez-Querol
Nearly thirty years spent transforming organisations - Arthur Andersen, PwC, Mercedes-Benz, BMW Financial Services, inspearit, Wemanity - then three years at Praesta France as a sparring partner to executives and C-level leaders. I have seen from the inside what makes transformations fail: less the strategy than the decisions that are not made and the conversations that are not had. KAIRNEXA was born of that observation. Engagements in banking, automotive, luxury, media, technology and telecoms, in France and internationally - from working one-to-one with a single executive to transformations involving up to 450 people.
How it works
Four movements. It is not a method to apply: it is a way of working, and it does not depend on who is in the room.
01
Clarify
We start with the real subject, often different from the one you walk into the room with. What you are trying to obtain, what is stopping you, what you are avoiding looking at. A first session is often enough to move the problem.
02
Confront
We question your assumptions, explore the scenarios you have not considered, and name what the people around you no longer tell you. Without indulgence and without an agenda.
03
Decide and commit
Thinking that leads nowhere has served no purpose. Every session ends with an explicit next move: decide, commit to an action, check an assumption, or open the conversation that is missing. Short, dated, and yours.
04
Come back to it
A decision that matters deserves to be revisited: what held, what gave way, and what reality taught us. Every session opens on what the previous one committed to - what held, what gave way, and why.
What makes this perspective different
Not a coach, not a consultant, not a well-meaning friend. Something else.
A peer, not a supplier
No one practises at KAIRNEXA without having led, transformed, failed and started again. We do not apply a model to you: we know what it takes to carry the decision.
No stake in your decision
KAIRNEXA has no ready-made solution to make you adopt, and no interest in pushing you towards one option rather than another. A practitioner’s role here is to make your reasoning more solid - not to sell you the conclusion. That is precisely what makes the confrontation possible.
AI as an amplifier, not an oracle
We use artificial intelligence to widen the range of scenarios and to structure complex situations. The founder of the practice trained on the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme at Saïd Business School, Oxford. Judgement stays human.
There is probably a decision behind the subject on your mind
You do not need someone to decide in your place. Perhaps only a place where that decision can genuinely be tested.
Thirty minutes, no commitment and no fee. If KAIRNEXA is not the right answer, we will tell you.