Darrell founded DIEM consulting Ltd in 2002 after a career that had encompassed strategic decision making within the UK Ministry of Defence and advising corporates & governments at the London office of leading strategy consultants McKinsey & Co. During his time applying operational & business analysis techniques at the MOD and McKinsey he observed that strategy often stalled or downright failed due to poor implementation, no matter how clever the consultant & how theoretically sound the advice was. Most consultancies addressed this common observation by focusing on large, long and expensive change management processes. Darrell found that conducting an initial assessment of strategic fit and engaging more effectively with stakeholders to gather their insights led to more quickly and effectively implemented strategies.
Over the last decade he has adopted tools from a range of disciplines to develop & refine a series of techniques to assess strategic fit and engage stakeholders. The outputs of these are then used in the strategic impact assessment to define and downselect from different strategy options. He has successfully applied these techniques to many types of commercial and government organisations in both consulting projects and coaching and training interventions.
As well as leading DIEM’s projects and capability development, he lectures on Strategic Change at Birkbeck College, University of London and the Role of the Board at the UK Defence Academy. He has published articles on strategy in the prestigious McKinsey Quarterly, on how risk should be communicated to the board in Risk Management magazine & on stakeholder engagement in Expert Witness magazine. He has a degree in Engineering from Christ’s College Cambridge and a PhD in Ballistics from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University.