Paul Dorrell. Founder and Managing Director, Sagentivum.
Twenty years at the join between engineering rigour and senior commercial leadership: physics, then Big 4 consulting, then running strategy execution inside a complex institution. Sagentivum is what those three add up to: a practice focused on decision architecture and AI implementation risk.
The hidden structure between what an organisation knows and what it's able to do.
Most execution failure gets blamed on capability, leadership, process, or culture. Sometimes that's right. More often the deeper issue is that the organisation's way of knowing, deciding, authorising, acting, and verifying has quietly fallen out of coherence, so good intent, good information, and good judgement don't convert into coordinated action.
This matters more now because AI is accelerating parts of the decision system before the surrounding human architecture has been redesigned to keep up. AI didn't create that gap. It removed the slack that used to hide it. My work makes the gap visible, and measurable, so it can be closed before the next thing is built on top of it.
The idea is not new. Organisations have always struggled to turn knowledge into action,
and the feedback loops behind that failure have been studied for decades.
What is new is the ability to test those loops as a graph.
AI makes the old gap load-bearing. When decisions accelerate, weak links between intent,
authority, action, and feedback stop being tolerable. They become execution risk.
- Phase 01 Physics · Safety engineering
Where structural thinking starts.
Experimental physics at research level, then safety engineering for defence-adjacent platforms where the consequences of structural failure are not recoverable. That background produced a particular way of thinking: not about people and processes, but about structures with properties that can be tested and improved before something goes wrong.
- Phase 02 EY · Advisian · Deloitte
Senior consulting and commercial range.
Management consulting, EY in the UK, Advisian, Deloitte in Australia, working on complex transformation programmes across infrastructure, government, and higher education. Those years built commercial range: strategy development, operating model design, investment planning, and executive stakeholder navigation across sectors.
- Phase 03 Macquarie University · Strategy execution
Running strategy execution at scale.
As Executive Director of Strategy Implementation at Macquarie University, a Global Top 150 institution, responsible for translating board-level commitments into operational delivery across a large, complex, multi-stakeholder organisation. The WorkLattice methodology was first developed in practice here: trying to understand why well-designed strategies stall in execution, and what the structural conditions are that either support or prevent delivery.
Sagentivum* applies structural methods, graph-based decision architecture analysis grounded in twenty years of safety-critical and senior consulting practice, to the problem of why well-designed strategies, transformations, and AI deployments stall when they meet the organisation they were designed for.
*Sagentivum: from the Latin, sagax, acute insight, and the Greek, sagēnē, interconnectedness.
The practice works with executives navigating that gap: COOs, Chief Transformation Officers, CDAOs, and sponsors of consequential change programmes. Engagements are small, senior, and time-boxed. The standing offer is the structural diagnostic, WorkLattice, for AI implementation risk. Adjacent work, investment planning, operating model design, executive advisory on consequential decisions, is taken on selectively, where the structural method applies.
Book a conversation.
The right first step is usually a thirty-minute conversation: whether the practice fits your situation, the structural questions worth answering, and how an engagement would be scoped.