What is Syncopate?

Syncopate is a consulting company based in Australia focussed on delivering results for clients. Because of our history and the people who happen to work at Syncopate, we’re primarily interested in the following business areas:

  1. Board Director, Advisory and Trustee Services especially related to governance, strategy development and risk assessments centred on new technologies including digital and AI
  2. New product development, especially in Insurance and Wealth Management. Either shorter or longer engagements.
  3. Capital markets consulting especially regarding counterparty credit risk leveraging the vannarho risk platform. Either shorter or longer engagements.
  4. Large project delivery (using agile etc) especially in Insurance, Wealth Management and Capital Markets. Mostly longer engagements and close to full-time. We utilise our Benefit Delivery Assessment to help pinpoint changes needed to how a program is run.


What’s in the name?

Syncopation is a musical term that refers to a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm used to create a sense of tension and release. Syncopation can be created by accenting the off-beat or by shifting the emphasis of the rhythm to a different part of the beat.

Syncopation is a great metaphor for strategic transformation. Changing a business, like syncopation, needs to be done artfully so it complements and works with the main rhythm of the business to transform it. Syncopation is also a great metaphor for the artful combination of left brain and right brain thinking in business.

The alternative is cacophany.


Why does Syncopate exist?

Syncopate is a home for people who like to challenge the status quo and improve human potential to create a better world. We do this by uncovering and developing digital innovations, ways of working and human talent and using them to further our client’s success. We work collaboratively with our clients on their most ambitious challenges to deliver lasting change that matters.

But we aren’t a very typical consulting company. For example:

  • None of the consultants are actually employed by us
  • We have no managers, not even a CEO. Instead we rely on self-organisation and transparency. Almost everything is bottom-up, and anyone can drive any decision.
  • Syncopate’s main purpose is to enable consultants to be happy, and Happiness Index is our driving metric. Strong revenue and delighted customers are a side effect, not a goal.
  • Syncopate doesn’t want to earn money from it’s consultants. It is in practice a non-profit company (although not formally so). Consultants keep most of what they earn.
  • Our ownership model is designed to keep our stock financially worthless. There is no incentive to “cash in”.
  • Consultants are 100% autonomous. They can do whatever they want (as long as they don’t hurt the brand or our house), and work as much or as little as they want.

Driving principles

(these principles drive almost everything at Syncopate)

Core structure and practices

(although these are core to our model, they are mostly just consequences of the principles above)

  • Happiness index - how do we know if we are succeeding?
  • Ownership model - how do people become owners, and what ownership actually means?
  • Economic model - how does money flow through the system?
  • How we make decisions - how do decisions get made when there is no manager?
  • Recruiting - how do new people get in?
  • Communication - how do we collaborate, sync, and improve?
  • Muffin protocol - how do we handle customer enquiries and route to the right consultant?
  • Office team - how do we handle admin and day-to-day operations?
  • Board of directors - Law requires that we have a BoD. So how does the BoD at Syncopate work?
  • Our business - what type of work we do
  • Visions - How to you get a bunch of autonomous consultants to agree on a vision? Answer: have several :o)
  • Sales - how do we actually sell consultants?

Supporting practices

(relevant stuff, but not core to our model)

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