Team

Idea Normals is four strategists and a whiteboard that has never been fully erased.

Margot Vale, founding partner

Margot founded the practice after a decade in conventional strategy work, during which she noticed that the best decision in most rooms was the one nobody had proposed. She leads normal-finding engagements and is the person most likely to mean "perpendicular" literally.

Idris Achterberg, principal, surface analysis

Idris maps assumptions. He has a framework for most things, a two-by-two for the rest, and a standing concern that some ideas are curved in ways current tools cannot measure.

Paz Ilunga, tangents practice lead

Paz studies the work teams do instead of the work they meant to do. She can make a distraction sound like a deliverable, and is right about it more often than is comfortable.

Anders Holm, principal, projection

Anders moves ideas into other contexts and reports what survives. He reports the failures with the same calm as the successes, including the ones that did not survive the third dimension.