Founded in Brooklyn by two strategists from IDEO and Pentagram, with a third partner from a Series-B fintech.
A Strategy Studio · Brooklyn · Est. 2017
Drawing the impossible so you can build the inevitable.
Mental Escher is a boutique strategy practice for senior product leaders, founders, and innovation directors who have the talent and the resources — but cannot see the next move. In a single session, we redraw the problem so the obvious one becomes visible.
A short thesis
The frame is rarely the obstacle. Not seeing the frame is.
The teams we meet are uniformly excellent. Their engineering is sharp, their data is clean, their roadmaps are defensible. And they are stuck — not for lack of effort, but because the strategic frame they inherited no longer fits the problem in front of them.
The next move is not “work harder inside the frame.” The next move is to redraw the frame. That is rarely a job a team can do alone; the people who built it cannot easily unsee it. An outside eye, trained to find the seams, can do it in an afternoon.
That is what a session is. Ninety minutes. One senior strategist in the room. We do not give advice — we redraw the picture until the obvious move surfaces. The ninety-two percent of clients who ship a reframed strategy within thirty days are not faster than you. They just saw a different picture.
The methodology
The Escher Reframe — five movements.
The session is the front door. The work behind it is a teachable sequence — adapted from the book, taught at Stanford GSB, and shipped inside 184 of the Forbes Cloud 100.
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01
Suspend the brief.
Set aside the question as posed. Map the assumptions baked into every word of it. Most reframes begin by deleting a phrase the team never realized they were carrying.
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02
Invert the figure.
Treat the obstacle as the asset. The thing slowing the strategy down is almost always the thing the strategy should be organizing around. We run this move three times before committing.
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03
Find the impossible object.
Build a model of the problem that cannot exist inside the current frame. The contradiction is the signal. Where it buckles, a new axis appears.
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04
Project the next move.
Once the new axis is visible, the obvious next move is rarely a guess. We draft it on paper with you, in language your team can repeat on Monday.
The deliverable
The Escher Session.
A single ninety-minute diagnostic with one senior strategist. Designed for executive teams who already know what they are doing — and want to see the one thing they cannot see.
What leaves the room.
A one-page reframe artifact. Three sentences max. Written on paper in the room, photographed, and shipped to you within forty-eight hours as a signed PDF. Most teams pin it to a wall on Monday morning.
How it runs.
You send a pre-read, four pages maximum, three days ahead. We read it twice. You arrive, we work on paper, no slides. The room is quiet. The work is specific.
The guarantee.
If we cannot surface a usable reframe in the ninety minutes, the session is free. We have honored this guarantee eleven times in eight years. We expect to honor it again.
Receipts
A short record.
The studio has been quiet about its own work. The record, eight years on, can speak for itself.
Escher Sessions delivered across thirty-eight countries as of 2024, by a permanent team of fourteen.
Of the Forbes Cloud 100 have used the method since 2020 — most as recurring clients across product cycles.
Of clients ship a reframed strategy within thirty days of a session. The remaining 8% booked a second session.
Average engagement ROI in the first quarter post-session, measured against the cost of the next decision.
Named the top innovation consultancy by Fast Company in 2023; profiled in HBR, Wired, and The Economist.
Stanford GSB executive-education courses now teach the method. The Escher Reframe (Wiley, 2023) is the textbook.
The Escher Reframe spent eight weeks on the Wall Street Journal business list and is in its fourth printing.
The artifact
The book.
What it argues.
Strategy failures are rarely failures of execution. They are failures of frame — the inherited picture a team cannot see from inside. The Escher Reframe (Wiley, 2023) is a short, rigorously practical book about how to redraw the frame in ninety minutes, and how to teach a team to do it themselves.
Eight chapters, four movements, one guarantee. If you have read it, the session is faster.
Where it has landed.
The method and the book are now adopted in three Stanford GSB executive-education courses, including the flagship Strategy in the Age of AI seminar, and is the required reading in two of them.
Coverage and adoption, in order of public record: Harvard Business Review (March 2022), Fast Company’s #1 Innovation Consultancy list (2023), Wired’s August 2023 long-read on reframing in product organizations, and a January 2024 Economist essay on boutique strategy practices.