Every organisation has a structure beneath the
structure on paper.
Decisions collect around certain people. Information travels through unofficial routes. Values appear in everyday trade-offs. Over time, these patterns become the organisation people actually inhabit. Shikumi helps leaders see that underlying system and redesign ways of operating that no longer fit what the organisation is becoming.
The diary is open for new engagements from August.
You may recognise the surface
- Decisions repeatedly return to the founder
- Growth has made work less coherent
- Responsibility exists without enough authority
- Meetings multiply while important questions remain unresolved
- Stated values and daily incentives have drifted apart
- A new tool, structure, or senior hire hasn't changed the underlying pattern
These may appear to be separate problems. Often, they're expressions of the same underlying system.
An organisation that can think, decide and adapt
The aim is not a perfect organisation. It is one that can think, decide and adapt without depending on constant intervention from a few people.
The work may lead to
- Clearer decision rights and greater leadership ownership
- Roles designed around the work rather than inherited assumptions
- Fewer meetings, with better decisions emerging from them
- Stronger links between strategy and daily operations
- Knowledge and processes that support growth rather than slow it
- An organisation less dependent on a few people's memory and presence
An organisational seeing and design practice
Shikumi (仕組み) is a Japanese word for the underlying structure: the mechanism, or the architecture beneath the architecture.
Shikumi combines close observation with operational analysis and organisational design. It examines what people say, how work actually moves, and what formal structures repeatedly produce.
How it actually works
Not the org chart version. How decisions, roles, and information actually move day to day.
What's underneath
The pattern or constraint sitting beneath the visible problem, the one the symptoms keep pointing back to.
What restores coherence
Structures built to fit what the organisation is becoming, then tended as they take root.
The practice draws on twenty years of operational leadership, organisational design and advisory work across growing ventures and complex global businesses.
Before artificial intelligence, organisational intelligence
AI can accelerate work, but speed is not the same as progress. When goals are unclear, knowledge is fragmented, and decision rights are unresolved, AI often reproduces the confusion more efficiently.
Shikumi helps organisations strengthen the foundations AI depends on: clear processes, usable knowledge, thoughtful governance, defined accountability and reliable feedback loops. And most importantly, ask a lot of questions before putting on the AI lens.
Not sure which of these is right for you, or whether Shikumi's a fit at all? Take the two-minute fit check first.
Take the fit checkThree ways to work together
Shikumi works with organisations at moments when their existing ways of operating no longer fit what they are becoming. This often happens during growth, leadership transition, strategic change, the introduction of new technology, or when operational problems keep returning despite repeated attempts to solve them.
The Field Study
See what is actually happening before deciding what to change.
An embedded organisational enquiry examining how decisions, roles, workflows, meetings, information and informal relationships work in practice. Conducted through conversations, observation and examination of key organisational material, it concludes with a clear reading of the underlying system, its central constraints and the choices now facing the organisation.
Typical shape: Four to six weeks, adapted to the organisation and the question being explored.
Useful when: growth has created complexity, the same problem keeps returning, or an important intervention needs to be designed well.
Start a conversationSeeing Sessions
Think through one consequential question.
A focused advisory engagement for a leader or leadership team facing a consequential, bounded question that would benefit from an independent, systems-oriented view. The conversation is followed by a concise written synthesis of the underlying tensions, considerations and possible paths forward.
Typical shape: One or two focused sessions, depending on the question.
Useful when: the question is bounded, the stakes are meaningful, and a full organisational study isn't necessary.
Start a conversationThe Long View
Help a change take root.
Continuing advisory support following an organisational diagnosis, redesign or leadership transition. The work observes how change lands, identifies unintended effects and helps leaders adjust the supporting structures and practices over time.
Typical shape: Ongoing monthly advisory support, shaped around the organisation and the change underway.
Useful when: leaders are steering sustained change over months, not weeks.
Start a conversationThe question—and what lay beneath it
Organisations rarely arrive with the wrong question. They usually arrive with one part of a larger pattern.
Shikumi works beneath the immediate brief—examining how strategy, structures, behaviours and relationships interact. This deeper view often changes both the question and the work that follows.
The challenge was not simply a product launch. The venture required a different operating model, new customer behaviours and coordination across the existing business.
Designed the venture strategy, operating roadmap and helped launch Knox India.
Capital was only one condition. The larger question was whether the organisation had the capabilities, governance and operating model needed to become a venture builder.
Conducted the research and developed the investment thesis.
The positioning problem reflected a wider disconnect between growth ambitions, organisational capabilities, customer definition and routes to market.
Developed the positioning and go-to-market strategy.
The transition affected more than the role at the top. Authority, institutional knowledge, relationships and decision-making all needed to move without creating a vacuum.
Provided ongoing strategic and operational advice throughout the transition.
We look for relationships rather than isolated problems: where strategy and execution have separated, where formal structures differ from how work really happens, and where recurring friction points to a deeper pattern.
The aim is to understand the system deeply enough to make the response simpler, more precise and more human.
The Practice of Attention
Attention is not passive observation. It's a disciplined movement between distance and proximity, between what people say and what structures repeatedly produce. Four moves, carried over from the studio, describe how it works.
See the shape, not the detail
Step back until the specifics blur and the underlying structure appears. The method works by moving between distance and proximity, not choosing one.
Read what's absent
The role that's unstaffed, the meeting that never happens, the question nobody asks. Absence carries as much information as presence.
Find the edges
Truth tends to sit where two things rub against each other: old process against new tool, stated value against actual incentive.
Find the sketch beneath
Every organisation still carries the original intent it was built on, faintly visible under everything drawn on top of it since.
Read the patterns underneath how things actually move.
One short, honest reading, from two possible angles: your organisation, or you as a leader. No score. No diagnosis. Just language for the shape you're already inside.
Organization
Discover the operating pattern shaping your organisation.
Take the reading →Leader
Discover the pattern you're running, and how it shapes what's around you.
Take the reading →Ireene J Karthik
Before founding Shikumi, Ireene spent twenty years inside complex organisations—leading operations and P&L across multiple geographies, designing new ventures, and helping teams navigate growth and change.
Her experience includes leadership roles at Infosys BPM, earlier work at Deloitte, and delivering operations for insurance and reinsurance organisations including Chubb, Gen Re, Royal & Sun Alliance and Aon, alongside Stanford Ignite and an executive programme at IIM Ahmedabad.
Ireene is also a visual artist with studio access at Wimbledon Art Studios. The studio practices at the centre of the Practice of Attention—squinting, negative space, contrast and underdrawing—are not decorative metaphors. They are part of how she has learned to observe relationships, absences and underlying structures.
Both practices begin with the same question: what is really here?