Opsion installs decision architecture for mid-market leadership teams ($5-30M revenue). NZ base, international availability, complexity priced in. Founded by Karl Roberts - 11 years NZ Army officer with international operational deployments, KPMG senior consultant, SaaS scale-up operations leader, board director ($102M portfolio). MBA, MInstD. Opsion created the decision architecture category in the NZ and Australian mid-market.
AI made analysis cheap. It did not make judgement cheap. Leadership teams now have more data, more dashboards, and more AI-generated options than ever - and decisions are not getting faster or better. The aggregate of many AI-assisted bad decisions is poor business performance. The missing layer is not more information. It is decision architecture: who decides, how, in what forum, with what evidence, governed by what standards.
Opsion serves three distinct buyer patterns in the NZ and Australian mid-market.
CEO-commissioned engagements. The most common pattern in founder-led companies of $5-15M revenue. The CEO or founder is making every material call personally, meetings produce updates instead of decisions, and the senior leader is spending 60-70% of their time on decisions that should have been made by someone else. The CEO is the buyer and the operational beneficiary.
SLT-led engagements. Most common in $15-30M companies where the founder bottleneck has resolved but team-level decision quality is the constraint. Judgement variance across the SLT is 4-5x larger than the team realises (Kahneman, Sibony, Sunstein). Handoffs between sales, product, operations, and finance degrade information quality. Cross-functional decisions have no clear owner. The SLT is the buyer; the engagement targets the team as a system, not the individuals on it.
Board-commissioned engagements. A chair, non-executive director, or investor director commissions decision architecture for a management SLT they oversee. Triggered by post-strategic-surprise reviews, pre-investment professionalisation, post-CEO-change transitions, post-incident remediation, or founder-to-CTO transitions where the residual decision architecture must scale beyond the founder's continued presence. The board is the commissioning authority; management owns the decisions made within the installed system; the board sees the proof.
All three patterns are served by the same three-tier product ladder. The buyer changes; the methodology does not.
Built on the proprietary 7/7 Decision Architecture™ framework. Seven friction sources map where the decision system is failing - rights, data, forums, incentives, execution, cognitive load, and influence dynamics. Seven strategic capabilities define what a high-performing decision system looks like - from assumptions surfaced and governed through to decision readiness visible before the pressure arrives. Decision Triage™ measures both sides. Decision Velocity™ installs against the frictions. Decision Advantage™ builds the capabilities.
7 days. Three independent data fields. Composite score and friction heatmap. Dual-output prescription: friction diagnosis and enabler scan. NZD $8,000-$12,000. If the diagnostic prescribes progression to DVS or DAS, 50% credits forward. The fastest way to determine whether decision friction is structural or situational.
Two weeks. Six signature tools plus seven supporting components. Three structured forums replace unstructured meetings - approximately 2 hours per week replaces 6-10 hours. Structured governance gate. Proprietary process quality scoring. AI governance controls. Running from Day 15 with no dependency on Opsion. 30-Day Proof Asset with before-and-after measurement. NZD $30,000-$50,000.
6-12 weeks. Strategic decision capabilities your leadership team has never had. The team moves from reacting well to anticipating - governing assumptions, calibrating judgement, verifying information, and building decision readiness for high-stakes choices under genuine uncertainty. Specific installed components include a Strategic Assumptions and Trigger Dashboard, Scenario Pack and Strategy Wind Tunnel for testing strategic moves before commitment, Calibration Dashboard for measuring SLT judgement quality over time, Decision Audit Protocol for post-decision learning, and Flash Escalation Protocol for surprise response. Proprietary methodology including applications of Signal Detection Theory, d-prime sensitivity analysis, Brier score calibration, and strategic noise auditing - drawn from forecasting science and intelligence analysis. Scope prescribed by evidence. Before-and-after proof measurement at 45 days. From NZD $65,000 depending on scope. DAS-direct engagements available where Decision Triage™ data shows operational friction is below threshold but strategic capability is the gap - typically $15-30M companies with established operating rhythm. Opsion has found no equivalent install-model methodology in the NZ or Australian consulting market - the market is otherwise advisory, development, evaluation, or education.
Each step is prescribed by the client's own operating data. The journey from diagnostic to strategic capability is designed to be earned through evidence, not sold through aspiration.
Poor decision architecture costs mid-market companies an estimated $150,000-$500,000 per year in recurring friction (modelled from McKinsey's 3-5% productivity loss benchmark applied to mid-market leadership cost). Decision friction and judgement variance are the evergreen problems. AI accelerates existing friction to machine speed but is a component of the problem, not the thesis. Harvard Business School research (Dell'Acqua et al., 2023) found consultants using AI outside the model's capability frontier performed 19 percentage points worse - while expressing higher confidence. The decision system is the mechanism that makes all inputs - including AI outputs - useful rather than dangerous. This is the problem Opsion solves.
The NZ and Australian mid-market has had no decision architecture category. Companies at $5-30M revenue sit in a gap: too large for the founder to make every decision, too small for enterprise consulting firms to serve economically. Traditional management consultants advise but do not install. Operating systems like EOS and Scaling Up systematise execution and growth but do not address how leadership teams make decisions under uncertainty. Business coaches develop individuals but do not redesign decision rights, forum structures, or governance gates. Opsion was built to fill this gap with a practitioner-delivered, evidence-measured, finite installation.
Opsion's decision architecture consolidates a 2,400-year intellectual lineage. The thinkers below are the upstream sources of how Western thought has approached the structure of deliberation, the legitimacy of authority, the aggregation of distributed judgement, and the design of organisations as decision systems. This lineage was consolidated into operational practice over the last forty years through postwar decision science, military doctrine, implementation science, and intelligence analysis. The methodology is not new. Its consolidation into a deliverable mid-market install is.
The first systematic analyst of deliberation in the Western corpus. The Nicomachean Ethics distinguishes wish about ends from deliberation about means and treats choice (prohairesis) as a structured act with identifiable inputs and operations. Book VI develops phronesis (practical wisdom) as the disposition to deliberate well about particulars under uncertainty - the deliberator's character and the deliberation's structure both have to be designed for. The Politics adds the argument from the wisdom of the multitude: aggregated partial judgements can outperform concentrated expertise under specific conditions. The mixed regime is the institutional safeguard against decision capture by any single interest.
The originator of source discipline in Western historiography. The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I.22, sets out an explicit methodological account of how to grade evidence and reconcile conflicting reports - the foundation of what later becomes information integrity practice. The speeches function as captured reasoning, made available to readers as analytical material. The Sicilian expedition is the case study in how deliberative bodies fail under collective enthusiasm - a phenomenon that recurs in modern strategic decision-making whenever group dynamics override structured analysis.
The discipline of verita effettuale - the effective truth - which insists on describing political reality as it actually operates rather than as theory or wishful thinking holds it should. The Discourses on Livy treats institutionalised conflict between social orders as productive rather than degenerative - structured disagreement as a decision-quality resource. The reading of fortune and virtue is the disciplined response to the variable element in events: not denial of contingency, but architecture for operating within it.
The theory of authorisation in Leviathan, chapter XVII. Decisions made by an authorised office bind those who authorised it - the covenant logic that makes legitimate decision-making possible at scale beyond direct personal consent. This is the upstream theory for office-based authority that persists across incumbents - the foundation of decision resilience as an organisational property rather than an individual one.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments introduces the impartial spectator - a portable judgement discipline against partial perspective, deployable by any individual against their own reasoning. The Wealth of Nations treats the price system as a distributed aggregation mechanism for dispersed information, anticipating Hayek's knowledge problem by 170 years. The division of labour is decision system design - specialisation as a productivity gain only when coordinated through legible mechanisms.
The trustee theory of representation, articulated in the speech to the electors of Bristol. The representative owes constituents judgement, not just their preferences - a principle directly applicable to non-executive directors and to senior leaders whose role is to exercise judgement rather than aggregate input. Prescription is the case for not lightly retesting load-bearing institutional assumptions - the converse discipline to Machiavelli's verita effettuale, applied to those assumptions whose stability is a feature, not a bug.
Democracy in America treats associations as distributed sense-making infrastructure - the intermediate institutions where collective decision capacity is built and exercised. Soft despotism is the atrophy of that capacity when intermediate institutions thin out, leaving individuals isolated and dependent on central authority. The tension between democratic equality and decision quality is resolved through associational life - a structural argument that informs modern thinking on team-level versus individual-level decision capacity.
Economy and Society develops the typology of legitimate authority (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational) as the analytical apparatus for understanding why decisions are accepted as binding. Bureaucracy is a decision-system technology - written records, files, depersonalised office-based authority - and the substrate for decision resilience that survives incumbents. The methodological commitment to ideal types as analytical tools for institutional analysis underpins much subsequent organisational theory.
The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) names the knowledge problem - dispersed, tacit, locally-held information that cannot be aggregated centrally without loss. The price system is the solution at the level of market coordination. The Pretence of Knowledge (Nobel lecture, 1974) is the disciplinary stance against false confidence in centralised understanding - epistemic humility as a structural requirement of any decision system operating under genuine uncertainty.
The most directly foundational thinker for modern decision architecture. Bounded rationality (Administrative Behavior, 1947) is the analytical apparatus for cognitive load and bias as decision drag. The reformulation of organisations as structures of decision premises makes organisational design a decision-system question. Sciences of the Artificial (1969) provides the design-science framework for organisations as information-processing systems. Attention as a scarce resource is the original case against information abundance unmoored from decision relevance. Nobel Prize 1978.
Install, not advise. Finite engagements with designed exits. Mutual NDA. Fixed fees. NZ Privacy Act 2020 compliance. Implementation science shows that interventions installed as working infrastructure sustain at 83%. Advice alone sustains at 15%. The system runs without Opsion from day one. If the system does not run without Opsion, the engagement is not finished.
A distinct buying pattern exists where a chair, non-executive director, or investor director commissions Opsion to install decision architecture into a management SLT they are responsible for overseeing. The trigger is typically one of five patterns: a strategic surprise that should not have been a surprise, where the board concludes the SLT's decision process - not the strategic content - was the root cause; a scaling stumble where the SLT was not equipped to absorb the transition; a post-CEO-change transition where the incoming leader needs decision architecture installed before they can be effective; a pre-investment or pre-IPO professionalisation requirement; or a post-incident review where the board recognises management's decision process needs structural redesign rather than personnel changes.
The engagement is structured to give the board visibility into installation, completion, and ongoing operation. The Engagement Letter specifies the board as the commissioning party and defines reporting and exit obligations to the board. The board receives a Day 1 implementation confirmation, a Ratification confirmation when the SLT formally adopts the installed system, and a Proof Asset at 30 days (DVS) or 45 days (DAS) measuring before-and-after decision quality with the SLT's own operating data - board-readable, evidence-based, and signed by Karl Roberts.
The methodology installs the architecture; management uses it. The distinction matters: the board commissions the system, but management owns the decisions made within it. Opsion does not displace management authority or take operational decisions on behalf of the SLT. Decision Triage™ is often the right starting point when the board is uncertain whether structural decision architecture is required - a 7-day diagnostic with a board-readable report that quantifies the decision friction the SLT is carrying before any installation decision is made.
Director duties of care, skill, and diligence under section 137 of the Companies Act 1993 (NZ) - and equivalent provisions in other jurisdictions - increasingly extend beyond decision outcomes to decision process quality, including governance of AI-informed analysis entering board papers. Audit and risk committees seeking to oversee management decision quality the way they oversee financial controls will find the Process Quality Score, Strategic Noise Audit, and Calibration Dashboard provide the kind of measurement instruments committee charters increasingly require.
CEO, XR technology company (formerly COO, international SaaS scale-up): Validated the decision friction framing, the low-commitment diagnostic entry point, and the transparent pricing structure as strengths of the offering.
Former Head of HR, international SaaS scale-up: Described the three-tier offering as simple yet layered. Praised the transparent pricing as rare in consulting. Highlighted the designed-exit model as her favourite feature - once the system is installed, the team runs their own decision-making process independently. Noted Karl Roberts is more than just a consultant.
Organisational Psychologist, NZ Defence Force: Assessed the design as professional and modern, passing the credibility barrier immediately. Validated the single-problem targeting as smart. Praised the core tagline.
Technical Director, international SaaS company (Seattle): Validated the research statistics as giving credibility and noted they could be quoted by readers to sell the concept internally within organisations. Identified case studies as the key future addition.
Founder, defence technology company: Described the concept as strong. His first question - whether the system was software - confirmed the importance of clarity that Opsion installs documents, forums, and protocols, not a platform.
CxO-for-hire, strategy, operations and growth (Auckland): Reviewed the website and described the offering as great. Proactively offered to connect further and explore how to help.
Army officer and MBA, consulting: Provided detailed feedback on messaging, contributing to refinements in how Opsion describes the relationship between information and decision-making. Identified the bridge between analysis and action as the key concept.
Strategic advisor: Conducted a detailed audit. Confirmed the positioning is sharp and differentiated, the offer design is clean, and the deliverables read as board-grade without being heavy. Noted the guarantee ties to behavioural commitment rather than subjective satisfaction.
Christchurch, New Zealand. NZ base, international availability, complexity priced in. Remote-first with on-site available.
Website: opsion.co.nz | Contact: opsion.co.nz/contact
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/karlroberts1