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Walking the Talk · Lead Product Design Consultant · 2023 – 2024

Culture, made measurable.

Six tools. 200 organizations. Acquired by ZRG.

Walking the Talk is the world's largest culture-only consulting firm — clients run from Visa and Vodafone to Telstra, Westpac, eBay, and Lilly. Their consulting practice was bottlenecked by the tools underneath it. I redesigned their core assessment software into self-serve products that Fortune 500s could use without a consultant on the call — and the firm was acquired by ZRG Partners on the back of that shift.

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Six archetypes × thirty behaviors — the Taylor Assessment geometry
200+ Organizations
200KLeaders assessed
40Countries
50K+Taylor DB
6Tools shipped

Culture consulting was analog.
Assessments took weeks.
Results arrived on PDFs.

Walking the Talk measured culture for Visa, Vodafone, Telstra, Westpac, Tesco Bank, eBay, Experian, Syngenta, Takeda, and Lilly. Their consultants were the best in the world at what they did — and they were the bottleneck. Every assessment needed a consultant to run it, compile it, and deliver it.

The firm wanted its practice to scale without its people scaling linearly with it. That meant building the software layer underneath — tools a CHRO could run herself, get results from in minutes, and use in the boardroom the same week.

Six tools shipped. Fortune 500s self-serving. Acquisition followed.

The shift Paper assessments Taylor v1 Culture Insights Portal Workshop tooling ZRG acquisition
0 → 6 → 200

The Story

From consulting-only assessments to a software suite Fortune 500s ran themselves.

01 2023 · The brief

The consultants were the bottleneck.

Walking the Talk had the methodology — the decade-old frameworks, the archetype taxonomy, the Psynet psychometric engine behind it. What they didn't have was a software layer that let clients run the methodology. Every assessment needed a consultant to set up, score, and present. The practice couldn't scale past the calendar of its senior people.

The brief was simple and unforgiving: take the three tools the firm ran on, and make them work without a consultant in the room.

02 January 2024 · Taylor Assessment

The only psychometric in the world that measures culture contribution.

Taylor Assessment scores individual culture contribution across six archetypes and thirty behaviors — a categorization no other tool on the market captures. I redesigned it ground-up in partnership with Psynet, the psychometrics house that built the engine underneath. Every screen was a conversation between design and psychometric rigor; nothing in the assessment could bend if the math didn't allow it.

The new Taylor Assessment was press-released globally in January 2024. It's now used by over 50,000 leaders in Walking the Talk's database — and it's the single tool that defined the firm's post-redesign positioning.

03 2023–2024 · Culture Insights Survey

Weeks of waiting collapsed into minutes.

Culture Insights Survey measures ninety behaviors across multiple languages — a 15-to-20-minute assessment designed to produce immediate portal results. Before the redesign, HR teams waited days or weeks for a consultant to compile data and write it up. After the redesign, a CHRO could open the portal the moment the survey closed and walk into a board meeting with findings the same afternoon.

The shift wasn't cosmetic. The entire service model moved from consultant-delivered to self-serve-with-expert-support-when-needed.

Taylor Assessment

The tool that defined the post-redesign positioning.

Taylor is the only psychometric in the world that measures culture contribution — how an individual's behavior pushes, pulls, or destabilizes the culture around them. Six archetypes, thirty behaviors, calibrated against Psynet's database.

The redesign took Taylor from an internally-used tool to a product the firm could press-release. Every screen — instruction, question, scoring, report — had to keep the psychometric validity intact while making the experience something a senior leader would finish in a single sitting.

The redesigned Taylor Assessment gave us a globally press-releasable product for the first time in our history.

Walking the Talk · Jan 2024 launch
04 2024 · Target Culture Mapping

Workshops captured, visualized, shared — in real time.

Target Culture Mapping is the workshop tool — used in over eighty executive workshops to help leadership teams align on the culture they want to build. The old version was a whiteboard and a PowerPoint deck the consultant wrote up afterwards. The redesigned version let the facilitator capture decisions as they happened, visualize the target culture against the current one live, and share the output with the room before everyone left.

The experience shifted from "we'll send you the summary next week" to "you're leaving this room with your target culture on a page."

05 2024 · The acquisition

Walking the Talk, acquired by ZRG Partners.

Six tools in, the firm was no longer a boutique consulting practice with software on the side — it was a methodology-backed product business. ZRG Partners acquired Walking the Talk, folding the firm's culture practice into its global executive-search and leadership-advisory business.

The redesigned software wasn't the whole reason for the acquisition, but it was a material one. Fortune 500 self-service had made the practice buyable.

Service redesign

The Shift.

The tool is the product. But the service model is the business. Two places where the redesign changed how the firm operates.

01 · Portal self-serve

Days of waiting collapsed into minutes.

Culture Insights Survey used to require a consultant to compile the data, author an interpretation, and walk the client through it — usually on a call days or weeks after the survey closed. The redesigned portal gave HR leaders and executives instant results, visualized in the firm's methodology, and designed to be read without an expert on the line.

Consultants still came in — but for interpretation and intervention, not for summary. The firm's senior time moved up the value chain.

Days → Minutes Time to insight · Culture Insights Survey portal
02 · Workshop capture

The summary left the room with the team.

Target Culture Mapping took executive workshops from "we'll send the deck next week" to live capture: the facilitator maps the target culture as the team talks, the visualization updates in real time, and the output is shareable before anyone leaves the room. Eighty-plus workshops have run on the redesigned tool.

It changed how leadership teams engaged with their own output — the artifact wasn't a deliverable, it was the meeting.

80+ Executive workshops run · Target Culture Mapping

The Toolkit

Six shipped tools, plus the supporting work that let the firm run them at Fortune-500 scale.

Tool 01

Taylor Assessment

The world's only psychometric that measures culture contribution — six archetypes, thirty behaviors, calibrated against Psynet's database. Press-released globally January 2024. 50,000+ leaders measured. The flagship product around which the firm's post-redesign positioning was built.

02

Culture Insights Survey

Ninety behaviors across multiple languages, 15-to-20-minute assessment, immediate portal results. The tool that moved the firm from consultant-delivered to self-serve.

03

Target Culture Mapping

Workshop tool for executive culture alignment — 80+ sessions run. Live capture, real-time visualization, shareable output before the room empties.

04

Psynet partnership

Client-side lead on the Psynet integration — the psychometrics engine behind Taylor. Design decisions negotiated against statistical validity, not around it.

05

Multi-language design

Culture Insights Survey runs across multiple languages with the methodology held constant. Typography, line lengths, and scale anchoring redesigned so the psychometric reads the same in every market.

06

Self-serve results portal

Immediate visualization, methodology-anchored layout, readable without a consultant in the room. The artifact the firm now walks into C-suite meetings with.

07

Workshop digitization

Taking a decade-old paper-and-whiteboard practice and rebuilding it as real-time software. Facilitator capture, live synthesis, instant share-out.

08

Press-ready launch

Taylor's global press release in January 2024 was a product-launch outcome — the redesign turned an internal tool into something the firm could market externally for the first time.

09

Psychometric-grade rigor

Every design decision reviewed against the methodology. No pattern that compromised statistical validity survived review. The firm's credibility was the constraint, not an afterthought.

More work

Deep dives on the tools inside the story above.

Tool · Deep dive

Taylor Assessment

The world's only psychometric that measures culture contribution. Six archetypes. Thirty behaviors. Press-released globally and backed by the Psynet engine. The flagship redesign.

Read the Taylor case study →
Coming soon

Culture Insights Survey

The 90-behavior, multi-language assessment that moved the firm from consultant-delivered reports to instant portal results. Case study in progress.

Coming soon

Target Culture Mapping

Workshop tool used in 80+ executive sessions. Live capture, real-time visualization, shareable output before the room empties. Case study in progress.

Coming soon

The acquisition

How the redesigned software stack made Walking the Talk buyable — and what moved from boutique consultancy into ZRG's global platform.

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