On the difficulty of seeing your own thinking clearly
Vault Mind CoreShift is a consulting practice for leaders and organisations who have reached the edge of what their current thinking can solve. Marcus Ellery writes and works here, usually one client at a time.
The twenty-third issue of the Vault Mind CoreShift quarterly letter was the last. This is an explanation of why, and what will replace it.
2026-03-03
How this practice came to exist
Marcus Ellery spent most of his thirties inside large organisations, first as a strategy analyst at a mid-sized infrastructure consultancy in Bristol, then as head of planning for a public-sector body in Edinburgh that was, during his time there, going through a reorganisation that nobody had quite planned for. He read a lot during those years. Mostly philosophy of mind, some organisational theory, a great deal of history. He kept noticing a gap between the quality of thinking that the people around him were capable of and the quality of thinking that actually made it into decisions. The gap was not about intelligence. It was about structure, and about the absence of any space in which to think slowly.
In the autumn of 2018, Marcus left the Edinburgh role and spent several months doing very little. He walked a lot, mostly in Northumberland and later along parts of the Camino in northern Spain. He read Simone Weil on attention, and Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain, and a battered paperback copy of Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal that someone had left in a hostel in Burgos. He started writing, first for himself, then in longer pieces that he shared with a small group of former colleagues. By early 2019, three of those colleagues had asked whether he would work with them directly. Vault Mind CoreShift began, without a name for several months, as those three engagements.
The gap was never about intelligence. It was always about structure.
Written resources
The Decision Memo Template — A twelve-page working document that walks through the structure of a...£45
Annotated Reading List: Thinking About Thinking — Forty-three books, organised not by topic but by the kind of thinking...£18
The Assumption Map: A Working Guide — A practical guide to mapping the assumptions underneath a strategic...£35
Quarterly Letter Archive (2020-2025) — The complete archive of the Vault Mind CoreShift quarterly letter, running...£22
Currently reading
The Matter with Things
Iain McGilchrist
Still in volume two, still arguing with it, still finding it useful.
The best first step is a short email describing the problem you are sitting with. No pitch required. Marcus reads everything himself.
There is a particular kind of meeting that I have sat in more times than I can count — the kind where a leadership team arrives already certain of what the problem is, and where the rest of the session is spent debating solutions to that named thing, never once pausing to ask whether the name is right. The named problem has a kind of authority by the time it reaches a working group or a strategy offsite. It has been repeated enough that it feels like a fact rather than a hypothesis. And yet, in my experience working with organisations across sectors, the named problem is almost never the actual problem — it is, instead, the symptom that was most visible, most politically safe to name, or most recently complained about by someone senior. This matters enormously, because the energy, money, and goodwill that organisations spend on wrong problems is not recoverable, and the damage done by solving the wrong thing with great competence can persist for years. What follows is not a methodology deck or a process checklist — it is an attempt to think carefully, in writing, about why this happens, how to notice it, and what a more honest kind of problem-naming might look like.
There is a particular kind of document that circulates in organisations — long, formatted, impressively footnoted — that nonetheless leaves everyone in the room less certain than they were before they read it. I have read hundreds of them over the years, and I have written my share of bad ones. What they share, almost without exception, is a confusion between the act of documenting deliberation and the act of actually deliberating. The decision memo, as a form, is supposed to do something quite specific: it should take a person who has not been living inside a problem and move them, in a single reading, to a point where they can make a defensible choice. When it fails — and it fails often — it is usually because the writer has unconsciously prioritised one of three other goals instead: demonstrating effort, hedging against blame, or performing thoroughness. This essay is about how to write one that does the real thing, using the format we have refined through Vault Mind CoreShift engagements, with worked examples drawn from the kinds of problems we encounter most — resourcing decisions, structural changes, build-versus-buy questions, and the always-difficult "do we stop this or don't we" moment that most organisations handle badly.
I left Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the second of January, which is not when most people leave. The pilgrim office was half-shuttered, the woman behind the counter looked at me the way people look at someone who has made a mild but irreversible error in judgment, and the mountains above the village were carrying a thin skin of ice that the guidebook politely describes as "challenging in adverse weather." I had a pack that was too heavy, boots that were adequately broken in but not gloriously so, and — this is the part that took me the longest to understand — absolutely nothing I needed to solve. No deliverable. No deadline. No one waiting on a decision from me. I had taken six weeks from my practice at Vault Mind CoreShift, told my clients the truth about where I was going, and walked out into the kind of cold that makes your thinking very simple and very immediate. What I did not expect was that the simplicity would not stay simple — that somewhere around Burgos, or maybe before that, maybe on the meseta between Logroño and Nájera where the light goes flat and prehistoric, something would shift in the way I was thinking, and I would come home understanding something about cognition and creative work that I had been telling clients for years without quite believing it myself.
Most consultants arrive with a framework already in hand. The work here starts earlier, with the question of whether the problem you have named is actually the problem you have. That distinction takes time, and it is where most of the value lives.
One engagement at a time
Vault Mind CoreShift does not run twelve client relationships in parallel. At any given time there are two, sometimes three, active engagements. This is not a capacity constraint. It is a quality constraint, and it is non-negotiable.
Written thinking as a working tool
Every engagement produces written documents: memos, decision frameworks, annotated maps of the problem space. These are not deliverables for the sake of deliverables. They are thinking tools that outlast the engagement itself.
Quick check
Is this practice the right fit for what you are facing?
This is not a personality quiz. It is a short set of questions to help you work out whether the kind of work done here is likely to be useful for your situation.
Founder
Meet the maker
Founder, Established since 2019
Marcus Ellery
Marcus Ellery trained as a strategy analyst and spent over a decade inside organisations in Bristol and Edinburgh before leaving institutional life in late 2018. He walked parts of Northumberland and the Camino Frances that winter, read more than he had in years, and began writing long memos to former colleagues about the thinking problems he kept seeing. Those memos became the first engagements of what is now Vault Mind CoreShift, founded in 2019. He is currently working on a long essay about the relationship between institutional memory and bad decisions, and is reading his way through the complete works of Simone Weil. He lives somewhere between London and the Northumberland coast, depending on the week.
