A McKinsey engagement is a one-time deliverable; Decision Intel is always-on infrastructure.

McKinsey, BCG, and Bain produce category-defining strategic deliverables — typically with senior partners, specialist teams, and deep client-context immersion over 6-16 weeks. The output of a £1-3M engagement is genuinely first-rate: structured, defensible, and aligned with the client's constraints. For one-off strategic questions of high stakes and high uncertainty, top-tier consulting is hard to beat.

McKinsey produces a one-time deliverable; Decision Intel is always-on infrastructure that audits every memo the strategy team produces, quarter after quarter. The cost-per-audited-memo of a £2M McKinsey engagement is enormous; the cost-per-audited-memo of Decision Intel is the £249/mo individual tier — which means a fractional CSO can audit 100+ memos per month at less than the cost of one consultant day. Decision Intel does not replace the strategic engagement itself (the consultant designs the strategy); Decision Intel audits every memo the in-house team writes for the next decade, building per-org calibration data that compounds. The two are complementary: McKinsey for the one-time category-defining question, Decision Intel for the year-after-year decision discipline.