William Haas Evans

"Designers have a prescriptive job.

We suggest how the world might be; we are futurists to some extent."
– Brigitte Borja de Mozota
 

William Haas Evans is a management consultant with thirty years of practice in strategy design, strategic foresight, and innovation. He advises boards and executive teams on the choices that set direction and on the operating models and governance that carry those choices once they are made. He is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Fugue Strategy Advisors, working with clients in healthcare and life sciences, pharmaceuticals, financial services, insurance, and telecommunications, from Fortune 50 enterprises to venture-backed companies and non-profits.
 

Three disciplines sit at the center of his practice. The first is strategic foresight, in the tradition of scenario development and horizon scanning. The second is strategy design, where a strategy is a small set of interlocking choices rather than a plan. The third is systems design, in the tradition of the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and socio-technical systems.
 

A system has one constraint that governs what it can achieve, and improving anything else leaves total performance unchanged. That principle is foundational to how Will reads an organization, and he holds a Jonah certification in the Theory of Constraints from the Goldratt Institute in Israel. Engagements open with conversation and humble inquiry, and the work underneath is finding the constraint that actually binds, which is more often a policy, a governance process, or a decision queue than a capacity problem.

He builds instruments as well as strategies. Will founded ForesightOps, the discipline of making organizational listening continuous and connecting it to the decisions that matter, and the applied research group that publishes it. Behavioral observation at community and market scale, signal synthesized into strategic intelligence, assumptions tested against evidence, and roadmaps where every move traces to the observation behind it. Its field guide specifies twenty of those methods. With his co-founder Jamie Bernard he created Outcome-Owned Architecture and the Outcome Earned Economic Model, which prices a decision against its value per unit of risk-adjusted cost before capital commits. He created PRISM, the Portfolio and Program Risk Intelligence, Scoring and Monitoring framework, and the diagnostic instruments that measure how well an organization reads and tests its own futures.
 

He works through facilitated sessions rather than presentations. The leadership team does the thinking, the method supplies the structure and the rigor, and the analysis between sessions pressure-tests what the room produced.
 

His engagement record spans three decades. For a multi-brand cruise and vacation enterprise he built the innovation capability inside global technology, designing the 5E innovation process and the product operating model that carry a challenge from intake to a funded decision, and running live programs through it. He led the enterprise architecture transformation at a Fortune 50 healthcare and life sciences company and presented it publicly with that company's vice president of enterprise architecture. He led the organizational redesign of a Fortune 200 pharmaceutical company whose connected insulin platform had consumed four years and $300M without reaching market, and the platform reached a Food and Drug Administration prototype submission in eight months. He took both executive leadership teams of a $3.2 billion bank merger through three days of kinesthetic modeling and foresight, and eighteen months later customer retention stood at 91% against a 72% industry average.
 

He served four years as Design-Thinker-in-Residence at the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at NYU's Stern School of Business, founded and curated LeanWX NYC: The Future of Work for eight years, and has taught design thinking with Simon Sinek for TED Global Prize winners. He holds patents in online search and navigation systems designed as the first head of product design at Kayak.com, a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in human-computer interaction and brain and cognitive sciences, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy from Occidental College. He wrote Designing Resilience: The Strategy, Structure, and Spirit of Enterprise Agility and edits the ForesightOps Quarterly.
 

Will lives in Boca Raton with his wife, Rabbi Laila Haas, and their son, Asher.