Shared UnderstandingLed by Daren Forsyth
Turn a promising idea
into something
people can use.
I’m Daren Forsyth. I help business owners and founders test opportunities, put AI to practical use and get new work moving.
I bring 30 years of building digital businesses, connecting people and helping teams deliver.
Recommendation on Daren’s work
“Strategic, a leader, knows how to bring people together to build a narrative and get things done. Delivers.”
How I help
Where shall we start?
First test
I have an opportunity I want to test
Perhaps your customers keep asking for a service you don’t yet offer. Perhaps you’re starting from scratch and want to find your first buyer. We start with the person who might buy or use it and the decision you need to make. I’ll shape the offer with you, build the simplest useful version and put it in front of people we agree to approach.
You leave with the prototype, a record of what people actually did or said, and my recommendation on what to change, fund or stop. We agree the audience, access, fee and scope before we start.
Programme
We need to get a programme moving
When two good teams give different answers to “What are we delivering next?”, another update meeting rarely settles it. I speak with the people doing the work, compare their accounts with the delivery evidence and bring the differences back to the people who can resolve them.
A typical diagnostic takes ten working days, subject to access. You get a map of the decisions holding up delivery, the people who own them and an agreed first action. We choose a date to check whether it helped.
AI in everyday work
AI that earns its place in everyday work
An enquiry answered while the customer is still interested. A site visit turned into a clear job brief. Less time searching through messages to find out what was agreed.
I help business owners explore where AI could make their working day easier, improve their service or open up a new opportunity. We start with the people doing the work, choose one useful task and test the difference.
For the businesses around us
Local builders and tradespeople carry a lot of their business in their heads, phones and conversations. Customer enquiries, site photographs, quotes and changes all need to become clear instructions someone can act on.
The owner might spend the day on site and the evening catching up with paperwork. The person running the office might be chasing the missing detail that holds everything else up.
Those are good places to begin.
Exploration
Exploring this through Jobsworth
I’m exploring these questions with the creator of Jobsworth, a product being developed for trades businesses to connect work from the first enquiry through to completion.
My contribution is to understand how people actually work, bring their experience into the product conversations and help test what makes it useful enough to adopt.
We’re exploring opportunities such as turning customer messages into a clear job brief, finding information in photographs and certificates, and flagging missing details before work moves forward.
Start with one task
We agree what is taking too much effort, who needs help and what improvement would count.
Then we try a first version in the working day. We look at the time it takes, the quality of the result and the checking needed. Together, we decide what deserves another step.
Local knowledge shapes the solution
My ambition is for the businesses adopting AI to gain confidence and capability alongside any improvement in their work. The people using it should understand what it does, when to question it and who takes responsibility.
For me, local deployment means getting close enough to a business to understand its customers, constraints and ways of working.
Let’s find your first useful AI project
Tell me what keeps getting pushed into the evening, what your team keeps chasing or what your customers keep asking for. We’ll start there.
Selected work
- 01
Taking pizza orders through a television
Fernhart · Sky Digital, 1999In 1999, customers could order a Domino’s pizza through Sky Digital. I co-founded Fernhart and was its managing director. Our team helped deliver the ordering service. A customer pressing a button was the visible part. The commercial challenge was making that order work for the stores fulfilling it.
Read the contemporary coverage(opens in a new tab) - 02
Bringing the BBC and Microsoft together
BBC · the Microsoft partnershipAt the BBC I established the strategic partnership with Microsoft and organised the meeting between Mark Thompson and Bill Gates. The part of that work I bring into a room today is knowing how to find the people who can make a decision and understand what each needs from it.
Read the Guardian’s account(opens in a new tab) - 03
Helping a distributed team deliver
British Council · UK, Hong Kong and PolandAt the British Council I worked with colleagues across the UK, Hong Kong and Poland on digital services for adult English learners. My work included supporting mobilisation, working directly with developers and bringing in specialist help. I can work with the sponsor who commissions a programme and the team who have to make it work on Monday morning.
How I work
Four moves, in the same order every time.
- 01
Listen
Start with people’s experience, their priorities and the questions they are already asking. Make room for the perspective that usually gets left out of the room.
- 02
Build understanding
Bring the contributions together. Name the shared priorities, the useful connections, and the differences that need another conversation rather than a decision.
- 03
Choose a starting point
Agree one thing worth working on, the smallest first step that would actually tell you something, and who wants to help make it happen.
- 04
Learn by doing
Try something manageable. Review it honestly, keep what worked, and decide what comes next with the people who will have to live with it.
People shape the direction and remain responsible for the decisions. My job is to make the choices clearer, not to make them for you.
Worth ten minutes
The Illusion of Understanding
If any of this is useful, this talk by Professor Phil Fernbach is the clearest explanation I know of why we so often think we understand something better than we do.
TEDx — Professor Phil Fernbach
The person behind Shared Understanding
Daren Forsyth
Entrepreneur. Connector.
Hands-on generalist.
I’ve sat on both sides of the brief. At Fernhart I had to win the work, hire the people and deliver what we’d sold. At the BBC and the British Council I saw what it takes to make a good idea travel across a large organisation. I also run Exact Reports, where landlords, agents and tenants need an accurate account of the same property. That experience keeps my questions practical. Who depends on this? What happens when they use it? What would make them come back?
AI is part of my working practice. I use it to explore options, make prototypes and compare what I hear. I take responsibility for checking the evidence and recommending what to do next. When you bring a question to Shared Understanding, you work directly with me.
Contact
What are you trying to get moving?
A couple of lines is enough. Tell me who it matters to and what decision is coming up. I’ll read it myself and suggest a sensible starting point.
Email Daren · daren@sharedunderstanding.co.ukPrivate project area
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