Leaders, leadership teams and groups working across organizational boundaries.
A Situational Intelligence Platform
See the situation.Change the outcome.
Situation R® is a facilitated, agent-supported platform for consequential decisions. It combines personal experience, stakeholder perspectives and synthetic-agent readings into shared situational intelligence — to test options, build a mandate and coordinate action.
Built on three decades of FAS Research methodology.
The stakes are high, perspectives are fragmented and implementation depends on others.
A shared reading, tested options and a mandate for coordinated action.
The philosophy of Situation R
The Situation Room.
The paper traces the motivation, theoretical foundations and design principles behind Situation R.
Why strategies fail
Three recurring barriers to action.
The situation is misread.
Decisive forces, relationships and perspectives remain outside the picture.
Make the field visible.
Personal experience, stakeholder perspectives, evidence and synthetic-agent readings are combined to reveal the forces, relationships and key actors shaping the outcome.
The organization cannot act.
What matters is understood, but capacity, access or allies are missing.
Connect priorities to capacity.
Strategic priorities are linked with dependencies, available capacity and the people who can make action possible.
The mandate is missing.
The people expected to act were excluded from making sense of the situation.
Build the mandate to act.
People do the reading together, building legitimacy, ownership and less friction in implementation.
The question comes first
The room starts with a consequential question.
Not a workshop topic. A question whose answer changes what happens next.
For exampleWhere should we focus our engagement efforts for maximum strategic impact?
- 01 / Outcome
What shapes the outcome?
- 02 / Influence
What can we actually influence?
- 03 / Leverage
Where should we focus?
- 04 / Coalition
Who must move with us?
- 05 / Action
What happens next?
How Situation R works
R / ROOM
The shared decision space in which people and synthetic agents read the situation, relate what matters and respond with coordinated action.
Human judgmentStakeholder perspectivesSynthetic-agent reading
Human judgment, stakeholder perspectives and the synthetic-agent reading remain distinguishable. Agreement builds confidence. Divergence reveals blind spots and the conditions under which a reading may be right.
What sets Situation R apart
Experience enters first. Shared intelligence emerges live.
Situation R is human-directed and agent-supported. It combines personal experience, intuition, stakeholder perspectives and synthetic-agent readings in one psychologically safe process. It works in the room or online, facilitated or standalone — with results, synthesis and feedback visible throughout.
Rough data before false precision.
Experience, intuition, weak signals and stakeholder perspectives enter independently before hierarchy or excessive detail narrows the field. Read together, partial inputs reveal the pattern.
Four settings. One process.
A trained facilitator or the Situation R moderator agent can hold the process — in the room or online, facilitated or standalone.
Feedback becomes live intelligence.
Inputs, differences, priorities and commitments become visible in real time. Teams can assess consequential situations and decide faster without suppressing disagreement.
Operating settings
Four settings. One sequence.
The room can be physical or online. It can be held by a trained facilitator or by the Situation R moderator agent. The setting changes; Read, Relate and Respond do not.
+ Reaches participants who would not travel to one place.
− Attention is the constraint; the session stays sharply bounded.
+ Highest bandwidth: bodies, silence and the corridor matter.
− Highest investment and hardest to schedule.
+ Fastest and lowest-threshold setting; a team can run it when needed.
− No facilitator can read the moment the room goes quiet.
+ Uses the room’s own energy, with no outside eyes.
− Requires a group that already trusts the sequence.
Example analytical output
Selected leverageGame changersSize = strategic weight
Depending on the question, Situation R can map the forces shaping the system, distinguish key levers from game changers and show where coordinated action has the greatest effect.
Session architecture
The room, as a flow.
One sitting, three acts and four repeating beats. People commit to their own reading before participant agents enter. At each hand-back, human and synthetic inputs are shown side by side; only the room decides what carries forward.
Swipe horizontally to follow the complete session flow.
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Before / Set-up
Open the field.
Documents and data are loaded. The people arrive with experience, intuition and hard interests. No participant agent enters before the question exists.
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Act 1 / Read
Set the question.
The room sharpens the consequential question, identifies missing perspectives and names the factors that shape the situation.
EnterPeople answer firstComputeAgents add missing viewsRead backInputs shown side by sideDecideThe room adopts the setQuestion, cast and factors returned to the room -
Act 2 / Relate
Find the zone of agency.
People and participant agents assess the same field independently. Agreement, divergence, dependencies and actual room to move become visible.
EnterPeople weight the fieldComputeAgents score the same setRead backBoth readings comparedDecideWhat carries forwardHuman and synthetic readings returned together -
Act 3 / Respond
Turn reading into mandate.
The room develops options, rehearses plausible objections and commits to coordinated action with named owners and timing.
EnterOptions from the roomComputeCounter-case from agentsRead backOptions and assumptionsDecideOwners, sequence, mandateA plan of action leaves the room
Where Situation R creates value
Situation R creates the greatest value when the stakes are high, the path is unclear and coordinated action matters.
01Consequences are material.
02Outcomes depend on other actors.
03Knowledge and authority are distributed.
04Action will alter the field.
05A feedback horizon can be defined.
For routine or fully specified work, simpler formats are usually sufficient.
Typical settings
Executive decision roomsTransformation councilsStrategic stakeholder negotiations
Coalition-building sessionsHigh-stakes strategy off-sitesTransition and crisis rooms
Selected Situation R engagements
AGRANABank AustriaDaiichi SankyoErste GroupNXPOMVPfizerTakedaVienna Tourismand dozens more.
Questions before entering
What leaders ask us.
Is this just another workshop?
No. Situation R is a facilitated, agent-supported Situational Intelligence Platform. It creates a shared reading, tests options and turns the result into coordinated action with clear ownership.
Does collaboration dilute leadership authority?
No. Leaders retain decision authority. The room broadens the evidence, makes dissent visible and makes the resulting action more executable.
What happens after the room?
The result becomes an actionable plan: what matters, where leverage sits, who must move and what happens next.
What happens to our data?
Session content stays within the controlled engagement environment. Client conversations are not used to train external models.
Can named people be modeled as agents?
Roles are modeled by default. Public figures are considered only where documented public positions exist and simulations are clearly identified.
How reliable are stakeholder simulations?
They are calibrated against research, interviews and observed reactions. They are evidence-based arguments about plausible behavior, never predictions.
What does an engagement look like?
A Situation R engagement begins with focused preparation, brings the people, evidence and perspectives required for action into a facilitated room, and ends with a documented shared reading, tested options and named ownership.
Situation R — a FAS Research Situational Intelligence Platform