I'm Lalao Harimanga Rakotoniaina. I've spent my career at the intersection of design, technology, strategy, and large-scale organisational change — working inside the programmes where the failures I describe on this site are not theoretical.
The transformation prospection methodology isn't a framework I imported from a consulting textbook. It's a discipline I built because the conventional approach — sequential handoffs, static recommendations, commitment before understanding — kept producing the same expensive outcomes, and I kept being the person called in to recover them.
Where the thinking came from
The methodology is what I built in response to what I kept watching go wrong.
Every large transformation programme I've worked on has had the same structural flaw: the organisation committed before it understood. Research was handed to strategy. Strategy was handed to design. Design was handed to engineering. By the time a solution existed, the people who had understood the problem were no longer in the room.
I spent years working across these disciplines — not sequentially, but simultaneously — and the pattern became impossible to ignore. The problem wasn't capability. It wasn't resourcing. It was the sequence. Commitment was arriving before understanding, every time.
"Making problems earn your money isn't a philosophy. It's a discipline. Most organisations have never been asked to apply it."
The Probe → Drill → Operate → Build model is the practical answer to that structural flaw. It doesn't eliminate commitment — it conditions it. Investment follows evidence. Fidelity follows confidence. You don't reach the next stage until the current one has warranted it.
Career record
Each engagement taught something the next one used.
What follows is not a credential list. It's a record of the decisions made, the problems encountered, and what changed as a result. The methodology is the accumulation of these lessons.
Embedded inside a national-scale core banking programme — the largest and most complex transformation context I've worked in within New Zealand. The lesson this environment reinforces daily: at programme scale, the quality of the decision-making architecture matters more than the quality of any individual decision. Governance that doesn't keep customer outcomes in the room at every stage will optimise for delivery velocity at the expense of adoption. The Operate stage of the methodology exists because of what I've seen happen when that stage is skipped.
2024 – 2025
AI Product Design Lead — Human–AI Interaction
Previously Unavailable · AI & Research Tooling
Designed interaction models for AI-powered business intelligence workflows — extending beyond prompt-based UX into gesture, intent and behavioural inference. Clients included OnBoard and the Cannes Lions. The core discovery: organisations adopting AI tools are not limited by the capability of the models. They are limited by the interaction design — the quality of the interface between human judgment and machine output. This is the AI implementation failure mode that doesn't appear in most transformation strategies, and that the Probe stage is specifically designed to surface before a build commitment is made.
2022 – 2024
Head of Innovation · Interim CXO · Head of Design
Medenterprises · Healthcare · Australia & New Zealand
Three successive roles across a single organisation's transition from traditional healthcare services to technology-enabled offerings — each one picking up where the previous had reached its limit. The lesson was structural: design capability alone cannot move a business up the value chain. It requires simultaneous work on strategy, operating model, and the measurement infrastructure that makes customer experience legible to leadership. I built all three from inside. The Drill stage of the methodology — proving a specific assumption under real conditions before widening the investment — is a direct product of what this kind of inside-out transformation taught me.
Co-founded a specialist consultancy focused on financial services transformation — lean, hands-on, and deliberately positioned against the sequential handoff model of larger firms. The founding proposition was that transformation delivery and strategic advisory should not be separated. Running the business as well as doing the work exposed the commercial logic of the methodology directly: staged commitment isn't just better for clients, it's a structurally more honest engagement model. It aligns the consultant's incentive with the client's outcome, not with the size of the next invoice.
2012 – 2020
Design Director & Strategy and Transformation Director
Eight years across four roles — from design delivery lead to strategy and transformation director — spanning practice building, executive advisory, and go-to-market leadership across France, BeNeLux, and New Zealand. The most significant lesson came from the ENGIE engagement: converting a CEO-level strategic agreement into a signed €200M transformation programme required building alignment at the COO and Executive Committee level before the commitment could be made. That alignment was the real deliverable — not the strategy document. Every large commitment I've been close to has worked this way. The document doesn't create confidence. The work that precedes the document does. Growing a practice from 3 to 60 people while maintaining sub-2% turnover taught the organisational side of the same lesson: confidence has to be earned incrementally, and it compounds when you don't rush it.
2007 – 2012
Head of Interaction Design · Creative Project Manager
Agence Attoma · Agence Babel · Paris · Defence, Infrastructure, Mass Market
Led interaction design for mission-critical systems at Agence Attoma — SCADA interfaces for the French Ministry of Defence, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Gendarmerie Nationale, and Thales. In high-consequence operational environments, the cost of a wrong assumption isn't a failed programme. It's a failed system in the field. The discipline of designing for contexts where failure has immediate physical consequences instilled a specific rigour: you prove before you build, every time, without exception. That instinct became the foundation of the Probe stage — the idea that a crude, disposable test is always preferable to an elegant, expensive commitment.
2003 – 2007
Interaction Designer · Industrial Designer
Reflex Group · Edelia (EDF) · Paris · Luxury, Energy
Designed digital experiences for Chanel, Moët & Chandon, Gucci, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Waterman — and before that, contributed to consumer energy services at EDF's innovation lab. Premium brand work taught craft: that the gap between a solution that is technically correct and one that is genuinely trusted is almost entirely expressed through detail, restraint, and consistency. That lesson runs through every prototype this methodology produces. A Discovery prototype is deliberately crude — but its crudeness should be intentional, not careless. The quality of the question it asks is the craft, not the fidelity of the artefact.
Graduated 2000 · 2006
BA Archaeology of the Far East · MSc Advanced Design Methodologies, Summa Cum Laude
Sorbonne University · ENSCI, Paris
Archaeology is the practice of reading an organisation from its artefacts — understanding intent, behaviour, and system from what remains when the people are no longer in the room. It turned out to be useful training. The move to advanced design methodology at ENSCI formalised the analytical instinct into a discipline. The combination — reading artefacts for meaning, then designing the conditions under which better artefacts get made — is a reasonable description of what transformation prospection actually does.
Disciplines
Integration is where the value is created.
The argument this consultancy makes — that sequential handoffs destroy context and produce expensive mistakes — is an argument I can make because I've worked across every one of those handoffs. The integration isn't a team composition decision. It's a career one.
Design
Systems thinking, interaction design, service design, and the discipline of understanding what people actually do versus what they say they do.
Technology
Architecture decisions, engineering constraints, AI implementation, and the gap between what technologists build and what organisations can absorb.
Strategy
Opportunity identification, investment prioritisation, and the structural conditions under which good decisions become possible — or don't.
Organisational change
How behaviour actually changes in large institutions. Where resistance originates. What adoption requires. Why most change programmes fail before implementation.
Not every problem deserves your money. Let's find out which ones do.
I take a small number of engagements each year. Initial conversations are direct, confidential, and take less than an hour.