Our approach
We are boundary spanners, helping ambitious ideas transition into evidence and then strategy that holds on the ground.
What we do, and why
Lakeview helps organisations close the distance between what research knows and what actually gets done. We do this not by adding another report to the pile, but by joining the dots between context and knowledge: what people do and why, what other sources of insight can bring, and how to operationalise for effective learning. Agricultural and natural-resource innovation taught us that "every situation is its own equation". Thankfully there are patterns toward building solutions that we can use.
Our strength is in solving enduring problems: complex, multi-faceted, ill-defined, the kind that resist quick fixes precisely because no single discipline or perspective contains them. Those are the problems we find most interesting, and the ones we have spent twenty years learning to work. For instance, we will add engineering approaches to our agricultural tools because they offer pragmatic simplicity; or ecological lenses because they excel at capturing biological complexity.
Crucially, we pay attention to what people actually do, rather than what they think, to always be practical. It's harder to capture, and it's our speciality. We focus on what is actionable, rather than "what should be done", because people must make choices out of all that thinking. This is where real value is.
How we work
Lakeview is two people with complementary minds who have worked side by side for twenty years.
One of us typically generates ideas and identifies the useful, cutting edge material; the other tests them and gives them structure.
One is the steady hand and the inspiration; the other is the visible lead who delivers.
The expertise overlaps enough to speak the same language and differs enough to see the same problem from several angles.
The practical effect for a client is unusual: a single, coherent piece of work, with the cross-check already built in. Where most engagements give you one perspective, a brand or a rotating cast of specialists, Lakeview gives you two senior minds that have spent two decades sharpening each other.
Both of us have spent years working directly with farmers and land managers, across contrasted environments: smallholder systems in South-East Asia; broadacre and pastoral systems in Australia and the remote Falkland Islands; agroecological and regenerative systems in Europe. Our field experience is the foundation upon which our strategic work survives contact with reality. We have spent enough time on the ground to know what does and does not hold.
We also actively keep contact with the research world. Our academic collaborations endure, holding us to a continuing commitment to rigour and the state of the art. Our global scientific network is part of what we bring. The combination is the point: research-grade thinking, applied by people who walked in the field.
“Matt, I like the value you put on science yet you still have that applied, practical bent, which means you get somewhere with farmers.”
What clients actually get
Described succinctly: clients leave better able to solve the problem themselves. We are not in the business of creating dependence on us. The lasting value is in the capacity we help build, the clearer framing, the better processes, the monitoring tools that lead the organisation to move forward, meaningfully.
Part of that value is decisions an organisation can defend. The work we produce is built to survive scrutiny from every direction it will face: a funder asking why this and not something else; a scientist asking whether the method holds; a farmer asking whether it is worth their time; a board or a regulator asking whether the numbers are real; a policy-maker asking did it have an impact. We design for all of these tests.
The rest of the value is quieter but compounds over time: the framing that makes a tangled problem workable, the synthesis that turns a pile of evidence into a clear next step, the structured processes that keep working after we step away. This is why we tend to prefer longer relationships to one-off deliverables, as the deepest value usually comes from supporting continuous improvement rather than from single interventions.
“Myrtille is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She is able to pause and see many complex aspects, then measure them and assemble them in a very constructive, problem-solving way.”
How an engagement runs
Engagements usually begin with a conversation about the problem rather than the deliverable, because the stated problem and the real one are often different. From there, scope can be almost anything: a short critical brief or second opinion; a synthesis or framework produced over a few weeks; facilitation of a co-design process; or a longer advisory relationship on a retainer basis, where we support a team as a program evolves.
We work remotely, internationally, and travel when the work needs us on the ground. We are comfortable both with sharp one-off pieces and with embedded, long-term support, and we will say at the outset which one we think a problem actually calls for.
“Well, Matt, you DO engender trust. You have good style that will challenge, but in a friendly way.”
What we don't do
We are not the right partners for everyone.
We do not work on reductionist projects solely focused on nutrient use optimisation, yield maximisation or cost reduction. All our work includes human dimensions, system thinking and multi-level considerations. In our experience, that is what works better in the long term and for more people.
We are also not useful for work designed to be delivered from the top to people who have to live with it. We have seen too many well-intentioned efforts fail for this reason to help build another one. We do not reject ambition or expertise, we insist on connecting it to what is actually happening on the ground. That connection is usually where the difficulty, and the value, turns out to be.
And we are wary of the "Technology Fallacy": as others have put it, "tech is easy, people are hard". High tech can be useful, so can low tech, and similarly we are not fixated within any particular paradigm. We do not settle, but explore, and respectfully learn what is useful from each. A good part of our work is helping organisations find the harder, more useful middle ground.
