CKS is a research and information services boutique

CKS provides value in a congested market by delivering precision interventions through highly qualified senior principals.

This boutique approach is predicated on the direct, personalized, and continuous engagement of our leadership. It fills an important gap in the information landscape and offers clients the greatest value for money.

CKS will leverage this approach to differentiate itself from generic, high-overhead consultancies, and prove itself as a trusted advisor.

Our mission is to turn information challenges to client advantage. To achieve this we will:

Apply rigorous design principles to enable effective research operations, and prioritize pre-discovery protocols in our information retrieval, processing, and exploitation activities.

Promote evidence-based judgment, foreground rigorous validation protocols and quality control, and equip clients with intelligence defined, optimised for service, and focused on real-world outcomes.

We live in an environment dense with information, conflicts over what it means, and tension over AI technology and ethics.

We’re committed to a grounded, balanced approach that effectively and ethically employs skills and resources in pursuit of our clients’ research and information requirements.

To back up our commitment to the intelligence objectives of our clients, we will apply our expertise relentlessly, leveraging the essentials to make sense of the problematic.

In its broadest sense, intelligence is a “peculiar genius” - a “quickness in seeing things as they are,” as George Santayana put it.

In practice, intelligence is the art and discipline of accessing information, elucidating meaning from it, and communicating the results at the right time to the right audience - and used judiciously and with deliberation, effect desired outcomes.

Human beings are creatures of habit and context - to borrow from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, they operate “in webs of significance” of their own making.

Social science enables systematic detailing of human behavior, social patterns, and institutional dynamics - uncovering and making sense of practical business and organizational problems.

Experimental and exploratory research extends the state of the art and redefines the art of the possible. It comes from venturing into the unknown and pushing boundaries.

It consists of three basic forms - basic, applied, and speculative or experimental research - organized in a structured and iterative process to generate and learn from new data.

Our service model is built on a straightforward premise: clients benefit most from boutique provision of expertise through principals qualified and experienced to serve their interests.

We don’t bait-and-switch on delivery, outsource core functions, or cut corners.

The result is senior performance and accountability that’s baked into company organization and service delivery.

A small team of consultants enables our principal-led approach, and ensures the stability, efficiency, and quality assurance that underpins every client engagement.

This is more than a back-office. It’s a working hub that leverages human expertise, technology assisted research, and the power of AI.

For our clients, it means predictable, professional delivery, without corporate bloat, costs or delays.

When assignments involve extended or more intensive operations, we upskill and upscale, mobilising teams from a network of close colleagues and partners.

The approach brings to bear principal-level oversight, lateral competencies, and the surge capacity required for more complex or resource-intensive tasks.

The result is fit-for-purpose and cost-effective teaming and surge capacity.

One of the foundational experiences of our Emerging Technologies R&D practice was a UK Defence Science and Technology Lab (DSTL) project on autonomous resupply logistics in the “last mile”.

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Case Description

A technology start-up won government accelerator funding for an autonomous resupply vehicle project.

Situation: The project required a specialist in policy, legal, regulatory and operational research to establish deep context, justification and implications of the proposed technology.

Solution: Research was done on government policy, multi-agency logistics doctrine, standard operating procedures, and case studies of the commercial state of the art.

Solution: The final report provided the contextual detail needed to justify the project to the funding programme, trigger release of a funding tranche, and advance to next stage of research and development.

In post-Gaddafi Libya, armed influence networks exercised patchwork control of the country’s oil fields. This represented serious risk for foreign owners and Insurers, who needed expedited understanding of local conditions.

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Case Description

An insurer monitoring a politically unstable North African state amidst violent revolutionary upheaval.

Situation: The client required an updated understanding of political and commercial channels of influence in the area. Due to the fluid nature of the situation, it also required an expedited response, and core capability in the form of an outsourced investigative analyst who could design and undertake research in support of the in-house team.

Solution: An approach was designed and implemented. Locally produced open sources, including online, print and grey literature, were identified as containing information relevant to client requirements. Steps were then taken to acquire and collate the information, validate it, and extract relevant data points. These became the source data for network charts mapping out social, political and commercial influence networks.

Solution: The client was briefed, and a final report and data visualisation product were handed over. The client deployed the collated information and briefing materials to its in-house team, which in turn used them to increase the effectiveness of its real-time fraud detection and investigations.

A European state with troops in Afghanistan wanted to improve its understanding of the Taliban before engaging them in diplomatic talks. Funding was provided to digitise and translate a large collection of primary sources.

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Case Description

A northern European state preparing for diplomatic talks with the de facto authorities of a post-conflict region.

Situation: Very little was known about the de facto authorities. The client wished to have a broader knowledge base so that its desk officers and diplomats could more effectively prepare for talks with the de facto authorities. They were aware of a private collection of hardcopy primary sources that had been generated by the de facto authorities, including newsprint, magazines, laws and decrees, and other openly published materials. The collection was held in a remote location, physically inaccessible to researchers outside the country, could not be relocated, and the texts were in multiple languages read and spoken by very few in the Ministry.

Solution: A project was designed from scratch to preserve, organise, digitise and translate the collection. Digitisation equipment was procured or built, and digitisation and translation efforts were undertaken under austere conditions, in partnership with the collection owners. Over 50000 pages were digitised, 2 million words of text were translated from three different languages into English, and local staff received and implemented training in digitisation processes. The original collection was left in the safekeeping of a custodian in the country and thereby preserved as tangible cultural heritage, and the digital collection was donated to a university library to ensure future researcher access.

Result: The project radically increased the store of publically available primary source data on the de facto authorities. Conversion of the collection from paper to digital media prevented loss of the physical materials, and of the information contained in them. The availability of an accessible and searchable digital archive enabled better informed diplomatic engagement with the de facto authorities, and researchers have authored multiple books and articles based on the newly available source materials.