In 1878, Thomas Edison had a working lightbulb. What he didn't have was anything to plug it into.
There was no electrical grid. No power generation. No wiring, no meters, no regulatory framework for running current under city streets. No one had built a commercial power station. The politicians in New York were skeptical about digging up Manhattan. Investors couldn't evaluate a market that didn't exist. And the public had no reason to want electric light when gas worked perfectly well.
Edison didn't solve this by perfecting the lightbulb. He solved it by building everything else — simultaneously. He designed the generation system, the distribution network, the metering. He convinced J.P. Morgan to back the venture and the mayor to let him tear up the streets. He built the Pearl Street Station and, on September 4, 1882, switched on the world's first commercial electrical grid. Eighty-five customers on day one. Five hundred within a year. Within a decade, the enterprise became General Electric.
The lightbulb was an invention. What Edison actually did — assembling the capital, the infrastructure, the regulatory permissions, the public confidence, and the commercial demand into a system where each piece enabled the others — that was something different. We call it opportunity formation.
The Edison problem, everywhere, all at once
Edison's challenge was exceptional for his time. Today, it is ordinary. The pace of technological change — in energy, AI, manufacturing, regulation, capital markets — now exceeds what most organisations can process within their existing frameworks. New possibilities emerge faster than the structures needed to act on them. We saw this first-hand helping an early AI company raise capital before the market had a name for the opportunity. The technology was real. The conviction was there. But the ecosystem — the investors, the customers, the regulatory clarity — had to be assembled from scratch.
When many organisations experience this at the same time, the result is a kind of collective paralysis. Everyone can see that something needs to happen. Nobody can see a clear, actionable path. And a natural assumption takes hold: if this is hard for us, it must be hard for them too — so what's the point of moving first?
That assumption is both true and misleading. Yes, it is hard for everyone. But that shared difficulty is precisely where opportunity lives — in the space between parties who want to act but can't yet see how. Find one thing from one party that reduces the perceived complexity for another. That's one rung. Turn to the next party with that rung in hand, and the ladder starts to take shape.
This is what we call opportunity formation.
What Interstice works on
Opportunity formation is the deliberate practice of creating the conditions under which a complex, multi-party endeavour can become real. It is not a transaction — you can't close something that doesn't yet have a shape. It is not execution — you can't execute until enough of the ecosystem believes and commits. And it is not strategy in the traditional sense — there is no playbook for assembling something no one has assembled before.
It sits in the space between all of these. The interstice.
It applies whenever multiple stakeholders with different objectives, timelines, and risk tolerances all need to participate in something that none of them can make happen alone. When an industrial technology company needs to shift from hardware-centric to software-first — and the transition requires aligning everyone from the board to the customers to the engineering organisation around a fundamentally different way of creating value. When progress depends on sequential layers that no single party controls. When capital, technology, regulation, and human commitment must align — and there is no precedent to point to.
In those situations, the opportunity doesn't arrive ready-made. It has to be assembled — one commitment, one stakeholder, one proof point at a time.
The ladder with missing rungs
Picture a ladder leaning against a wall, but with most of the rungs missing. Everyone can see where they want to get to. Nobody can climb it as it stands. The instinct is to wait — for someone else to build the ladder, for conditions to improve, for certainty to arrive.
It doesn't arrive. Certainty, in these situations, is not a starting condition. It is an outcome of doing the work.
Opportunity formation means building the rungs as you climb. You take whatever small thing one stakeholder can offer — a letter of intent, a feasibility commitment, a conditional approval, or very often just a "yeah, if I had that, I could do this" — and use that to unlock the next conversation. What stakeholder A provides becomes the basis for what stakeholder B needs to hear. What B commits to gives C the confidence to participate. The structure of the opportunity emerges through movement, not through planning.
Edison understood this intuitively. He didn't wait for the grid to exist before approaching customers, or for customers to exist before building the grid. He moved all the pieces forward together, each one creating just enough momentum for the next.
What creates inertia
If you've spent time in complex environments — where organisations, governments, investors, and operators need to align around something new — you'll recognise a frustrating pattern: everyone can see the potential, but nobody moves first.
The reasons are rational. Committing resources to something unproven is risky and career-affecting. The upside is difficult to quantify and harder to argue for with a board. The timeline is uncertain. And in most cases, the parties involved have something more pressing they need to finish first.
Worse, the biggest obstacle in any complex situation is rarely an active opponent. It is inertia. The status quo is already in the budget. It carries no execution risk. It requires no one to stick their neck out. It is, by every short-term measure, the rational choice — even when everyone involved knows it isn't sustainable.
In many situations, these problems also tend to fall between areas of responsibility. It's not sales. It's not strategy. It's not operations. It's the feeling that we have to do something differently — and that is remarkably hard to get started in most organisations, because it belongs to no one's mandate and everyone's concern.
This is the terrain we work in. Not situations where the path is clear and needs to be walked, but situations where the path itself has to be constructed.
What can unlock value
There is no formula, but there are patterns. Across years of navigating these situations — in energy infrastructure, technology, capital markets, and industrial transformation — a few things consistently matter.
Articulating success in a way that survives contact with reality
Most visions of success are either too vague to be useful or too specific to survive changing conditions. The art is finding a description that is concrete enough to act on but flexible enough to adapt as the situation evolves. You need people to see a plausible path — not a guaranteed destination, but something credible enough to take a step toward.
Champions
Nothing happens without someone inside a key organisation deciding to push for it. Or so it is often said. In most cases, it's enough with someone simply wanting something to happen. That will may be the very first asset in building the first rung on the ladder.
Most people don't have unlimited bandwidth or political capital. Opportunity formation is about providing the assets they need: arguments, evidence, and a framework they can use to bring budget, attention, and authority to the table. Part of what they need is also a managed downside risk. How can we build the upside while managing the downside? In uncertain situations, the perceived risk-adjusted return is crucial to consider.
Sequencing
Some things have to happen before other things can. This seems obvious, but it is where most complex initiatives fail — people try to get full commitment before they've reduced enough uncertainty. Even if you know how big something can become, if not enough people see it yet, you have to de-risk. From "let's take a first meeting" to pilots, memoranda of understanding, feasibility studies, conditional agreements — these aren't bureaucratic overhead. They are the mechanism by which psychological equilibrium is created. Each step makes the next step feel less risky.
Breaking barriers honestly
Obstacles in complex situations come in two forms. Some are hard and specific — a regulatory requirement, a technical limitation, a missing capability. Those can be solved with direct engagement. Others are vague and atmospheric — general discomfort, fear of the unknown, institutional inertia. Those tend to dissolve if the conditions around them change. Knowing which kind you're facing, and not confusing the two, is half the work.
Trust as the operating system
In complex, multi-party situations, people are not committing to a plan. They are committing to a relationship. Trust that you understand their constraints. Trust that you'll be honest when things aren't working. Trust that if something breaks — and something always breaks — you'll still be there, working the problem.
This cannot be manufactured. It can only be built — patiently, deliberately, and through consistent behaviour over time.
What we don't claim
The situations we work in are, by their nature, unknowable in advance. We don't pretend otherwise. No one can guarantee outcomes when the terrain is genuinely uncertain, and anyone who claims to is offering a false confidence that will cost you later.
What we can do is bring structure where there is none, movement where there is stasis, and clarity about what can be known versus what has to be discovered. We can help you see the sequencing, identify what to unlock first, and build the relationships that make the next step possible.
We do our best work when we can work closely with your team — understanding not just your position, but the positions of the other parties involved. The closer we are to the real dynamics, the people, the constraints, the better we can help shape what comes next.
A note on time
One of the most misunderstood aspects of complex, multi-stakeholder work is how it relates to time. The cycles in these environments — building relationships, establishing trust, aligning interests, reaching commitment — can be longer than the planning horizons of the organisations involved. This creates a tension between doing the right thing for the long term and surviving the short term.
But time is not always the constraint it appears to be. Often, these situations feel slow because the right thing hasn't been unlocked yet. When someone finds the piece that shifts perception — a proof point, a conditional commitment, a first mover willing to signal — the timeline can collapse dramatically. What looked like a three-year problem becomes a three-month problem, because the barrier was never really time. It was uncertainty.
Understanding this dynamic — knowing when patience is the method and when the right unlock can compress everything — is part of what we do. During the financial crisis, we worked on transactions in financial services where the timeline went from months to days — not because the complexity had decreased, but because the right conditions suddenly made alignment urgent and achievable. Edison's Pearl Street Station, by contrast, took four years from concept to switch-on. But the decision to back it took one meeting with J.P. Morgan. The skill is knowing which moments to wait for, and which to create.
If any of this resonates — if you're navigating a situation where the path isn't clear, where stakeholders need to align, where capital meets complexity and nobody has enough to move on their own — we'd welcome the conversation.