Before founding S2A, Brad Brezinski had spent much of his career in demanding organizations, first as an officer in the Navy’s nuclear power program and later as a strategy and finance executive for a Cincinnati-based defense contractor.

With a new CEO named and several new members joining the executive team, the company was reconsidering its direction and the next stage of growth. Brad met with various consulting firms being considered to help shape its strategy and direction. He came away frustrated by how much attention was given to the planning process and how little was given to the people, culture, and organizational realities that would ultimately determine whether the strategy succeeded.

He began exploring the problem more deeply through his doctoral research on culture and strategy activation, while applying what he learned in practice as a CFO and CSO. In 2014, he founded S2A to bring that thinking to other organizations and help leaders confront the same challenges. At the heart of the new firm was a question that continues to guide our work:

How can leaders design strategy around the realities of their organizations and create the conditions to make it happen?

S2A’s early work focused on the idea of culturally responsive strategy, grounded in the realities of the organization expected to carry it forward. An organization’s history, values, relationships, and unwritten rules all influenced which strategic choices made sense and how people would respond to them. Understanding those realities needed to be part of designing the strategy from the beginning.

Through early partnerships with global leadership development firms, S2A worked with hundreds of leaders navigating strategy, innovation, and change. Those experiences helped refine an approach that considered both the culture an organization had and the culture its future success would require.

A strategy could challenge an organization's culture, but it couldn't afford to ignore it.

As S2A’s work expanded to organizations including Coca-Cola, Thermo Fisher Scientific, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the NCAA, its thinking about culturally responsive strategy began influencing how it approached organizational challenges more broadly. One lesson became increasingly clear: two organizations could face what appeared to be the same problem and need entirely different solutions.

What looked like resistance to change might be rooted in broken trust, competing priorities, or past experiences. A collaboration problem might have more to do with informal relationships than formal structure. Starting with a familiar solution could mean missing the real problem altogether.

We placed greater emphasis on understanding an organization’s history, culture, relationships, and operating realities before drawing conclusions about what needed to change.

Too often, consulting firms begin with their models and frameworks, then try to make the organization fit. We believe the organization itself should shape the approach.

The pandemic brought nearly all of S2A’s business to an abrupt halt. With engagements cancelled and familiar ways of working no longer viable, the firm had to rethink its own future. New federal and defense partnerships opened an unexpected opportunity, bringing us deeper into mission-critical environments where leadership, culture, and organizational performance carried significant consequences.

These engagements required leadership development grounded in the challenges people actually faced. Leaders had to navigate uncertainty, make difficult decisions, build trust, and maintain performance under pressure. Our work had to reflect the realities of those environments and help people become more effective within them.

The work had to hold up where it mattered most: in the decisions people made, the relationships they relied on, and the missions they were responsible for.

Our work supporting Air Force Special Operations brought a new dimension to something we had been studying for years: the relationships that shape how people experience an organization often have little to do with its formal structure. An org chart could show the chain of command, but it couldn't reveal who people trusted, where they turned for support, or who might be struggling with isolation.

Through NILE, an initiative that began with a focus on suicide prevention among junior enlisted Airmen, we applied Organizational Network Analysis to better understand the relationships influencing culture, connection, and belonging. The analysis revealed patterns of isolation and identified trusted individuals who could help strengthen those connections. As a veteran-owned firm, the mission was especially meaningful. This innovative approach helped NILE earn the 2022 Major General Marcelite Harris Trailblazer Award.

The relationships we had long recognized as central to culture and strategy were now something we could see, measure, and help leaders strengthen.

Making the informal organization visible was an important step, but a network map only told part of the story. Knowing who people turned to was valuable. But understanding the quality of those relationships, how people experienced them, and what they meant for organizational performance opened up a much larger set of possibilities.

That became the starting point for Constellation. By combining network analysis with measures of trust, influence, expertise, collaboration, belonging, and employee experience, we could build a more complete picture of how organizations actually worked.

It also changed the questions we could help leaders answer. Where did too much depend on a few individuals? What was making collaboration difficult? Who had earned influence without formal authority? Where were valuable capabilities, future leaders, or hidden vulnerabilities being overlooked?

What began as a way to understand relationships was evolving into organizational intelligence that leaders could use to make better decisions about strategy, culture, leadership, and change.

By 2024, Constellation had evolved into a standalone offering, giving leaders a clearer picture of the relationships and patterns shaping organizational performance. It reinforced our belief that good advice begins with understanding how an organization actually operates.

As S2A entered its second decade, we also turned some attention inward. We formally articulated the values that had shaped the firm from the beginning: Connection, Elevation, Excellence, Enjoyment, and Impact. We also put our purpose into words:

Accelerating Missions That Matter.

Together, these commitments helped us become more intentional about the organizations we served, the challenges we took on, and the kind of company we wanted to build.

Our values and purpose became a shared standard for how we worked, the decisions we made, and the impact we wanted to have.

By 2025, S2A was working with complex organizations across the built environment, financial services, healthcare, advanced manufacturing and defense. Each organization brought different challenges, but our work increasingly crossed the traditional boundaries between strategy, culture, leadership, and organizational change.

A strategic challenge could reveal deeper issues with collaboration or trust. A major change initiative might depend on a handful of influential people whose importance leadership had never fully recognized. We were seeing more clearly how these different aspects of organizational performance influenced one another, and why addressing them in isolation often fell short.

We brought our work together through three connected capabilities: Organizational Intelligence, Strategic Advising, and Training & Development.

Together, they help leaders understand how their organizations actually work, make better choices about what needs to change, and build the capability to make those changes happen.

AI is making it easier to analyze complex problems, explore possibilities, and develop credible strategies. That creates enormous opportunity, but it doesn't change something we've learned through more than a decade of work: every organization has its own culture, relationships, and ways of working, and those realities shape what it can accomplish.

We see the next chapter of S2A in bringing even greater organizational intelligence to the decisions leaders make, helping them understand their organizations more clearly and build the capabilities needed to act. Technology will continue to change what's possible, but our commitment to understanding each organization on its own terms will remain central to everything we do.

Our ambition is to help more organizations close the gap between what they're capable of and what they actually achieve.