Certified Red Nose Consultants · for organisations in transformation
Children lose their victim status in the presence of a clown. That is why they love clowns, and it is why we exist. Artificial intelligence has made knowing things cheap; what it cannot do is unlearn. We place certified consultants into your leadership circle whose only job is to be the least informed person in the room, with licence to say so, until nobody in that room is a victim any more.
The problem
In 2023 Google Research and the NeurIPS competition track asked the world to solve machine unlearning: remove a specific set of knowledge from a trained model without damaging the rest. More than a thousand teams tried. The result: progress, but no method that matches retraining from scratch. Knowledge is entangled. Forgetting breaks the neighbours.
Every AI you work with runs inside a context window: a finite working memory. When it overflows, something has to be forgotten, and the machine forgets by position, not by judgement. The oldest instruction drops out, however important it was; the small talk stays. Overflow forces forgetting. AI is not good at forgetting the right thing.
Organisations are built the same way, with the sign reversed: their context window has been overflowing for decades and they forget nothing. Every fact your company holds is tied to someone’s status, someone’s history and someone’s trust. The leader who says “this is no longer true” loses trust, stops saying it and starts hoarding what they know. We call that shadow knowledge. It is where transformation goes to die.
Transformation is non-monotonic reasoning: new knowledge that contradicts the old, and the courage to delete the old. Somebody has to trigger it. That somebody is always the idiot in the room.
The method
The clown chooses to be the victim and refuses to be the scapegoat. In a clown’s presence, children stop being victims; so do leadership teams, once someone in the room is willing to fail first. Our consultants are trained on stage, certified in practice and bound by a code of ethics that keeps the licence to fail from becoming licence to humiliate.
“The clown provokes, leads and balances. He chooses the uncertain rather than controlling it.”Florian Reichl, Digital Transformation: A Formal-Logical Model
A certified consultant joins your meetings with the red nose and a contract that lets them stop any conversation with three words: “I don’t understand.” Every stopped sentence is a fact your company could not defend.
Carnival has rules for breaking rules. So do we. The Fool’s Licence Agreement fixes what the consultant may do, for how long, who can stop them and what stays backstage. It is handed back at the end of the engagement.
Anyone may bet against the company: a hypothesis, a test, a deadline, a capped stake. Win, and the company pays it back as innovation cost and adopts the knowledge publicly. Shadow knowledge becomes company knowledge, with a scoreboard.
Engagements
A consultant attends your regular meetings for one day, nose on, licence active. Afternoon: shadow-knowledge inventory, trust map and the first three wagers.
A consultant becomes a temporary member of your leadership circle with one veto: the veto on silence. They run the wager office and the monthly trust review, then hand the licence back.
Your leaders fail on stage, on purpose, in front of the organisation. Prepared clown pieces on real wrong decisions, followed by an open wager office in the hall.
Our consultants
Every consultant listed here holds at least the CRNC Practitioner level: a supervised real-world engagement, a stage examination before a stranger audience and a signed code of ethics. Profiles are examples for this draft.
Profiles shown are examples. The first certified cohort completes in 2027.
Evidence & ethics
Every engagement starts and ends with the same four measurements. If nothing changed, the report says so. The research on machine unlearning proves that forgetting is hard for machines; it does not prove that clowning works. Our own measurement has to.
| Measure | How | When |
|---|---|---|
| Contradictions voiced | Count of “that is no longer true” statements per leadership meeting, observed | Before, during, after |
| Wagers filed | Number and quality of Innovation Wagers submitted, won and adopted | Monthly |
| Trust balance | Directed trust ratings 1–10 on the team’s relationship graph | Start and end |
| Unlearned | “What did you unlearn in the last 30 days?” asked of every member | End |
Code of ethics, short form
Book
Tell us what your organisation has to unlearn. A Master consultant replies within two working days with a Fool’s Licence proposal.