Commercially sharp.
Impact-obsessed.
No bloat.

Namaa was designed for leaders who need direct access to senior thinking. Not a firm, not a team. Just Alisha Mody, a senior adviser with twenty packed years across five continents and every kind of organisation, from global banks to early-stage ventures. The breadth matters. It means I can see the whole problem, not just the part that fits my specialism.

And the work is simple: get to the real decision, think it through, leave with clarity. If any of this resonates, I am happy to have a quick chat to see if I can help.

Get in touch

Namaa. Three meanings, one philosophy of practice.

Growth
Arabic, نماء
Impact and commercial performance are not in tension. They are mutually reinforcing.
Creative power
Sanskrit, नम
The businesses trying to do the hardest things cannot afford conventional thinking.
Now
Okinawan, 今
The best strategic thinking should be accessible at the moment it matters, not weeks later.

Growth

The evidence is no longer marginal. Impact-obsessed businesses attract better talent, build stronger loyalty and generate better long-term returns. Impact, it turns out, is a commercial advantage.

But the obsession with it can itself become a liability. Businesses sometimes love what they stand for more than they love their customers, their model or their numbers. That is where things go wrong.

These are the moments leaders like this know well.

  • A fundraise where the terms could quietly reshape your priorities
  • A partnership that accelerates growth but pulls at your impact
  • A board or investor who needs convincing on the commercial case and the impact case, at the same time
  • A product decision that serves revenue but not the people you built this for
  • A leadership team that is moving fast but losing the thread
  • A moment where you know what is right but cannot yet find the words for it

Creative power

The moments that test these businesses rarely arrive labelled. A commercial decision becomes a culture question, becomes a narrative problem, becomes an ops constraint, sometimes all in the same week.

Most advisors have gone deep in one direction. That is how careers work. I bring genuine range across strategy, operations, brand, venture and systems design. Not breadth for its own sake, but the ability to hold the full picture and help you act when the pressure is real. No firm to feed. No workstream to justify.

Now

When you need senior thinking, I am available. We have a focused conversation, reach a clear output, and you leave with a decision you can act on.

Single session
One pressing decision, 90 minutes. You leave with a decision memo you can act on immediately.
Focused engagement
We work through a specific challenge over two to four weeks, with three or four sessions and async support throughout.
Ongoing access
I act as a trusted thought partner on call through a period of significant pressure.

About

Alisha Mody, Founder of Namaa

Over twenty years, Alisha has worked across some of the world's most complex organisations, from global financial institutions and Vision 2030 giga-projects to early-stage ventures and impact-led businesses. She has led strategy, transformation and venture design at Monitor Deloitte, Wolff Olins and Xynteo, and has spent more than a decade as a senior adviser to Bethnal Green Ventures. The thread throughout has been the same: making ambitious ideas commercially durable.

Clients include: American Express, Bethnal Green Ventures, Deloitte, EDF, GSK, HSBC, Lloyds, Microsoft, NEOM, Publicis Sapient, Santander, Skype, Wolff Olins, Xynteo.

What people say

"Wildly intelligent, incessantly curious, charming and unafraid. Alisha really gets it: how business can shape the world for the better, and is extraordinarily rare in being able to translate the big purpose into real, tangible, radical, doable actions."
"One of the most thought-provoking illustrations of what our business could be. A strategic provocation that challenged entrenched thinking and re-imagined the experience we could provide."
"Rare for someone of this level of academic quality to also be warm, open-minded and practical. She understands the dynamics of the most complex organisations and acts accordingly."

Get in touch

If something here resonates, get in touch.

Get in touch
Clarity

Tools for clearer thinking.

There is a lot of talk about AI driving efficiency. But there is another use case that gets less attention: using AI to support clearer thinking. Not to replace the human brain, but to help us use it more effectively.

The more stretched a leader is, the more they prevaricate. Not because they are indecisive. Because the conditions for clear thinking have collapsed. Overloaded working memory. Elevated anxiety. No uninterrupted time. The way senior roles are designed actively destroys all three simultaneously.

Two tools. A simple crutch for when the conditions are against you. Each one runs as a real conversation in Claude, one question at a time, and ends with something concrete you can act on or share.

Paste the prompt into a new Claude chat. It will ask you questions one at a time. Answer honestly. Let it push back.
01

The Decision Memo

Use this when you need to make a significant call.

Most leaders make high-stakes decisions in the gaps: between calls, under time pressure, without writing anything down. Six months later the consequences arrive and nobody can remember what was decided or why. The Decision Memo slows the thinking just enough. It makes the real decision visible before you commit.

The prompt 
You are going to help me work through a decision and produce a clean Decision Memo I can share. This is a real conversation, not a questionnaire. One question or prompt at a time. Wait for my full answer before moving on. If I am vague, push back. If I am avoiding something, name it directly. Do not be polite at the expense of being useful. The entire conversation should take no more than 20 minutes. You have a maximum of 8 exchanges to get to the memo. If after 6 exchanges we are still circling, tell me directly that we need to move toward a conclusion, summarise what you have heard, ask me to confirm or correct it, then write the memo.

Step 0 — Establish context
Ask me the following three questions one at a time. Wait for my full answer to each before asking the next.
First: who are you and what do you do?
Second: what is personally at stake for you in this decision — not professionally, personally?
Third: how much time do you have right now?
Then proceed.

Step 1 — Describe the decision
Ask me to describe the decision I am facing. Just that. Nothing else yet.

Step 2 — Find the real decision
Do not ask an open question. Based on what I have just told you, offer me three possible framings of what the real decision underneath might be. Make them specific to what I have said. Ask which framing feels closest to the truth, or whether none are right. Do not move on until the real decision is named precisely. If still vague, offer three more framings.

Step 3 — Surface the options
Ask me what my options are. Tell me you need at least three genuinely different options — not variations of the same choice. If the options feel like the same thing dressed differently, name that and push me to find a genuinely different path. If I am stuck, offer a wild card option and ask whether it changes my thinking.

Step 4 — Name the trade-offs
For each option, ask me what I would be giving up if I chose it. Do not accept the first answer — ask whether that is the real cost or just the obvious one. Push me to name what I am most reluctant to give up. Do not move to the next option until I have answered honestly about the current one.

Step 5 — Test the instinct
Ask me what my instinct is and what I am leaning toward. Then ask: does my reasoning actually support that instinct, or am I rationalising something I have already decided? If my instinct and reasoning point in different directions, name that tension explicitly.

Step 6 — Test the non-negotiable
Ask me what my non-negotiable is. Then test it: if the pressure became extreme, would I actually hold that line? What would have to be true for me to abandon it?

Step 7 — Surface the unsaid
Ask me: what have I not said in this conversation that is relevant? Do not accept nothing. If I say nothing, offer three possible things I might be avoiding — based on what I have told you — and ask whether any are true.

Step 8 — Write the memo
Only once we have been through all of the above, write the Decision Memo. One page. No preamble. Structure: the real decision / options considered / trade-offs / recommended stance / non-negotiables / risks to monitor. Close with one sentence I could say out loud to my board.

Output: A one-page Decision Memo, ready to share.

02

The Pre-Mortem

Use this before you commit to something significant.

Most teams run post-mortems. They are useful. But by then the damage is done. The Pre-Mortem flips the sequence: you imagine failure before you commit, while you can still change course. It uses prospective hindsight to surface the risks, blind spots and wrong assumptions that conventional analysis misses. Not pessimism. Intellectual honesty, applied at the right moment.

The prompt 
You are going to help me stress-test a decision I am about to make and produce a Pre-Mortem summary I can act on. This is a real conversation, not a questionnaire. One question at a time. Wait for my full answer before moving on. If I am vague, push back. If I am avoiding something, name it directly. The entire conversation should take no more than 20 minutes.

Step 0 — Establish context
Ask me the following three questions one at a time. Wait for my full answer to each before asking the next.
First: who are you and what do you do?
Second: what is personally at stake for you in this decision — not professionally, personally?
Third: how much time do you have right now?
Then proceed.

Step 1 — Describe the decision
Ask me to describe the decision or commitment I am about to make. Just that. Nothing else yet.

Step 2 — The failure
Ask me to imagine it is 12 months from now and this went seriously wrong. Ask: what happened? Wait for my answer, then ask why. Keep asking why until we reach root causes, not surface ones. Do not accept the first answer.

Step 3 — The silence
Ask me: who saw this coming and said nothing? Why did they stay silent?

Step 4 — The assumptions
Ask me: what did we assume that turned out to be wrong?

Step 5 — The inconvenient
Ask me: what did we ignore because it was inconvenient?

Step 6 — The unsaid
Ask me: what have I not said in this conversation that is relevant? Do not accept nothing. If I say nothing, offer three possible things I might be avoiding and ask whether any are true.

Step 7 — Write the summary
Only once we have been through all of the above, write the Pre-Mortem summary. Clean. Structure: the decision stress-tested / failure causes identified / which are preventable / guardrails to add before committing. Close with one sentence I could say out loud to my board.

Output: A Pre-Mortem summary with failure causes and guardrails.