We align market, positioning, and vision to enable transformative growth.
We work to liberate people, ideas, and organizations.
We provide bespoke acumen for companies and collaborations adapting to global change.
You’re like a truth surgeon. You went in, spotted the illusions and confusion, and put what was genuine, compelling and magnetic in the right place—precisely where our audience could get to it.
— Danielle LaPorte, WhiteHotTruth, creator of The Fire Starter Sessions
What we do
We liberate systems that no longer serve you.
Our industry approach and organizational insight enables us to see what others miss to create transformational change. It leads to the highest possible strategic vision, reflecting one version of the truth throughout your organization that reflects who you are, what you’ve built together, and where you must direct your energy and effort in order to prosper.
Strategy is about making choices. Are you making the right ones?
A truly strategic approach grows with your organization as you reach your highest potential.
Our process leads to a depth of organizational insight that enables us to see what others miss.
The problem you thought you had is often something else. We keep working until we find the end of the thread that lies at the root of your challenges.
No one ever goes to work wanting to do a bad job. Yet many employees live lives of quiet desperation in their cubicles, unable to meaningfully affect change. Disempowered to help themselves, or those around them.
Our goal is autopoeisis: A system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. Engaged employees self-organizing to generate optimum results.
Are you getting the most you can from your team?
Your organization must constantly adapt to changing market realities, competition and technological advances. A steady hand on the tiller will fail if you aren’t watching the weather. Despite best intentions and past success, there are times when what worked in the past is unlikely to work today. We’re in that climate now. .
How you are perceived in the marketplace must:
Constantly adapt to changing market realities, competition and innovation
Always reflect who you are and what you have built, together
Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what comes to mind when others think of you.
Rikia’s advice has been an indispensable element of my career, accelerating the growth of every business I’ve been a part of, not to mention spurring my own development as an executive. I rely on her to think through every angle and, in many instances, to get me out of the weeds and thinking strategically again. It’s incredibly rare to work with someone who so effortlessly combines such high intellectual horsepower with the empathy and global perspective that busy leaders so often miss.
— Damir Hot, CEO at Canalyst
[Rikia has] a fantastic mind and a wonderful grasp of strategy, connectivity and the power of a story.
— Brad Batz, President, Fike Corporation
About
Rikia Saddy has spent more than 25 years helping governments, companies, institutions, and community organizations understand complex issues, weigh competing interests, and build consensus across stakeholder-rich environments. Her work is defined by an ability to absorb large amounts of information quickly, identify what matters, understand the whole system, and turn competing perspectives into a practical course of action.
Born in Edmonton, Rikia completed her secondary schooling in Treaty 8 territory before earning a B.A. from the University of Alberta. She began her career with the Government of Alberta, working in Federal and Intergovernmental Affairs, Energy Econometrics, and Agricultural Marketing before being posted to Alberta’s trade office in London, where she developed a lasting interest in international business and Canada’s place in the world.
Rikia earned an MBA in International Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management, still ranked first in international trade, where she received the top award in Marketing. Recruited to Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide in New York, then one of the world’s largest advertising networks, she helped 154 newly acquired agencies in 147 countries share market intelligence, coordinate regional accounts, and pursue global new business. She later led the TWA account through its Chapter 11 restructuring before moving to the agency’s largest account, a $180-million global beverage business.
In Canada, Rikia led public relations for Walt Disney Entertainment productions, managed banking and telecommunications accounts at BBDO, and served as Director of Client Services at Canada’s largest multicultural marketing agency before founding Rikia Saddy Strategy.
In 2008, she joined the executive team of STEMCELL Technologies, where she developed the strategic positioning that supported the company’s growth into Canada’s largest biotechnology company. She has continued to advise organizations in technology, healthcare, education, finance, philanthropy, and social impact, in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.
Her public-interest work has frequently required her to bring together evidence, institutions, and stakeholders with differing priorities. She successfully built the case for digital mammography in British Columbia, developed the vision for a new inflammatory bowel disease centre at St. Paul’s Hospital, and aligned a board, a university, and a lead donor around the Centre for Prevention at UBC, the Canadian Cancer Society’s first major capital project outside Toronto.
Her research on Canada’s philanthropic landscape for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation informed the federal government’s Feminist International Assistance Policy and its subsequent ten-year, $14-billion commitment to women’s and girls’ health and rights. In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she initiated a coalition of 25 grassroots, women-led organizations that secured $750,000 in legacy funding and hosted a visit from the Prime Minister.
A 2012 alumna of the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference, Rikia has chaired the Strategic Innovation Committee of the Couchiching Policy Conference and served on the boards of the Central City Foundation and Oxfam Canada. She has also volunteered on civic, provincial, and federal political campaigns for more than one political party, giving her practical experience of democratic institutions and public decision-making across partisan lines.
Rikia’s ability to assess evidence and competing arguments was recognized early. As a national high-school debater, she received the Tom Lawson Award for best exemplifying the spirit of debate. The discipline of reading widely, separating the essential from the peripheral, constructing a needs case, seeing both sides of an issue clearly, and explaining an optimum course of action has remained central to her work.
Raised within a family shaped by Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish traditions, Rikia developed an early respect for pluralism and the possibility of common purpose across deeply held differences. She has maintained a lifelong commitment to learning French and has written and spoken on Canadian unity, democracy, education, business, and public affairs.
She has been quoted in The Globe and Mail, published in The Tyee, and profiled national and Quebec perspectives on Canadian unity for CBC’s The National. She is the author of We Are Canada, a Red Maple Award finalist.
Rikia believes in a strong, united Canada and has made her home in Vancouver for 30 years.
Born headfirst into a Muslim/Catholic/Jewish family, Rikia Saddy has traveled and lived around the world, working in Vancouver, London, Paris & New York as a strategist for governments to global advertising agencies. Combining cultures and contexts, with a passion for politics stoked by intervals abroad, and through her own company’s drive for new models of social change, she has been engaged on leadership and election campaigns at the civic, state and national levels. Researching and writing articles on topics as varied as the war in Afghanistan to the Norwegian Study of Democracy to Education Reform, the breadth of her portfolio is only matched by the infectious energy and curiosity that drives her every commitment and desire, frankly, to build a better world. Quite simply, Rikia Saddy is a gifted communicator and one of the most passionate people I know.
— Salimah Y. Ebrahim, CEO, Artery
Contact
Our work saves millions of dollars in lost productivity, missed opportunities, and system failure. To find out how we can help you, please get in touch.