I work with leaders who know something is wrong but are not sure exactly what.
My job is to find it, name it, and fix it.
Sarah Heffron spent more than two decades inside complex organisations before building a practice around the problem she kept encountering: the gap between what an organisation intends to do and what it actually delivers.
She began her career subcontracted to Accenture, developing standard operating procedures for a newly formed national security programme at the Transportation Security Administration. It was the first time her whole job was figuring out how complicated systems needed to work and defining how all the pieces fit together.
That thread runs through everything since. At Mercer, she designed the operating model for a newly formed global business line managing more than $800 million in revenue, and later redesigned commercial operations to bring transparency to how revenue was actually being generated. At Visa, she held senior director responsibility for the operating model connecting global product strategy to regional execution across more than 200 markets.
She founded Sarah Heffron Advisory & Consulting to work directly with the leaders carrying these problems.
Operating models are systems. The failures that matter most rarely sit inside a single function. They sit at the seams: between functions that should be coordinating but aren’t, between strategy and the execution infrastructure meant to deliver it, between how the organisation was designed to work and how it actually operates. Fixing one part without understanding its connections to the rest is how well-intentioned interventions create new problems while solving old ones.
This is why I start every engagement with diagnosis. Before any design work begins, I need to understand which structural failures are present, how they connect to each other, and what the system is actually doing versus what it was designed to do. What gets built afterward is only as good as the understanding it’s built on.
Credentials and affiliations
Certificate in Applied Agentic AI for Organisational Transformation, MIT (May 2026)
Council & Founding Member, StrategyXF
I grew up wanting to be an astronaut. Genuinely, all the way through high school. It did not work out, and my path into this work was unconventional by most measures: two history degrees, a national security programme, a temp placement that turned into a career.
What stayed constant was the instinct to figure out why things are the way they are and what else they could be. It turns out that is most of the job.
At home I am kept grounded by Tilly, an English Springer Spaniel with strong opinions about walking schedules, and Mei Mei, a Bengal cat who came all the way from the United States and has never quite forgiven the journey.