About

About 20 Thousand Leagues.

Why Twenty Thousand Leagues

The name is a deliberate echo. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seais a story about a small crew going deeper than anyone else dared — into territory where the surface answers don't apply.

Depth before breadth. Judgement before methodology. Crew before army.

That's the analogy we mean. We work where the question is genuinely unclear: where the technology is real but the commercial path isn't, where the data is plausible but the decisions resting on it are wrong, where the strategy looks coherent but the organisation can't absorb it.

“We don't take engagements where we can't say what we actually think.”

No bullshit. Not a tagline — a consequence of how the practice is built.

We have no methodology to protect, no software licence to upsell, no junior team whose utilisation depends on extending the engagement. We say what we see.

If AI is not the answer, we say so. If the IT organisation is right and the CEO is wrong, we say that too. If the project being planned will fail because of a data problem nobody has admitted to yet, we name it early.

This is not a moral position. It is the only commercial position consistent with how we want clients to come back. Clients who buy the right solution return for the next problem. Clients who buy the wrong solution don't.

The crew

Three senior practitioners. One commercial entry point, one technical depth, one transformation discipline. Each of us has operated at the level we now advise — and we work with each other often enough that the shared judgement is part of what clients are buying.

Simon Kaastrup-Olsen

Commercial strategy · Product · AI implementation · Go-to-market

Simon is the commercial and product entry point of the practice. He has operated as Chief Product Officer (CPO), Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) across startups, scale-ups, and a legacy turnaround — and is the practitioner most clients meet first.

The career has run on both sides of the table. Founded and led companies — including productising data science into a business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) that beat a 4.2Bn USD competitor for an Asian partnership, and a business-to-consumer (B2C) artificial intelligence (AI) product in esports that reached acquisition talks with the largest US esports organisation in the field. Inside scale-ups, led the rebuild of a Data Science offering at a pharmaceutical consultancy. Defined the technical consultancy at Ciklum, scaling it from 20 to 220+ specialists — the foundation for what is today a 4,000+ person business. At a Nordic pharma-client, defended several million euros of strategic cloud investment to executive management and a board comprised of senior Danish life-sciences executives.

Currently sits on two commercial real estate company boards. Working stack runs in open source and modern AI tooling — retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, fine-tuning, and the surrounding data infrastructure — alongside product engineering across Next.js, .NET, and Python. Maintains specialist networks across regions the practice draws on when an engagement needs to scale specialist capacity at speed.

Strongest in

Turning strategic ambiguity into actionable direction; AI implementations anchored in business strategy; getting leadership aligned on what they actually want to build.

Lars Brebøl

Data architecture · Process design · Compliance · Technical governance

Lars is the technical depth of the practice. The career has run inside the organisations most consultants only see from the outside — PwC at Director level, GDS solution architecture (Worldspan, Travelport), and independent senior consulting for top-tier Nordic banks and life-sciences clients. PRINCE2 Practitioner. PSM certified.

The work is the kind that boards commission when they suspect they're being told different versions of the truth by different parts of the organisation. At a top-tier Nordic bank, reconciled the definition of 'customer' across legal, compliance, internal audit, and technology — producing the single signed-off customer-population breakdown the four departments could each defend. At a Northern European bank, ran the PSD2 and PCI-DSS alignment across a complex legacy payments estate, consolidating fragmented expert opinions into a single coherent trajectory the executive could act on.

Deep expertise across enterprise BPM tooling (ARIS, MEGA, Qualiware, iServer), payment systems, modern data platforms (Databricks, Kafka, Confluent, Event Hub), the Microsoft enterprise stack (Active Directory, Entra ID, the Azure platform, Synapse, Data Factory, Purview), and the three-level enterprise architecture model used to navigate complex legacy estates. Maintains a vetted technical specialist network of his own, which the practice draws on for capacity engagements alongside Simon's network.

Strongest in

Diagnosing data foundation problems before they are named; mapping compliance obligations to process and system requirements; inspecting IT organisations to distinguish genuine technical constraints from organisational resistance.

Sune Edmund Pedersen

Transformation governance · Programme leadership · Change management

Sune is the transformation discipline of the practice. The career has run on both sides of the table — directing transformation programmes inside a major global brand, and training the consultants who deliver transformation work for everyone else.

Inside ECCO, the Danish global footwear and lifestyle brand, served as Group Senior Director leading the transformation and execution function, and as interim Programme Director for the SAP S/4HANA programme — one of the most complex enterprise technology programmes a global consumer brand can run. Directed a 25-person transformation and execution department responsible for ensuring the wider organisation could absorb what the programme produced.

Before that, eight years at Implement Consulting Group — one of Scandinavia's leading consulting firms — building and leading high-performance teams through complex agile and hybrid transformations. 1,000+ professionals trained across project methodologies, change management, and the Project Half Double approach.

Harvard MLA. HBDI Certified Practitioner.

Strongest in

Programme governance that creates decision clarity rather than bureaucracy; formal change management at the scale complex organisations actually require; reading where transformation programmes are likely to break before they do.