The Iceberg Score
How much of your firm's work is still hand-made? Five questions, two minutes. Start the assessment.
A free, five-question diagnostic for consulting boutiques, design studios and creative agencies. It measures how much of your non-billable work — proposals, case studies, workshop prep, reviews, planning — still gets done by hand, and how far AI has moved from one person's browser tab to a workflow the whole team runs on.
Two minutes and free. You answer the questions, leave an email, and get a score out of 100, one of four bands, and the one thing to set up first.
The four-step ladder
Every question uses the same four steps, so the score reads as one thing rather than five unrelated ones.
| Step | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0 | Done by hand, from scratch, every time |
| 1 | Some people use AI on their own, results depend on who does it |
| 2 | Shared prompts or templates exist, used unevenly |
| 3 | A set-up workflow (shared context, skills, projects) the whole team runs on |
The five questions
One per sphere of non-billable work:
- Proposals and pitches. How do you write proposals and pitches?
- Case studies, content and hiring pages. How do you produce case studies, content and hiring pages?
- Workshops, synthesis and client updates. How do you prepare workshops, research synthesis and client updates?
- Reviews, onboarding and career conversations. How do you run reviews, onboarding and career conversations?
- Planning, retros and internal memos. How do you do planning, retros and internal memos?
How the score works
Five questions at up to three points each gives a maximum of 15, shown out of 100. Your company size, your role and anything you add in your own words shape the advice at the end; they never change the number.
The four bands
0 to 39 · Below the waterline
Most of your firm's work is unseen and hand-made. Proposals, case studies, reviews, plans: your people write them from scratch, at night, between clients. AI exists somewhere in the firm, nobody has set it up. Most boutiques your size sit here. It is also the cheapest moment to change, because there is nothing to undo.
What to do first: pick one of the five and set it up for the whole team. One week, one workflow, everyone uses it.
40 to 64 · Individual icebergs
AI is in your firm, in people's own tabs. A few people found their way with AI and do their part twice as fast. The firm does not see it: results vary by person and leave with them. You have the tools. You are missing the shared set-up.
What to do first: take what your fastest people already do and turn it into one shared workflow. Start with proposals, they touch everyone.
65 to 84 · Mostly above the waterline
You have shared workflows. What slips is the rhythm. Templates, prompts and cycles exist. Use depends on the week, the manager, the deadline. The overhead that remains sits in your two lowest spheres, and everyone in the firm can name them.
What to do first: fix the two lowest spheres. Give every workflow an owner and a cadence, so it survives a busy quarter.
85 to 100 · Tip of the iceberg
Your firm runs on set-up work, not on heroics. Non-billable work starts from shared context and AI carries the first draft. Few boutiques are here. Two questions remain: where the freed hours go, and whether the set-ups stay current as the firm changes.
What to do first: review the set-ups themselves once a quarter, and decide out loud what the freed time is for.
Who it is for
Founders, ops and people leads, and managers at consulting firms, design studios, branding and innovation consultancies, UX and research agencies — the firms where the work that wins and keeps clients is not the work that gets billed.
Who made it
Polar Bear is a People Ops consultancy founded by Pauline Bertry and Alexey Lobachev, both ex-McKinsey. We build career frameworks, review cycles and ways of working for human-size teams, and we run our own company on the set-ups we recommend.
Take the Iceberg Score · Book a free 30-minute call with Pauline