The role that launches movements across companies, government and civil society by framing a problem so clearly that a new way of thinking about it becomes possible.
The third of the three roles in Hill, Tedards and Wild (2026), next to the Architect and the Bridger. The Catalyst works at the scale of the ecosystem, and its discipline is Category Design: a point of view that names a problem the world does not yet know it has, languaging that frames, names and claims it, and Lightning Strikes as moments of shared attention (Ramadan et al., 2016; Lochhead et al., 2023).
I read categories with the two faces of increasing returns in mind. A category can be a fenced field, or it can be a shared problem frame in which many can play and in which cooperation becomes the winning strategy. And a strike only lands when Architects and Bridgers have prepared the ground.