Strategy rooted in the city you work in
Mon-Thu 9:00-18:00, Fri 9:00-16:00
Absolute Derive started in Lisbon in 2017 as a one-person practice. Mariana Fonseca had spent the previous eight years working inside organisations, first at a municipal urban regeneration agency in Porto, then as head of strategy at a mid-sized cultural foundation in Lisbon's Mouraria neighbourhood. She was good at the work, but she kept noticing the same problem: organisations would hire expensive consultants who arrived with a ready-made framework, applied it regardless of context, and left before anyone could tell whether it had worked. She started Absolute Derive to do the opposite.