When conflict broke out across the region earlier this year, a client in the events sector came to Northbourne Advisory with what seemed like a simple question: what has actually been cancelled, and where?
It turned out there was no answer. Not because the information didn't exist – but because nobody had assembled it.
"Airlines were adjusting schedules, organisers were revising plans, governments were issuing guidance, and nobody was working from the same picture," says Northbourne's founder, Justin Kerr-Stevens, who spent nearly three decades working across the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia and Australia before launching the Doha-based firm eight months ago. "We spent a day trying to pull it together for the client and realised there was simply no consolidated tracker anywhere. No regional registry, no single source of truth."
That gap became the Mapping Disruption framework, a 46-day intelligence operation that ultimately tracked 275 events across four countries with 665 cited sources. What began as an internal tool for a single client rapidly became something the whole industry was circling.
The war room behind the data
The mechanics of putting together those early reports were immense. With a global team working around the clock, they triangulated across government channels, organiser websites, tourism authority calendars, aviation updates and social media, aware throughout that official sources were often the last to confirm anything.
"Cancellations were appearing on X and Reddit before organisers had updated their own websites," Kerr-Stevens recalls. "And in many cases those websites weren't helpful either: outdated content, non-functional contact details, no status updates. We were making direct calls to organisers, cross-referencing venue social accounts, verifying everything against at least one named source before it went into the tracker."
Building a team that could operate under pressure without losing their analytical rigour paid dividends, as in an environment flooded with rumour and misinformation, precision was key. As the data set matured, AI was brought in to assist with verification, but with human flagging remaining the quality control layer throughout.
What the industry got wrong
What struck the firm most, watching the sector respond in real time, was not the scale of disruption, but rather how few agencies had thought through crisis scenarios in advance.
"Very few event-based agencies had any kind of pre-built crisis communications infrastructure around event cancellation. No holding statements ready to go, no cascade protocols, no clarity on who makes the call and who gets told first," Kerr-Stevens says. With a fast-moving situation, where real-time improvisation was required, many were often making reactive decisions based on social media rather than verified information.
"The agencies that handled it best were the ones that had thought through the scenario in advance, maintained direct relationships with government contacts, and were able to give their clients a clear operating picture within hours rather than days."
However, most were doing neither.
The Doha advantage
Typically, the GCC is misread by advisors operating from the outside. Therefore, Northbourne's positioning, as a Doha-headquarted agency, with regional insights built over decades, is central to how the firm frames its value.
"Agencies based outside of the region have a tendency to parachute into regional crises with a framework built elsewhere," the agency founder says. "We are already here and we understand the institutional landscape, the sensitivities, the speed at which decisions get made, and crucially, the gap between what governments say publicly and what is actually happening operationally."
That local depth, with Doha having manoeuvred blockades, mediated conflicts, and hosted global tournaments under intense scrutiny has shaped a particular crisis philosophy. "That shapes how you think about crisis," says Kerr-Stevens. "You develop a tolerance for operating in grey zones, for holding multiple competing narratives simultaneously, and for understanding that stability and disruption are rarely as binary as they appear from the outside."
What agility actually looks like
The Mapping Disruption work wasn't in the original business plan. It emerged mid-crisis, from a client need, and became, by the founder's own account, one of the most significant things the firm produced in its first eight months.
"The original mission was straightforward – to build a best-in-class strategic advisory practice grown from here in the GCC," says Kerr-Stevens. "Launching Northbourne was about creating the firm I had always wanted to work with as a client: one that combines serious analytical rigour with genuine regional fluency... but experienced enough to be trusted with mandates that actually matter."
That evolution points to something broader about how the firm has had to adapt its original model. However, as Kerr-Stevens points put, the speed with which change can occur in the region doesn't allow one to build something and then refine it slowly. "You have to be willing to move, to build in public, to let the work define the firm as much as the other way around." The adds that agility is not a compromise on quality, but rather, especially in this environment, a prerequisite for relevance.
Regional fluency
For Northbourne Advisory, the five-year ambition is to be recognised as the leading independent strategic advisory firm in the GCC – not the largest, but the most trusted. And the Mapping Disruption work has clarified a specific direction: building out a permanent real-time intelligence and monitoring function for clients in events, tourism and investment, rather than treating it as a crisis-only capability.
"We have demonstrated that there is significant value in being able to translate fragmented signals into a coherent operating picture, and to do that consistently, at pace, and with the kind of rigour that clients can rely on," says Kerr-Stevens, adding: "The GCC is one of the most strategically significant and fastest-moving communications environments in the world, and yet so much of the advisory work being done here is still being led from outside it, by people who would fly in, deliver a strategy, and fly out."
As the region continues a period of extraordinary transformation, it is clear that the organisations navigating it need advisors who have genuine regional fluency, and not ones making assumptions and decisions from the outside.
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