We help organizations, leaders and teams bring your people together to engage, understand what matters, and collaborate to solve the right problems in sustainable ways—so you can get unstuck, develop solutions that people want and define a better tomorrow.
what we do
Let’s get you
unstuck.
Maybe you’re an established corporation trying to get your teams to think more innovatively and launch successful offerings faster. Perhaps you’re a bootstrapping start-up looking to better connect with your customers and grow your brand, or a nonprofit striving to maximize your impact.
Or maybe you’re just stuck, struggling with unclear goals, misaligned stakeholders and an uncertain future, and aren’t sure what to do next.
No matter your challenge, we help you understand what matters to the people with a vested interest in the outcome, then co-create strategies and solutions that effectively address the problem within today’s constraints and chart a sustainable roadmap forward. And we do it in ways that help you build confidence, expand capacity, increase capability and improve culture.
The results: you get unstuck, confidently tackle today’s challenges and take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities.
We call it human-centered problem solving.
You’ll call it a great way to work.
Let’s convene
your people—
all your people
Bring stakeholders together and create space to collaboratively frame what we believe the problem to be and get into action to address it.
Services
+ Alignment & Consensus
Building
+ Whitespace Identification
+ Challenge Framing
+ Project Planning /
Phase 0 Alignment
Let’s understand
what really matters
Learn about needs, opportunities and potential solutions to the problem from those with a vested interest in the outcome.
Services
+ Contextual, User &
Stakeholder Research
+ Insights, Persona &
User Journey Development
+ Opportunity Area Definition
+ “How Might We” Development
Let’s co-create
solutions to the right problems
Co-design strategies and solutions that effectively address the problem within today’s constraints and chart a sustainable roadmap forward.
Services
+ Solution Ideation & Co-Design
+ Strategic Roadmapping
+ Communication Tool Design
Let’s evolve
how we solve problems in the future
Learn, practice and adopt the human-centered tools and mindsets to shift culture and enable you and your teams to more effectively anticipate and solve problems in the future.
Services
+ Human-Centered
Problem-Solving
Training & Skill Building
+ Innovation Team Definition
+ Innovation Process
Formalization
how we work
Let’s stay anchored on what matters and explore with purpose.
To help you move forward with confidence, we employ a structured, yet flexible approach and optimize our ways of working to keep us all in focused action—while de-risking our decision-making and ensuring our solutions deliver on what matters.
Let’s be
Cross-Functional
Bring critical stakeholders from across your organization together in a collaborative working model that helps you share information and own the process and outcomes.
Let’s be
Human-Centered
Bring what matters most to people into the problem-solving process, and harmonize that with your capability constraints and business goals.
Let’s be
Iterative
Diverge to explore, converge to balance tradeoffs and act; prototype, test and narrow to solutions and platforms that sustainably deliver what matters.
Let’s be
Future Focused
Stay anchored to what matters to people as we evolve solutions in response to changing context, constraints, capabilities and opportunities over time.
Let’s leverage what’s working
Based on your needs, we tailor our engagements to most effectively complement your team’s knowledge and capabilities and provide the best outcomes. Sometimes that means a light touch approach to get you off in the right direction; other times it’s a fully collaborative engagement where we work side-by-side with your team, complementing their deep expertise with our mindset, process and broad experience. In all cases, we strive to maximize what your team brings to the table to yield great results that you and the team can fully own and act on.
Mindsetting
We point you in the right direction.
We give you tools, techniques and our informed outside perspective to set you off in the right direction, then check in to keep you on course. Whether facilitating teams through accelerated workshops or providing an outside perspective and sounding board for experienced teams wrestling with particularly thorny challenges, we help you stay in focused action so you can get where you need to go.
Engagement Modes
+ Jam Sessions
+ Workshops
Modeling
We work the challenge with you.
We guide your team through an actual project, complementing your deep technical, business and institutional knowledge with our mindset, process and broad experience to develop outcomes the team can own while providing tools and approaches they can carry forward.
Engagement Modes
+ Sprints
+ Scoped Projects
+ Immersions
Making
We work aspects of the challenge for you.
Where it makes sense, we step in and execute on specific solutions defined by the project team. This helps us all maximize our capacity and capabilities while ensuring you can still own the work when we’re done.
Engagement Modes
+ Solution Execution
Let’s deliver value that extends far beyond our engagement
Working collaboratively and anchoring our strategies and solutions in what matters to people drives lasting value for you, your team and your organization.
Build Confidence
Strategies and solutions are more likely to succeed because they’re rooted in what you know your people want—not what you think they want—while balancing your internal metrics and constraints.
Build Capacity
Focusing on what matters helps you prioritize your efforts and better leverage your experts, filtering out work that doesn’t matter and freeing up resources to better deliver on what does.
Build Capability
The mindset, methods and tools are applicable to any type of challenge, helping you evolve how you approach problems and become resilient to future uncertainty and change.
Build Culture
Working collaboratively and cross-functionally behind a clear vision—with ownership of the outcomes—drives engagement and satisfaction while reducing burnout and turnover—happier people produce better results.
about our team
Let’s leverage our collective experience and learn from each other.
We both know a thing or two: you’ve got deep expertise in what you do and your organization; we’ve been fortunate to have a wide and varied experience with organizations across almost every sector, size and geography.
We know outcomes are better when we bring our collective expertise together, complementing your deep knowledge with our broad perspective—and that when teams help create the outcomes, it ensures a greater chance at success.
That’s why we deliberately keep ourselves small—it forces both you and us to collaborate and leverage what we’re both great at to develop solutions that work for you and your people—and that you can carry forward after we’re gone.
Let’s put our experience to work for you
We’ve helped an education startup better meet the needs of students, and a complex multi-national optimize their global hiring process. We’ve helped an insurance company understand what it’s really like to use their products, several food companies create new products and brands, a research institution encourage entrepreneurship among its faculty and staff, and a nonprofit foundation rethink their model to maximize their impact. We’ve helped clients look internally to better meet the needs of their employees and externally to deliver for their customers and consumers. We’ve worked on complex, systemic problems and simple, straightforward problems. Odds are, we can help you with yours.
Let’s get to know each other
As a team of human-centered strategists, researchers, designers, innovators, communicators, and facilitators, we’re driven by the belief that with an open mind and collaborative spirit, anything is possible. We know outcomes are better when we partner with people whose expertise and experience complement our own, and that when teams help create the outcomes, it ensures a greater chance at success. That’s why we deliberately keep ourselves small—it forces both you and us to collaborate and leverage what we’re both great at. (We figure your success is our success, and if we can help you make a lasting positive impact, odds are you’ll call us back—if not for the work, at least for the witty banter).
connect with us
Let’s work together to make what people want.
Connect
Let’s get the conversation started and figure out how we can help you. An email and a couple of check boxes is all it takes.
Articles & Links
Our take on things and interesting nuggets we’ve discovered along the way that made us stop and think.
Toolkit
Explore our archive of free human-centered design thinking resources to get you thinking differently.