In April 2022, the Pocket Project, in partnership with the German NGO ‘Mehr Demokratie’, offered an online workshop “Collective Trauma & Democracy,” led by Thomas Hübl, PhD, along with a support team of 20 facilitators. Throughout the weekend, 350 participants engaged in dialogue (German only) and reflection as part of the Collective Trauma Integration Process, working through the complexities of perceptions and understanding of conflict, polarisation, and divisiveness that is all too common in our democracies today. Complexity Partners have done the SenseMaker Capture and Design.

Following an initial pilot project in 2017, our work evolved into an ongoing engagement with the leadership team of the Stilllegung project: the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant under conditions of high regulatory, technical and social complexity. We coach the leadership team and Abteilungsleiter on team development, leadership roles, decision-making and complexity-informed approaches to strategy. The work combines the TLC Leadership Profile with methods from our broader complexity repertoire and continues to this day. The engagement is conducted in collaboration with European Centre for Leadership Practice.

EuroSense is an ongoing large-scale citizen sense-making project we designed and implemented using SenseMaker®. Rather than surveying opinions or testing predefined assumptions, the project gathered micro-narratives from citizens across Europe and enabled participants to interpret their own experiences. From our perspective, EuroSense demonstrated how complexity-informed sense-making can surface patterns, tensions and weak signals in democratic life that conventional research methods routinely miss, offering decision-makers a richer, more grounded understanding of lived reality.

Empathie macht Schule ist ein schulweites Entwicklungsprogramm zur Stärkung von Beziehungskompetenz bei Lehrkräften, pädagogischem Personal, Schulleitungen und Seminarleitungen. Auf entwicklungs- und existenzpsychologischer Grundlage verbindet es Wissen über sozio-emotionale Entwicklung, Selbstregulation und Beziehungsarbeit im Alltag. Die komplexitätsbasierte Evaluation mit SenseMaker® kombinierte Mikro-Narrative und quantitative Mustererkennung und machte sichtbar, wie sich Selbstwirksamkeit, Konfliktfähigkeit, Klassenklima und Teamzusammenhalt entwickeln – bei gleichzeitiger Anerkennung der strukturellen Belastungen im Bildungssystem.

Between 2018 and 2021, we worked with Inter IKEA Systems and Ingka Group across multiple departments and contexts, using SenseMaker® to explore lived experience in areas where values, culture and operational reality intersect. The work ranged from questions of compliance culture in purchasing and logistics (iConduct), to candidate experiences of value-based recruitment, to the “heaven and hell” of onboarding from a co-worker perspective. We also supported local initiatives, including cultural learning in stores, and evaluated the IKEA COVID emergency response by capturing real-time co-worker narratives. Across all projects, the focus was on making patterns visible beyond formal processes and KPIs, enabling leadership to understand tensions, risks and opportunities as they actually showed up in everyday practice.

Between 2019 and 2022, we delivered a comprehensive leadership coaching programme for United Nations Population Fund, working with the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO). The programme brought together leaders from around 23 countries across the region and supported multiple cohorts of mid-level managers in scaffolding their leadership capacity in preparation for promotion, using the TLC Leadership Profile as a widely recognised baseline assessment. The work focused on practical leadership challenges in complex contexts, including decision-making, delegation and workload management.

In 2023 and 2024, we conducted a culture scan for the ESARO headquarters in South Africa for the United Nations Population Fund. Using SenseMaker®, we explored the organisation’s dispositional state by capturing and analysing staff narratives to surface patterns that remain largely unspoken in conventional assessments. The work focused on understanding underlying needs, tensions and constraints, and on supporting leaders in recognising and responding to less visible, unarticulated aspects of staff experience that shape culture and everyday practice.