A bespoke Capture is designed around your specific situation — your organisation, your community, your question. The design process itself is part of the work: through it, we clarify what you are actually trying to understand, what the right entry points are, and how to frame the signifiers so that the narratives you gather are genuinely informative rather than merely confirmatory.
We co-design the Capture with you, support the collection process, and work with you through the sensemaking — reading the patterns, identifying where the system is stable and where it is in motion, and thinking through what that suggests for next steps.
This is not a research report delivered at the end. It is a collaborative process that builds your own capacity to read what is happening in your system.
If you are considering a bespoke Capture and want to understand what would suit your context, the right place to start is a conversation.
A SenseMaker Tailored to You
Try a Quicksense
A tailored SenseMaker Capture is designed around your specific context — which takes time, and works best when that context is already well understood.
QuickSenses are a different entry point: pre-designed Captures on specific topics, ready to launch quickly, that let you start gathering signal before the full picture is clear.
They work well as a first step, as a lightweight diagnostic, or where a focused question matters more than a fully tailored frame.
They are a practical way to start — and often a useful first step before a larger, bespoke project.
We designed the Quicksenses in collaboration with our partners Evelyn Wolf and Michael Schiller. Look at "Complexity-meets-clarity.de" (German webpage), or just contact us.
The Coaching QuickSense examines organisational themes, decision-making, and coaching or training needs from the inside: not what people say they need, but what their everyday experience reveals.
The Culture Scan looks at organisational tensions, leadership dynamics, and emerging cultural patterns — the things that shape how work actually happens, beneath strategy and stated values.
The AI-Culture QuickSense surfaces the lived experience of AI in your organisation: where people feel overwhelmed or energised, where learning is happening and where blind spots are forming, and what uncertainties - about redundancy or responsibility - sit beneath the official narrative.
The Dilemma Mirror works with contradictions that don't resolve: question everything, but don't change too much. Do more with less. Trust your team, but carry the responsibility alone. Where these tensions are familiar, the Dilemma Mirror makes them visible and workable.
The SenseMaker
SenseMaker®
works with the lived experience already present in an organisation.
Rather than relying on surveys or external interpretation, it gathers short, everyday narratives from within the system. These micro-stories make visible the patterns, tensions, and emerging shifts that shape how people actually experience their work.
The process reveals how meaning is currently being made across roles and contexts — and where small shifts might influence the wider system.
It shows the “standing waves” in the system: habits, beliefs and structures that keep things in place.
Most people don’t talk about the real tensions they face – but their stories reveal them.
We invite people to share short, concrete narratives from their daily experience. These stories surface what is happening beneath roles, strategies, and assumptions — often deeper than opinion and earlier than reflection.
Participants then interpret their own stories by locating them within a set of carefully designed tensions. This adds layers of meaning without external analysis.
SenseMaker® aggregates these narratives and makes patterns visible. The result is a nuanced picture of the system’s current dispositions — the habits, beliefs, and structures that stabilise how things are.
From there, we ask:
What small shifts could generate more of the patterns we want — and fewer of those we don’t?
Surfacing Unarticulated Needs
THE SENSEMAKER
All our SenseMaker® projects are delivered under an official licence from Cognitive Edge / The Cynefin Company, and are carried out in close collaboration with, and supported by, their core team.
These are different ways in, depending on what you need:
Schedule a call — if you want to talk through your situation before committing to anything.
Download the SenseMaker introduction — if you want to understand the method first.
Try the Dilemma Mirror — if you'd rather start by doing than reading.
Read the Case Studies — if you want to see what SenseMaker looks like in practice.
If you already know what you're looking for, we offer two formats: a Bespoke Capture designed around your specific context, and QuickSenses — pre-designed Captures on specific topics, ready to launch quickly.